Remembering Poston
By TRISTAN SEDILLO
Rafu Staff Intern
Saturday, July 12, 2008

New documentary provides touching perspective on the camp experience.

Photos courtesy of Fly on the Wall Productions
Poston survivor Ruth Okimoto visits the ruins of the camp barracks in Arizona in a scene from “Passing Poston.”

A boy and girl play at Poston. The documentary tells
the story of how four former internees went through
the camp experience and moved on with their lives
afterwards.

Lush music opens the newsreel as a friendly voice describes the journey taken by thousands of Americans of Japanese descent, “not prisoners or internees, just dislo­cated people,” trekking across the Southwest in “pleasure cars, loaded with as much as they can carry.” On the screen, a row of well-tended automobiles drives past, looking more like a parade than a caravan of exiles. In one of the next scenes, Mary Higashi, a survivor of the Poston concentra­tion camp, recalls her personal experiences. “The first two years were unbearable. I don’t know what hell is like, but it was a nightmare.”

Such scenes of distressing irony abound in “Passing Poston: An American Story,” a new documentary from directors Joe Fox and James Nubile. Utilizing four very dif­ferent experiences from individuals who survived Poston, together with the discordantly saccharine images of camp depicted in American propaganda films, “Passing Poston” provides a multifaceted view of not only the hardship and ostracism suffered by internees, but also the discrimination and opportunism that fueled the internment.

“You can’t really understand what happened without listening to the stories. The details leave the most indelible marks,” co-director Joe Fox said in an interview. His film follows this cue, focusing on the details and the unique stories to emphasize that the camp experience is very much individual. As the survivors recount how they processed their lives in camp and moved on afterwards, their indi­vidual experiences complement each other.

Out of 60 Poston survivors interviewed, only four were willing to fully revisit the grief of their camp experiences. In a series of interviews, at times murmured or tear-choked, Higashi, Kiyo Sato, Ruth Okimoto and Leon Uyeda recount their loss of faith in America. In another of the film’s great ironies, each of these survivors began as a poster child for the American dream, sharing their Issei parents’ grand visions of the opportunity offered by the United States.

“My father believed his sons could grow up to be the President,” says Oki­moto, recalling her Methodist minister father’s early idealism. This idealism was crushed when the FBI, assuming he was a Buddhist priest with ties to Japan, began trailing the family before incarcerating them at Poston.

Sato, once confident in the justice of President Roosevelt, remembers on the trip to Poston expecting that he would see the wrongness of the internment and send a wire to halt the proceedings. When she realized that this wouldn’t happen, her world “collapsed.”

The camp was located on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona, a place that already held connotations in American history for many of the younger internees. Sato had studied Na­tive Americans in school, learning that they had their own lush hunting grounds and rivers where they could maintain a free lifestyle on the reservation. Traveling across the reservation itself, however, she soon realized that her history books had lied. She and her fellow internees were in the middle of a desert.

The cinematography is prompted by the survivors’ descriptions of Poston as empty, barren, vast, or “nothing but sagebrush and sand.” Book-ending each section of the film, sweeping aerial pans over the Arizona desert and long shots of low, abandoned buildings capture the emptiness and isolation that seems to per­vade the feelings of camp. While starkly beautiful, these shots are also vaguely disturbing. At moments, they seem almost like images of an alien world.

The upbeat tone of the newsreels inter-cutting the interview footage underscores the disparity between the image of “relocation centers” consumed by the general public and the actual concentration camps. The dust-riddled barracks, built in a matter of weeks to accommodate thousands of people, were poorly constructed wood frames covered in tarpaper, leaving residents little protection from the triple digit heat in the day and the cold dry nights. Lacking electricity and running water, the conditions seemed unlivable for the mostly urban population deposited at Poston. Without schools, government, or any services, the internees were forced to take on new roles and put in hard labor to make their surroundings fit for human residence.

It is not the memory of harsh condi­tions that brings the most sorrow to the survivors, however, but the memory of being told they were not wanted by the only nation they could call home. As Uyeda puts it, they “felt lost in the des­ert.” The film’s emotional punch comes across in these interviews, as, struggling to keep their composure, survivors re­count the experience of being made to feel that they did not belong, a feeling that continued past the Internment and, for many of them, continues today.

“The strongest theme that made me want to make [this film] is, yeah, there’s injustice, but also poignancy. There’s a wanting and aching to be part of a society that doesn’t want you,” said Fox.

“Passing Poston” also uncovers a little known fact about the Internment. When Ruth Okimoto finally received her $20,000 reparations check in 1990, she set out to find the truth about Poston. Af­ter spending innumerable hours scouring the National Archives, she finally found her answer in a box labeled “water.” Unique among the camps, Poston was not administrated by the War Relocation Authority, but rather by the Department of Indian Affairs.

The opportunistic Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, had estab­lished the Poston concentration camp to provide confined labor to develop the land and bring in more federal funds and Native American residents. One minority group had been exploited to help another, both deposited on the same stretch of arid land due to forced displacement.

However, for how much the film shows that the residents of Poston were victimized, Fox and Nubile never portray their subjects as powerless vic­tims. Instead, they take the same view expressed by Okimoto, placating the anger by “looking at the big picture.” “Passing Poston” is a tribute to the in­domitable will of the human spirit and the ability of survivors to come to terms with their experiences and form bridges to both the social outcasts who benefited from their work and the nation that had rejected them.

Higashi smiles when describing her wedding at Poston, paper flowers sub­stituting for the real thing. Sato tells of her pride at the first sprout in the camp’s garden. Uyeda remembers his Poston days as the first time in his life when he could live without discrimination. And for all the survivors, there is a sense of community.

“From their suffering we gained a lot,” says Dennis Patch of the Colorado River Reservation, speaking about the role of the internees in developing the area. Workers from Poston brought the first running water to the reservation, built structures that would house gen­erations of Navajo and Hopi Indians and have been credited with alleviating poverty and suffering in the community. Though the two populations had no con­tact in the ’40s, “Passing Poston” shows how they later came together through a bond of gratitude and shared mistreat­ment from the dominant American society. In the present day, groups from Poston and the reservation have jointly worked to preserve structures on the Colorado River, and the history of the Poston Relocation Center forms a major part of the reservation’s museum.

With the very youngest of camp survivors now at retirement age, it is now more important than ever that this too-often overlooked piece of history be preserved. Fox has pointed out that this history may already be repeating. The capture of Arab prisoners and their detention at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial mirrors the “relocation” of individuals from the United States and South America during the Intern­ment. Fox hopes to draw attention to this and to help change viewers’ per­spectives.

Towards the end of the documentary, the survivors are shown in their daily lives, individually coming to terms with their memories and their current places in society. Sato teaches school children about the Internment. Higashi has found prayer. Okimoto paints. All of them are still very much tied to their experiences. “When I drive onto the reservation,” Okimoto says, “there is a feeling that I’ve gone back home.”
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“Passing Poston: An American Story” plays at the ImaginAsian Center at 251 Main Street in downtown Los Angeles July 11 through July 17. Call (213) 617-1033 for more information or visit www.theimaginasian.com/la.