American Pastime

This is an excellent film about the internment of Japanese Americans. It's done focusing on two families, one Japanese American, one Caucasian, and examines the issue of discrimination and outright hatred that existed at that time in the hearts of some people.

It uses baseball as a way that the people in the camps were brought together, to try to make their lives more tolerable. In the film, it's a way that the two families are finally able to come to terms with each other.

The film starts just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and has a lot of valuable footage of the internment process itself. When you view the film, you can get a good idea of the type of things that the internees had to endure, and it makes that type of thing more realistic than reading about it in a book.

It also shows that some of the internees were violently opposed to the internment. Those people ended up being removed from the various camps and were shipped to Tule Lake or to other smaller federal facilities.

There is also a ten minuted documentary on the DVD. It shows some of the people who were actually in the 442nd, and others who had been interned.

Excellent film, and very good documentary.

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