Race and Racism in Allan Parker’s Come See the Paradise, Essay Example

Scholar Michael Bess, among other war historians, contends that race played a formative role in World War II both nationally and internationally, as racial tensions and divisions “led to one of the greatest breaches of constitutional governance in the nation’s history” in Japanese internment (Bess 22). While the U.S government did not completely nullify the Japanese Americans of their U.S. citizenship, the forced uprooting and relocation of all Japanese and Japanese-Americans living on the West coast—well over 110,000 of them–into internment camps on the presence of racial difference and hostility (Ngai 175). Released in theaters in the United States in 1990, famous director Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise reproduces on film this heinous act of institutional and legal race, shedding light on one of the darkest chapters in American history. The film narrative appeals to the audience’s sympathy for the victims of this overt racism at the behest of the U.S. government . This film eschews the structural and institutionalized racism and simmering nativist sentiment that underlay internment policies swiftly passed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt merely out of political expediency. It limns Japanese internment as an atrocious affront to the mythological image of the United States as a democratic nation and the land of opportunity and freedom. While this film proffers a counter-narrative that sheds light on the true feelings of the Japanese towards forced relocation and explores the ramifications of World War II on the Japanese family, the film structures the Japanese wartime lived experience within a Eurocentric framework undergirded by cultural conservative intimations that rendered all Asian cultures as “alien” and permanently foreign despite prevailing optimist in the American ethos.

Parker’s Come See the Paradise overtly castigates the policy of Japanese internment by highlighting the nativist sentiment that fueled its passage and the tenuous nature of the so-called inalienable rights guaranteed by U.S. citizenship according the Constitution. Lily, the female, Japanese-American protagonist, and her family acquiesce to the mandates of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 as a way to prove their loyalty to the U.S. despite the fact that the U.S. essentially labeled them permanent foreigners and cannot assimilate solely on the basis of their national ties and racial identity (Ngae 3). This nativist intimation reflects the historical nativist implications that have pervaded public discourses in the United States for centuries.  In 1921, future president of the United States Calvin Coolidge promulgated that “it would not be unjust to ask of every alien: What will you contribute to the common good, once you are admitted through the gates of liberty?” (Nativism 153). Executive Order 9766 forced Japanese and Japanese Americans “to contribute to the common good” by uprooting themselves from their homes and sojourn in internment camps while the war was ongoing. Although the War Information Office (WIO), the agency that oversaw the internment camps, disseminated images of the Japanese in the camps appearing jovial, happy and overly  cheerful, eager to prove their loyalty to the U.S. government via compliance, Parker depicts the lived Japanese experience and their emotional state in a far different light.

Housed in military-like, tiny stalls barred in by military barbed wire, the Japanese lamented how the internment camps replaced their former home life. To many, they felt like they were forced into a militarized, outdoor prison, thereby being incarcerated without a just cause. When they argued about the loyalty questionnaires that all Japanese men were forced to take, Lily’s younger brother posits that they are obligated to fight for the American army because they indeed are American citizens. This heated conversation prompted Charlie–a disillusioned Japanese male who used to be proud to be an American citizen–to bitterly rebutt: “we stopped being U.S. citizens once the barbed wire went up.” Lily further expresses such disillusionment and anger when camp authorities forbid Lily’s mom from working in the camp because they consider her to be a “Japanese nationalist” merely because she was first-generation, according to camp laws. Lily angrily retorts: “What law protects citizens from being locked up for no crime?” Her ire germinated out of disgust at  how the U.S. portrayed the Japanese as willing to be interned in order to assimilate into American culture. Moreover, the government limned the Japanese as wanting to turn their back on Japan and be willing to fight for the very army of a country that stripped from of the civil rights, thereby rendering them second-class citizens.

Parker proffers a compassionate and empathetic perception of the Japanese and the Japanese-American lived experience by evincing an underscoring how profoundly the World War II disrupted Japanese families and essentially tore the traditional patriarchal structure of the Japanese family asunder. The camps thwarted traditional familial and gender relations by dismantling patriarchal structures, which had dictated patterns in Japanese family life and forcing young, Japanese men to join the U.S. army as a way of proving their loyalty, which had  been questioned by virtue of their nationality. The first few scenes of the film limn Mr. Kawamura, Lily’s father, as the patriarchal breadwinner who always made the final decisions within his family. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, authorities arrested him because of his known ties to various Japanese cultural clubs as well as because he was Issei, or a member of the first generation of Japanese migrating to the United States. As a result, Lily’s father was accused of espionage and spying. After American authorities release him, and he when he arrives at the internment camp, Mr. Kawamura undergoes a staggering change, becoming depressed, isolated, dejected, and a pariah even within his own family. There was no work available for him to earn small wages, so his days consisted of him staying in the small room in the barracks while his daughters had the freedom to work jobs  for a small wage. Such a subversion of gender and familial patterns unequivocally takes its toll on the former patriarch, rendering him emasculated. As a result, Mr. Kawamura takes his own life because he cannot bear the inner anguish of losing his status.  Furthermore, the American authorities in the internment camps forced Japanese-American sons or those who were in fighting condition to fill out disseminated loyalty questionnaires that questioned whether young boys were willing to take up arms against their mother country. This reality resulted either in fighting for the American army against the Japanese or forced removal to a detention center called Tule Lake because of their disloyalty. Charlie refused to fight for the U.S. army, but Lily’s younger brother swears his loyalty to the U.S. and joins the army. Both sons left the family while they were still living in the internment camp. The despair on Lily’s mother’s face is palpable upon hearing that her youngest son who wore his loyalty to the United States had been killed in action. In addition, because of Charlie’s disloyalty, he was repatriated back to Japan and would never be able to come back into the United States.

While Parker’s narrative is commendable for proffering a sympathetic view regarding the injustice and inequities that Japanese suffering in internment camps, it is nonetheless unequivocal that he appealed to a culturally conservative ideology that is hegemonic in American in addition to a Eurocentric view of the world. Through the Japanese characters, Parker raises a litany of historical and socio-cultural issues that become reduced because of a preoccupation with Jack Mcgurn, the white male protagonist in this film, as a technique to appeal to mainstream Hollywood using a modal subject whom spectators can identify with. Parker makes various efforts to avoid such eurocentrism by giving Lilly a prominent and controlling voice as the film’s narrator who recounts her past experiences to Minnie, her daughter. Indeed, the film narrative is structured by Lily’s memories and recollection as a tool to make it seem as though the film accurately portrays the experiences from the Japanese and Japanese Americans who lived through it. However, almost the entire first half of the movie centers on Jack’s troubled past due to his participation in labor union activities and his involvement in an interracial relationship between Lily and Jack, which was frowned down upon during that epoch. In comparison to the romantic story portrayed in the beginning, the dramatization of the actual internment experience is far more succinct and therefore somewhat reductive. Moreover, Jack is portrayed as the white, romantic hero who eases’ Lily’s anguish, which pushes the issues surrounding Japanese internment to the background. as such, Parker couches this film narrative on race and racism in American within the audience’s intrinsic identification with Jack as the white male protagonist, which refracts the counter-narrative that Parker had originally wanted to lay bare.

Works Cited

Bess, Michael. Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2006. Print. 

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.

Parker, Allan. Come See the Paradise. 20th Century Fox. 1990. DVD.