Tag Archives: DVD

Watch our film on Comcast video-on-demand through month of May

Comcast XFINITY logoWe’ve just learned that our film has been selected for national distribution through Comcast XFINITY’s video-on-demand service. Thanks to Chi-hui Yang, curator of the “Cinema Asian America” series, Comcast digital cable subscribers with On-Demand in select TV markets can watch Conscience and the Constitution for just $1.99 per view.

If you haven’t already seen Conscience, this is a limited opportunity, from today through May 31, to see it at home for a nominal fee. Please share the news with friends. Read more in the news release, with a list below of the TV markets where you can “demand” our film:

Conscience and the Constitution carried nationwide in May on Comcast video-on-demand

Award-winning documentary featured in “Cinema Asian America” series on Comcast XFINITY

To mark Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May, XFINITY On Demand ‘s Cinema Asian America presents Frank Abe’s landmark documentary, Conscience and the Constitution.

Originally released in 2000, the film has become a vital part of the nation’s on-going conversation about race, citizenship and civil liberties – complex and fraught dynamics that have become even more urgent since September 11, 2001.

“With video-on-demand and Comcast’s national presence we can reach more viewers and give them a chance to learn more about the incarceration, at a nominal cost,” said Abe. “Thanks to series curator Chi-hui Yang for including our film among so many other outstanding offerings.”

From May 1 through May 31, Conscience and the Constitution is available to all Comcast digital cable subscribers with On-Demand for $1.99 per view.

Conscience and the Constitution examines the history of mass incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during WWII, the majority of them US citizens. The film focuses on a group of 85 internees, who refused to be drafted to fight for the US military – an act of protest that resulted, not only in the largest trial for draft resistance in U.S. history, but also in ideological rifts within the Japanese American community that persist even today.

At a time when community leaders advocated for Japanese Americans to sign up for the armed forces to prove their loyalty to the U.S., the resisters refused to do so, knowing that they and their families had been stripped of their civil rights and incarcerated, solely on the basis of their race. The film examines the deep schisms that opened in the Japanese American community during the incarceration and which persist today.

That story also informs the plot of the new musical, Allegiance, which premiered last fall in San Diego and is currently back in development in a workshop lab in New York. “This cablecast of Conscience is timely, as audiences who’ve seen or heard about the musical can now check out the source material for themselves,” said Abe.

“Cinema Asian America” is the groundbreaking video-on-demand offering on Comcast featuring Asian American and Asian films and videos in a monthly, thematically-programmed format. The curated series brings together award-winning films fresh from the film festival circuit and classics which beg to be revisited.

To find Conscience and the Constitution through the Comcast digital cable menu, viewers should click on the “On Demand” button, then look under the “Movies” folder and select the “Movie Collections” subfolder to find “Cinema Asian America.”

Conscience and the Constitution is also available as a Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD, which can be ordered online for home use for $29.95 plus shipping by visiting Resisters.com/orders. For institutional rates, schools and libraries should contact Transit Media at www.transitmedia.net or (800) 343-5540.

Learn more about the film at Resisters.com, and see sample clips from the film at YouTube.com/ConscienceDVD.

Comcast TV Markets

Birmingham, AL
Dothan, AL

Huntsville, AL
Little Rock, AR

Tucson, AZ

Fresno, CA
Sacramento, CA
San Francisco, CA
Santa Barbara, CA

Colorado Springs, CO
Denver, CO

Hartford, CT

Washington DC

Ft. Myers, FL

Jacksonville, FL
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Panama City, FL
Pensacola, FL
Tallahassee, FL
Tampa, FL
West Palm Beach, FL

Atlanta, GA
Augusta, GA
Savannah, GA

Chicago, IL
Champaign, IL
Peoria, IL
Rockford, IL

Ft. Wayne, IN
Indianapolis, IN
South Bend, IN

Charleston, KY
Louisville, KY
Paducah, KY

Monroe, LA
New Orleans, LA
Shreveport, LA

Boston, MA
Springfield, MA

Detroit, MI

Kansas City, MO

Baltimore, MD
Salisbury, MD

Minneapolis, MN

Columbus, MS
Hattiesburg, MS
Jackson, MS

Albuquerque, NM

New York, NY

Youngstown, OH

Portland, OR

Harrisburg, PA
Johnstown, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Pittsburgh, PA
Wilkes-Barre, PA

Charleston, SC

Chattanooga, TN
Knoxville, TN
Memphis, TN
Nashville, TN
Tri-Cities, TN

El Paso, TX
Houston, TX

Salt Lake City, UT

Richmond, VA
Roanoke, VA

Seattle, WA
Spokane, WA

Wheeling, WV

Sharing the story at Asian American Studies conference

Staffing table at conferenceThanks to all those who stopped by our table at the 2013 Association for Asian American Studies conference in Seattle — especially those who took home our order card to recommend their college librarians acquire the new two-disc DVD of Conscience and the Constitution, for classroom use. It was incredibly validating to hear from so many professors over three days tell us of the success they’ve had in using the film in their courses. Not often one gets a chance to meet with the educators actually teaching the material, and it was rewarding to share the story of wartime resistance with so many students and scholars at once.

