The incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps happened during World War II, but the culture of false information and political manipulation that went on then is still very active today, according to filmmaker Jon Osaki. His movie, “Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066,” was featured in “Shared Stories,” a monthly film series that began streaming from February 24 – 28. The program was a collaboration between the Boston Asian American Film Festival, Boston Latino International Film Festival, the Roxbury International Film Festival (RIFF), and Arts Emerson.
“We’re co-presenting a lot, so [we thought], why don’t we actually do something around creating a series that focuses on BIPOC communities, whether it’s around themes or around understanding that we all have these same stories,” said Lisa Simmons, director of RIFF. “We understand that culturally, we are more alike than we are not. It was a way to think about how we could cross sector our audiences. Is there a way that we could curate a series together to bring our audiences to one space?”
In “Alternative Facts,” Osaki studies the use of misinformation in the justification for having Japanese Americans relocated to internment camps. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 led to the enforcement of this plan, with about 120,000 people, who had mostly been living on the Pacific Coast, being interned. Osaki reveals that many false claims of espionage and sabotage on the West Coast were used to validate the removal of Japanese people, with stories of the detection of submarine signals being spread. In the documentary, political activist and legal scholar Peter Irons even uncovers a memorandum where Edward Ennis, a justice department lawyer, essentially wrote to solicitor general Charles Fahy, [in Irons’ words] “We are telling lies to the Supreme Court.” In other words, Fahy was aware that the process was motivated by racism, rather than fact, and did not share that information with the court.
“The fact of the matter is that politicians were feeling the pressure from white farmers, from exclusionism, at the time, and public officials got to the military,” said Osaki. “They told them they had to do this.” He added, “A lot of people point to Pearl Harbor as a reason for all of this. Really, the efforts to exclude Japanese from the West Coast were in motion for decades. They came in on the heels of the Chinese, who had been excluded in the late 1800’s. Those same forces were trying to do the same thing to Japanese Americans and were successful in getting the U.S. government to pass the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned all Asian immigration. So these efforts were in motion for a long time.”
The conditions that led to the internment of Japanese Americans have not disappeared. Today, the suppression of facts in order to target a demonized group is a practice that still continues. Minority communities have felt the effects of the travel ban and detention of migrant families, under the Trump administration. The parallels to the culture and political climate that Executive Order 9066 was born under still exist, said Osaki.
“Unfortunately, the politics of fear is alive and well, today,” said Osaki. “What’s very disheartening about what we have seen over the last four years and what we continue to see today is that the political tactics of targeting and scapegoating a group of people works. People in this country still respond to those types of really unfortunate political tactics.” He added, “We continue to see the same patterns of identifying who the unwanted group is in this country and creating a political agenda around them.”
The film raises the question of who gets to dictate history and what we see in our textbooks, acknowledging that there are elements of the country’s past that are often overlooked. Osaki said that it is important for a nation to embrace its mistakes, in order to recover and evolve. According to Simmons, movies like Osaki’s can continue to challenge hegemonic narratives that dismiss these tragic realities and encourage viewers to seek out the truth.
“It’s really about unearthing this history,” said Simmons. “It’s about giving people the opportunity to see the history behind the history, for people to really understand that you can’t believe everything you read and everything you see. You have to look beyond that and understand that there’s another story that may have been buried. So it’s our responsibility to be able to unearth that and to be able to bring that history forward.”
The dates for the upcoming installments of the Shared Stories series are below:
MAR 24–28
APR 21–25
MAY 19–23
JUN 23–27
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