Browse > Time > 1970s
12 articles
... I Told You So (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Expression through art, Importance of community, Power of words
- Widely available
Early documentary film produced by the Asian American arts organization Visual Communications that profiles the Sansei poet Lawson Fusao Inada . Shot in black and white, the film follows Inada through the streets of Fresno where he recites poetry from his 1971 book Before the War: poems as they happened over music by June and Dan Kuramoto, visiting friends and the family fish market. Later, he is shown working with other Asian American writers/editors on a new literary anthology (that will be published as Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers ), at work teaching at Southern Oregon University and walking among the ruins at the Tule Lake site. Between the poetry, Inada talks about his upbringing in Fresno where he related more to Chicano and African American classmates than to Japanese Americans, his family background, and the impact of wartime incarceration. No director, producer or writer is listed in …
Manzanar (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Power of the past, Quest for discovery, Growing up – pain or pleasure
- Limited availability
Experimental documentary film by Bob Nakamura made in 1971 that was one of the first films to explore the legacy of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.
An Abandoned Pot of Rice (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Displacement, Immigrant experience, Importance of community, Progress – real or illusion
- No availability
Short essay by Hisaye Yamamoto DeSoto about the Kumamoto-mura community near Oceanside, California, where her family lived just prior to World War II. The pleasant reminiscences of life there are tempered by recollections of the chaos after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the events leading up to the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The title of the story comes from the narrator's recollection of making a pot of rice intending to make rice balls on the day of their forced departure, but forgetting about it, leaving the full pot behind. Years later, she returns to the site of the community, which subsequently became a large military base which for a time housed tens of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees. Noting the similarities with the concentration camps she and her family were in, she observes that this group was the third group of Asians to …
Time of Decay (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Fiction
- Desire to escape, Family—blessing or curse, Loneliness as destructive force, Losing hope
- Widely available
Short story by Ferris Takahashi of an Issei woman whose family puts her in a cold nursing home against her will at the end of her life. Told from the perspective of the woman, she recalls her forced removal and incarceration in unspecified concentration camps and other episodes in her life.
When the World Winds Down (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Fiction
- Isolation, Lost love
- Limited availability
Short story by Sharon Hashimoto about a watch repairman who fixes a gold watch brought in by a young man who reminds him of his late brother. Fred Fujita is one of the last remaining Nisei businessmen in the old Japanese section of Seattle. Agreeing to fix the gold watch at the end of one day, he decides to work on it at home, observing that his late wife would have objected to his doing so. While working on the watch, he recalls his brother Jimmy—the night at Heart Mountain when the seventeen-year-old Jimmy tells him he is going to enlist, trying to talk him out of it, and receiving word that he is missing in action.
The Legacy of a Cemetery (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Reunion, Wisdom of experience
- Limited availability
First person reflections on a trip back to his hometown of Los Angeles by a man who had settled in New Jersey after leaving the Jerome , Arkansas, concentration camps some thirty years earlier. A visit to Evergreen Cemetery east of downtown Los Angeles brings back memories of his forced removal in 1942, remembrances of Nisei soldiers he knew who are buried there, and memories of his deceased family members.
The Loom (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Adult
- Fiction
- Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Facing darkness, Loneliness as destructive force, Motherhood, Power of silence
- Widely available
Short story by R. A. Sasaki that portrays the life of a Nisei woman looking both backwards and forwards after the death of one of her daughters. Born and raised in San Francisco where her family ran a boarding house, the unnamed woman graduated from the University of California before being incarcerated with her family in Tanforan and Topaz during World War II. Returning to San Francisco after the war having married a Kibei man she had known from before the war, she has four daughters while her husband works in the flower industry. Devoted to her daughters, she is at a loss as they leave the house to pursue their own lives and after one dies in a mountain climbing accident. Her daughters' efforts to bring her out of her torpor are largely unsuccessful until one gives her a loom, through which she is able to express the feelings …
Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Expression through art, Nature as beauty, Role of women
- Available
Documentary profile of Nisei artist Ruth Asawa produced and directed by Robert Snyder. Of Forms and Growth includes footage of Asawa at home, in her garden and at work, and features the artist talking about her artistic influences and techniques. In particular, she highlights the influence of artists Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller, and the film includes footage of Asawa and Fuller. She goes on to talk about the various media she has worked with, including ink and oil paintings, wire and paper sculptures, and sculptures made from baker's clay. The film also explores Asawa's community work, particularly in establishing art programs in schools as well as a community arts festival. Photographer Imogen Cunningham talks about photographing Asawa and her family and about Asawa's marriage to Albert Lanier. Asawa's early life—including her wartime incarceration—is covered only briefly, and her later work that is influenced by Japanese American history is not …
Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Drama
- Immigrant experience
- Limited availability
Landmark feature film produced by Visual Communications (VC), a Los Angeles based non-profit in 1980. Centering on the life story of an Issei man, Hito Hata was likely the first dramatic feature film about Asian Americans by Asian Americans since the silent film era.
Fujikawa (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Beauty of simplicity, Man against nature, Wisdom of experience
- Limited availability
Documentary film that profiles second generation fisherman Fred Fujikawa through the eyes of his nineteen-year-old nephew Michael Shiroishi. Narrated in Shiroishi's first-person voice, it is his first time accompanying his uncle. Over the course of the voyage, we learn about Fujikawa's family, who were among the Japanese Americans who settled on Terminal Island prior to World War II, along with the history of Japanese Americans in the fishing industry, while also getting a glimpse of life aboard a fishing boat and of Fujikawa and his brother building and launching a new boat. There is a brief segment on the internment of Terminal Island fishermen—including Shiroishi's grandfather—and the subsequent destruction of the Japanese American community there. "It's a sad deal," recalls Fujikawa.
Lawson Fusao Inada: What It Means to Be Free (film)
- Films and Video
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Documentary
- Expression through art, Importance of community, Power of words
- Limited availability
Documentary film featuring poet Lawson Fusao Inada . In the film, Inada reads ten of his poems, while also providing brief introductions or background information on each of them. The filmmakers incorporate archival and contemporary footage—including visits by Inada to Tule Lake , the site of the Fresno Assembly Center , and Japanese American Historical Plaza in Portland, Oregon—as well as archival and family photographs into the readings.
A Grain of Sand (album)
- Albums
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Contemporary Folk
- Evils of racism, Immigrant experience, Injustice
- Widely available
Originally produced and released in 1973 by Paredon Records, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America by folk trio Chris Kando Iijima , Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto , and William "Charlie" Chin is widely recognized to be the first album of Asian American music. The record is a combination of folk songs, political ballads and protest songs. The music was written, performed and recorded at the height of the Asian American, black, and anti-war movements in the early '70s by New York musicians and activists Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin, who were then in their twenties and early thirties. The original album includes artwork by Arlan Huang/Artist Resource Basement Workshop on the album jacket and liner notes with a political statement by the musicians, lyrics, and a list of Asian American publications from the era. One of the songs, "We Are the Children," is likely the first …