Asian Americans, Episode 2: A Question of Loyalty (film)

The second of five episodes of a landmark documentary on the Asian American experience, A Question of Loyalty focuses on the World War II period, telling the story of three Asian American families, two of which are Japanese American.

The three families are the Unos, the Inas, and the Ahns. The Uno family story focuses on eldest Nisei son Kazumaro "Buddy" Uno , who becomes disillusioned over the discrimination he faced in 1930s American and ventures to Japan where he becomes a journalist and eventually a propagandist for the Japanese military, while his family is later incarcerated in American concentration camps. The filmmakers follow Buddy's granddaughter, Tamiko Ishidate, as she traces the family story through visits to her great-aunt Kay Uno Kaneko in Hawai'i and to Buddy's two surviving children in Japan. The also covers the role that Buddy's siblings Edison Uno and Amy Uno Ishii played in the Redress movement .

Psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina recounts the story of her Nisei parents, who are among those who gave "no-no" answers to the loyalty questionnaire and end up at post-segregation Tule Lake , where her father is later removed and separately interned at the Fort Lincoln camp in Bismarck, North Dakota. Ina is later shown at a protest at the Dilley, Texas, immigrant detention center, which is near the Crystal City site in which her family was later held. The Ahn family story focuses on Susan Ahn Cuddy, the daughter of Korean immigrant independence activist Ahn Changho, who becomes the first Asian American woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Series producer Renee Tajima-Peǹa, a professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA and director of UCLA's Center for EthnoCommunications, had been trying to make a series like this "for decades" and first wrote a treatment for it for the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) in 1990s. In around 2013, public television station WETA approached Tajima-Peǹa and CAAM about doing such a series; after a few years of fund-raising, production on the series began in August 2018. The production team included producers Leo Chiang, Geeta Gandbhir, and Grace Lee and narrators Tamlyn Tomita and Daniel Dae Kim. ^[1]

The five episodes:

Episode 1: Breaking Ground , produced by Chiang and narrated by Kim, on early migration from Asia up to World War II

Episode 2: A Question of Loyalty , produced by Lee and narrated by Tomita

Episode 3: Good Americans , produced by Chiang and narrated by Kim, on the Cold War era and the "Model Minority" stereotype

Episode 4: Generation Rising , produced by Lee and narrated by Tomita, on the Asian American Movement and new immigration from Asia after 1965

Episode 5: Breaking Through , produced by Gandbhir and narrated by Kim, on the 2000s to the present

The series debuted nationally on public television stations on May 11, 2020, with the airing of the first two episodes, followed by the last three on the next day.

Asian Americans received a Peabody Award in June 2021. ^[2]