Thanks also to those who came to our Thursday afternoon panel, “Revisiting the Sites of Japanese American Wartime Incarceration.”

AAAS_panelOur presenters revisited the camps on three very different levels –  the physical, the emotional, and the imaginative. Brian Niiya described how the preservation of the physical site of the Honouliuli camp in Hawai’i expanded into a larger effort to modify the very narrative of Japanese American history in Hawai’i. Karen Inouye delved into the emotional heart of symbolic graduation ceremonies for Japanese American students removed from college after Pearl Harbor.

But it was the final piece from panel organizer Larry Hashima of California State University, Long Beach, that was most revelant to this blog about the resisters. hashimaLarry broke down the imaginative ways in which we construct narratives about the camp experience in his paper, “The Final Frontier Allegiance and Musically Remaking the Internment Narrative.” Larry examined the George Takei musical that debuted last fall in San Diego. He argued that by casting real-life JACL leader Mike Masaoka as “the key antagonist (if not outright villain)” of the musical, and by framing the Nisei veterans as “unwitting dupes volunteering for an unnecessary sacrifice,” the show engaged in “a radical reinterpretation of historical events” and “unchained” the story of camp from “the anchors of the established narrative” — anchors that are otherwise known as the facts.

He concluded that “while Allegiance may have attempted to ‘boldly go where no musical has gone before,'” it can also be viewed as a throwback to the bad old days when the common wisdom pitted the veterans against the resisters (“a false dichotomy,” Larry says), and Japanese Americans were understood only as victims.

Hashima is developing his ideas for a longer dissertation examining the development of common themes within fiction and film treatments of the camp story. We’ll keep an eye on his progress.

“Films of Remembrance” to feature DVD featurette

Floyd Mori at JACL apology ceremony
Floyd Mori at JACL apology ceremony

One of the featurettes on our new DVD, “The JACL Apologizes,” will screen in San Francisco Japantown on Monday, Feb. 18 as part of this year’s, “Films of Remembrance.”

It’s a one-day film series held in conjunction with the Bay Area Day of Remembrance, commemorating the 71st anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which set the wheels in motion to forcibly relocate some 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry into American concentration camps during World War II.  Our piece caps off the day’s program, which ends with this description:

5:30 p.m. “A Divided Community: Three Personal Stories of Resistance” (2012, 73 min.) This documentary by Momo Yashima highlights the struggles of three Japanese American World War II resisters — Yosh Kuromiya, Frank Emi and Mits Koshiyama — who challenged the U.S. government’s decision to draft Japanese Americans while they and their families were being held in America’s concentration camps.

Followed by “The JACL Apologizes” by Frank Abe, from the DVD “Conscience and the Constitution.”

The screenings are at Nihonmachi Little Friends, 1830 Sutter St. (near Buchanan) in San Francisco Japantown. The event is sponsored by the Bay Area Day of Remembrance Consortium, the Nichi Bei Weekly and the National Japanese American Historical Society.  Free admission, though they’d welcome donations. Thanks to Kenji Taguma for including our piece in the series.

New year’s greetings from Resisters.com

Happy new year and best wishes for a busy 2013. Here is a relevant clip from our film that is one of the moments I look forward to whenever we screen it. It’s a scene that editor Lillian Benson found in the footage we gave her, and once we told her the mochi-pounding is a New Year’s tradition, she knew exactly where to place it. It’s a moment to pause and give the audience a chance to catch up on all the information they’ve absorbed that establishes the history, gets our characters into camp, and sets the table for the draft resistance to come. Composer Alan Koshiyama then added his touch, a new musical theme that we titled, “The Second Winter.” Enjoy.

