Documentary Review

Film: HISTORY AND MEMORY: FOR AKIKO AND
TAKASHIGE

            The video is made by a woman called Rea Tajiri and is 32 minutes
long. It starts with text on a screen and describes a view from a plane of
aboveground of a mother and father talking about their daughter having
nightmares. It uses still photos and showcases a woman getting water from a tap
in a hot, dusty, dry place. The view of the woman is in colour and is a
dramatized, not a historical, theme. Ultimately, the film returns to the idea of
water, and the filmmaker uses history and fiction to express it. Her sister
collected pictures of movie stars who were all white people. But she and her
family were all Japanese Americans who were put in internment camps. Then there
is newsreel footage of the attack on Pearl Harbour, which showcases an
interview with a soldier who witnesses the attack and says, “that is
real” – certainly not imaginary. This sets us up to understand the whole
story, which is about memory what is real versus what is imaginary.

          It is a sad and angry, and
thoughtful video. It is about the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour
and how the memory of that event has been manipulated in media and people’s
minds. The film is composed of snap shots, tiny bits of newscasts, pieces of Hollywood movies,
historical footage, interviews, and plain text on a screen. There is a
voiceover of the filmmaker who leads viewers through all these elements, and
she also interviews other family members and uses their voices. There is a
present-day visit to the site of the camp and lots of historical fictional
movie footage of the Japanese Americans packing their belongings, getting on
trains, and sitting in classrooms, based on the time of internment. The idea in the film is that there are things that exist only in
the minds of the observers who were present at the time. Then people
manufacture images which look different and misrepresent what really happened. People forget things and memories
disappear if they are too uncomfortable. It was the same way the American
government make the Japanese Americans disappear. Cameras were forbidden at the
camps, so there are very few real images of what happened there.

         The
lessons in the film are: sadness that happened in previous generations can be felt
by the young and the new generations. This can be helped by going on a search
to see what happened in history. The idea is that something inside you can lead
you to the exact place in history where the bad things happened by talking to
your grandmother and bringing it more into the open.

Some of the shots in the film
that I like are the family historical photos, the image of the mother putting
water on her face, because the water is flowing and  cleansing. The interment camps were in a
desert which felt hot and dry. Also, water is what made the Japanese American’s
farms grow and what made the successful. 
And maybe that is why the government stole the farms. Water is a way of
cleansing and sweeping out bad memories and history.

           This film presents historical
information in documentary form, but it also brings in personal reactions and
opinions and mixes personal, private,
and public historical record. The documentary is both factual and fanciful.

            There
is a woman’s voiceover of the narrative, which we think is the filmmaker. She
introduces the grandfather’s voice, which talks about how the government stole
his house while he was in the army.

The lessons in the film are
for everyone because anybody can see that history and memory are not always
straightforward. They are sometimes complicated, and sometimes movies and
dramatizations are used to cover up uncomfortable facts about history. This film
takes the individual through a process of uncovering. This is a personal and
not scientific process. This process is subjective, and the film and its maker
are impressionistic. The historical documents prove her ideas, and then she
adds the concept of superstition and ghosts which help her remember things and
her grandparents’ suffering and sadness. The mixing of elements allows the
viewer to paint a complete picture.

            This
happened both in the United States and in Canada. In Canada, the novelist Joy
Kogawa wrote Obasan, which also used documentary elements and fiction to tell
the story of the displacement of Japanese Canadians during the war. This was
told from the point of view of a small girl, and Obasan was her grandmother,
which is similar in the way but in a written form. It was the first novel in
the world to tell that story.

Bibliography

History and Memory: For Akiko
and Takashige. n.d.
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285191/>.

History and Memory: For Akiko and
Takashige. 1991. <https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/history-and-memory-akiko-and-takashige>.

Tajiri, Rea. History and Memory: For
Akiko and Takashige. n.d. <https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/history-and-memory-akiko-and-takashige>.