Abstract:

Hosted by Jan Yanehiro. "Vivid color 8 mm home movie footage brings home the realness of history in this documentary collage of life at Heart Mountain, a concentration camp in Wyoming where more than 10,000 Pacific Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Personal rememberances and never before seen movie footage and photographs detail the political and the personal situation in which Japanese Americans found themselves in suddenly at the onset of WWII. The first internees arrived by train on August 12, 1942, and prepared the camp for those coming over the next eight weeks. What the government called a Relocation Center, soon became Wyoming's third largest city -- an isolated city powered by imprisoned families and the military that presided over them. Many people from the camp were used to save the Wyoming agricultural economy by replacing the labor lost to the fighting of the war. Later, controversy split the camp when the government imposed questions about their loyalty to the United States."