Cinevue

ACV: I was lucky enough to see the featurette after the film—festival-goers may not be as fortunate. In the featurette, Aaron Yoo (who plays “Lyle Nomura”) encapsulates the film wonderfully, saying, "(There are) more important things in life, but sometimes it takes a game to understand them." Would you mind elaborating on that theme?

Two-thirds of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent taken from their homes and put into the camps were American citizens. The other one-third had all lived in the United States for at least sixteen years because of immigration laws. So these people were thoroughly Americanized. Particularly the young people were like “all-Americans,” in love with baseball and jazz. I wanted to show that rather than being “different,” they were the same as other Americans, enjoying the same pastimes.

One of the pleasures of baseball is that everyone knows the rules and the game has its own code of ethics that apply to all who play, regardless of where they’re from, their race, or their color.

ACV: I particularly enjoyed your characterization of the film as one deeply steeped in the notion of "family": Lyle's family, Billy's family, interned families as a whole. Could you say a little more about how playing baseball or even Lyle's mastery of the sax (or Lane's participation in the 442nd) says something about Japanese Americans' joining (or being denied) membership in the American family?

Most of the Japanese Americans while, of course, aware of their heritage, embraced the American lifestyle. They combined it with the Japanese tradition of family. They had both a strong sense of personal family and a view of themselves as being of the American family.

ACV: These might be more general questions: Did you come across any surprising aspects of the internment leagues while researching for the film?

For me, the leagues were not a surprise. They played baseball as all Americans did, and they were highly organized, so it was natural for them to form leagues. One of the aspects of the camps that I didn't elaborate on was that the internees built up the camps to be self-sustaining, growing their own food, having their own inner-governmental structure, improving their surroundings, educating themselves and helping each other.

ACV: How did you come up with this idea for the film?

Because both my parents and their families had been put into the camps, I'd wanted to do something about the camps for a long time. One of the producers, Barry Rosenbush, had found a book on the history of Japanese in baseball, Diamonds in the Rough, and brought it to me. It was a non-fiction survey of how Japanese had come to be involved with baseball. I thought baseball would be a way for a general audience to get involved in a story about he camps, so I came up with the story, using many of my own family members’ histories as the basis of characters.

ACV: Were you a baseball fan, or jazz fan, before filming?

I was a baseball fan when I was very young, and I used to be a musician. A couple friends and I wrote all the music that Lyle's character plays in the film.

ACV: I personally loved the cinematography, the way in which you cut the historical footage in beautifully with shots of the film's version of Topaz. Were photographs of the camp/landscape by Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange influential in any way on how you wanted to render the camps?

Both the Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange pieces served as great research photos, though because they were both authorized by the United States government, they were pretty cleaned up. A great deal of the video footage was shot by David Tatsuno, who had snuck a camera into the real Topaz camp and got excellent footage that gave a real feeling for the life inside the camp.

ACV: You imbue your female characters with such strength and presence - was this a conscious consideration on your part, given the time period and certain expectations of gender (esp. when one thinks of war and baseball, two such masculine domains)?

I wanted to show the consequences of war on two families, and the females as well as the men certainly had to deal with great loss and hardship. Japanese families, while patriarchal, often have a woman as the backbone—in my own family, my grandmother ruled the roost. Also, for young Katie's character, she is in the center of the entire conflict, so it gave the story a center.

ACV: Lastly—how in the heck did you get John Kruk to be the announcer? Brilliant!!

Producer Barry Rosenbush is a huge baseball fan, and contacted John Kruk, who is obviously well known to fans as both a player and a commentator on ESPN. Kruk came in for half a day and did his entire part. He was very good and very funny, both as an actor and a guy.

Matt Briones is Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. His forthcoming book focuses on the diary of a Japanese American internee.