Citizen Tanouye

Eight students from Torrance, California, research Technical Sergeant Ted Tanouye. Tanouye was in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team at the same time his family was moved to an internment camp.

The Alumni Association of the high school he was from decided (Torrance High School) to build a monument to him after they read about the Medal of Honor that was awarded to him by Bill Clinton.

The movie then goes into an introduction of the eight students and how they divided into two teams to do the work necessary to find out as much as they could about Ted Tanouye.

The movie also includes interviews with people who knew him personally.

One team of students checked the school's yearbooks, while the other team checked the city's historical society. One of the interesting things is that they found in the local papers that the local Japanese were not attacked right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; it was a couple of months before the papers began an anti-local Japanese campaign. That perfectly matches what I have read happened in California at that time. The change of approach was due to the Hearst papers series of vicious anti-Japanese articles.

There's a lot of really excellent photographs and short movie clips dealing with the internment. It also has the same kinds of things for the history of the 100th and the 442nd, which is the topic the film covers next.

One of the really interesting things was the discussion about how the camps broke up family unity in the Japanese Americans. Families did not eat together all the time, as they had, and they did not spend most of their time together, as they had done before.

It's also interesting how the students doing the work reacted to the various things they learned about life in the camps.

The students found a web site that showed exactly the things that Ted Tanouye did on Hill 140 that led to him getting the Medal of Honor.

This is a really good documentary.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page