In memoriam: Senator Daniel Inouye, who stood up for the resisters

Sen. Daniel Inouye was a highly-decorated combat veteran, the first Japanese American in Congress, and an icon in the Japanese American community — so people took notice when a decade ago he began to give interviews in which he compared the courage of the veterans to the courage of the Heart Mountain draft resisters for being willing to go to prison to stand up for their rights. Maybe he sensed, after the broadcast of our film and other works, that the time had come for the reconciliation long talked about between the veterans, the resisters and other camp dissenters.

He was big enough to recognize that, as he put it, “it took a lot of guts” for the resisters to stand up to their own government — and by saying so, he showed a lot of gut himself. 

I’m sorry to learn tonight that Mr. Inouye passed away today at the age of 88. In 2002, he was gracious enough to grant us an interview that is exclusive to our new DVD. Shot at Seattle Central Community College by our principal videographer, Phil Sturholm, producer Carol Hasegawa squeezed in two questions on our behalf at the end of her interview with him on the day’s Civil Liberties Celebration. In the good Senator’s memory tonight, here is the full featurette as it appears on our DVD:

The James Omura centenary: 1912-2012

James Omura - Broadway High School photo
James Omura at Broadway High School, Seattle

One hundred years ago today, November 27, 1912, Utaka Matsumoto was born to a sawmill worker and his wife on Bainbridge Island, Washington. At age 6 his mother returned ill to Japan and he never saw her again. At age 13 he would take the name James Omura and leave home to work in the Alaskan salmon canneries. In this centenary year we recognize Omura as the Japanese American journalist most willing to take a stand — demanding of the Tolan Committee “Has the Gestapo come to America?,” editorializing against the draft resistance at Heart Mountain in “Let Us Not Be Rash,” and testifying decades later to the Bernstein Commission for redress.

Jimmie would always tell me that he didn’t expect to be remembered or recognized for his accomplishments until 50 years after his death. Then he would go on to complain about the lack of guts among the third-generation Sansei journalists, including, one had to assume, myself. But he seemed genuinely pleased to be awarded the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the then-fledgling Asian American Journalists Association, and we were fortunate to have recovered and told his story in our PBS film Conscience and the Constitution.

In this centenary year we may get word of publication of Jimmie’s memoirs, a work left incomplete by his passing in 1994 and painstakingly edited ever since by Professor Art Hansen under the working title, Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura.

We were saddened to recently hear from Art of the passing of Jimmie’s second wife, Haruko Karen Omura, on September 4th at the age of 85, but we have been in touch with the two sons of Karen and Jimmie. The younger son Wayne is a writer, author of the book Movies and The Meaning of Life: The Most Profound Films in Cinematic History, available on Amazon. We asked Wayne for his reflections on this date:

On the Hundredth Anniversary of My Father’s Birth

Many fathers tell stories about their lives, and it is hard to know how much is true and how much is tall-tales.  It was only after my father retired that he became involved, once again, in politics, history, and journalism.  It was then that I began to suspect that those “tall-tales” might be true.

After his death, after seeing all that was written about him, all the many books in which his name appeared, I realized that those tall-tales were really “true-tales.”  I should have listened better and taken more interest as I was growing up.  But like all kids, we had our own lives to live, our own problems in the here and now. The past was history.  The words went in one ear and out the other.

A personal anecdote may be in order which displays my Dad’s character, as well as the most important principle he taught me.

While working after college as night-manager in a small grocery store, I had numerous physical confrontations with shoplifters.  My Mom (being a mother) thought it was reckless and stupid.  “Why risk your life and physical injury for a candy bar?” On a practical level she was right, but on an ethical level she was wrong.  My Dad’s response was an unusual outburst of anger. (He had mellowed a lot in his later years.)

“He should do what he thinks is right!” he shouted.

Whether an action is dangerous, unpopular, destroys your career and reputation, makes you an outcast in your own community and to your own people: You should always do what you think is right!  (Not just when the world is at peace and you are relatively safe.)

Wayne Omura
written on Thanksgiving Day 2012

If you knew Jimmie, or just share our admiration of him, consider this an open thread and please leave a comment below.

For this occasion here is a part of the extended interview with James Omura in which he describes his trial for conspiracy, as featured on Disc Two of our new DVD. Happy birthday, Jimmie. Your fighting spirit is deeply missed.

Author’s booth at the 2012 JACL National Convention

JACL convention logoLook for me in the author’s booth in the exhibit area for the 2012 JACL National Convention, which comes to town this weekend at the Bellevue Hyatt.

I’ll be at the table both Friday and Saturday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

We’ll have the new Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD on sale for a special convention discount. Looking forward to meeting delegates who wander by and sharing the story of the Heart Mountain resisters. Thanks to convention  chair Elaine Akagi for making the arrangements.