Review of Come See the Paradise

I think this film does a decent job depicting the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. The movie spends a lot of time establishing a pre-war normalcy that is uprooted in the later parts of the movie. Lily Kawamura's (Tamlyn Tomita) family is well established and prominent among Japanese American elite circles. They are educated and well dressed and prove themselves to be just like any other American. Japanese Americans were just like any other Americans. Yet the contingencies of war took that all away from them. The movie in the beginning does capture a bit of the tensions between non-hyphenated Americans and the Japanese Americans, mainly through the interactions with Lily's father (Sab Shimono) and Jack McGurn (Dennis Quad). What the movie best achieves though is a depiction of life within the internment camps and the costs of upheaval for many Japanese Americans. Lily's family is forced to give away everything and depart from their home in San Francisco and partake in the forced internment. This tears Lily apart from her now husband Jack, which is certainly emotionally distressing but the whole love story between them is so painfully awkward and horrible to watch that it is hard to fully feel any emotions one way or the other. I think Alan Parker would have done a better job focusing a bit more on the internment experience rather than this irritating love story. With that, the internment experience showed the further trials that Japanese Americans had to face. They were asked to remain loyal to a country that took everything away from them. The film shows the internees struggling to reply to the infamous "Loyalty Question," question numbers 27 and 28 on a survey that all internees had to take. The question essentially asked them to either declare themselves to be fully committed American citizens, and potentially fight for their country or: "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government power or organization?" These sort of questions had immense repercussions for those who answered no, as we saw in the movie when Lily's brother was sent to the Tule Lake internment camp with the rest of the "no-no boys." The tensions between the Nisei and Issei generations held a lot of sway in the film as well, another aspect that was well represented in terms of camp life. Overall the film depicted a complicated time in American history but lacked in the romance aspect of the film.