Multimedia Presentations

Films and Shows about the Tule Lake Segregation Center

Life at Tule Lake
Jimi Yamaichi takes us on tours of the camp grounds in Newell, CA and a barracks replica at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, CA. The film includes scenes from the 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 Tule Lake Pilgrimages. You will also see an interview with Hiroshi Kashiwagi, as well as his poem a "Visit to Tule Lake".
Edited by Anders Tomlinson. Music by SonicAtomics. Produced by Anders Tomlinson and Jimi Yamaichi.

Charles Palmerlee Collection (96.47.8)
Color footage shot at Tule Lake by teacher Charles Palmerlee, 1942-1945. Includes panning shots of camp barracks; the guard tower at sunset; high school students, including a graduation; school administrators and office staff; Japanese dance performances; crafts, including bird and shell pins; the Tule Lake Union Church; Christian Youth Fellowship group; shots of families and children; the transition to segregation camp with families leaving and others arriving; and hand-made intertitle cards.
Credits: Charles Palmerlee Collection, Gift of Mrs. Charles Seward Palmerlee, Japanese American National Museum (96.47.8). Preserved and made accessible in part by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Resistance at Tule Lake
This film tells the long-suppressed story of incarcerated Japanese Americans who defied the government by refusing to swear unconditional loyalty to the U.S. Though this was an act of protest and family survival, they were branded as “disloyals” by the government and packed into the newly designated Tule Lake Segregation Center.

Cats of Mirikatani
Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani survived the trauma of WWII internment camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art. This documentary explores the lingering wounds of war and the healing powers of friendship and art.

From a Silk Cocoon
The discovery of a small metal box leads to the uncovering of a family story, shrouded in silence for more than 60 years.

History Dectives
George T. Tamura is a Japanese American artist. Born in Sacramento, CA in 1927, he attended Chouinard Art Institute and showed in numerous one-man shows in the Los Angeles area. He was employed as an award-winning art/creative director. Mr. Tamura was featured on the PBS program History Detectives as host Tukufu Zuberi investigated and solved the mystery of who created the paintings of an apparent internment camp discovered in an unlabeled box.

 

Photographer Tom Parker shooting film footage of Japanese American Soldiers in action at Camp Shelby.

WRA Photograph by Charles Mace - 1943

War Time Propaganda Films

During World War II, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) contracted for five films to be made by the War Department's Hollywood film division. The War Department produced approximately 1,100 documentaries and newsreels that ran in movie theaters across the United States during WWII.

Photographers such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange were contracted by the WRA to take still photographs of life in the camps. Other contracted photographers, including Tom Parker and Charles Mace, shot both film and still footage.

Presented here are two of the films produced. The film attempts to justify why the federal government established the camps and acknowledges that conditions were not very good.

Despite the slant of both the films, the footage is a remarkable document of what Japanese American's lives were like in the camps. There are shots taken at several camps including Tule Lake.

 

A Challenge to Democracy

Tells the story of 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were asked to leave their farms and small businesses on the West Coast to live in isolated Relocation Centers in the months of hysteria following Pearl Harbor. The movie shows that an overwhelming majority of these people are loyal Americans who are being assisted by the Federal Government to find jobs and new homes for themselves in the normal world outside their barracks cities.

 

Japanese Relocation

Narrated by Milton S. Eisenhower, director of the War Relocation Authority. An historical record of the forced relocation of Japanese residents from the Pacific Coast to the American interior, carried out the the U.S. Army and the War Relocation Authority.

Depicts camp life: cafeteria, church services, nursery schools, people engaged in war-related work (making camouflage nets for army). Building new quarters in the desert for the final movement to the relocation camps. Smiling Japanese people on trains. Medical facilities, Americanization classes, schools, internal government, barracks-style housing, irrigation projects in desert. Some evacuees were "permitted" to become fieldhands in sugar beet fields under appropriate safeguards. Describes the goal of the relocation as achieved when "all adult hands" are engaged in "productive work on public land or in private employment." And when "the disloyal have left this country for good." Relocation seen as a humane act "setting the standard for the rest of the world in the treatment of people who may have loyalties to an enemy nation, protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency."