Powerful, newly-discovered color footage from 1944 shows a day in the life of a World War II camp in Jerome, Arkansas built to imprison Japanese Americans. The footage is narrated by Saburo Masada, who spent two years in the camp starting in 1942, when he was 12 years old.
Masada, today a retired pastor who lives in Modesto, California, has become an outspoken storyteller along with his wife, Marion, to make up for what he calls years of silence. “The government kept it pretty much out of our history books for decades,” Masada said. “And they use euphemisms to hide the the gross violation of our Constitution, say things like they were relocating us to new ‘pioneer communities.’” Masada, like most Japanese Americans, says that the term “concentration camp” is actually more accurate than “relocation center” or “internment camp.”
The Kodachrome footage was found on eBay by archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, who uploaded it to the Prelinger Archives, a repository he created to “collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere.” Prelinger bid on the reel of footage not knowing what it would be. “My partner and I put it on our projector and were very excited to see it,” he said. “Quickly our thoughts turned to how it might be used by and with the survivor community, and how it was an important piece of evidence. It’s amazing how home moviemakers are often witnesses to historical events of such great importance.”
Prelinger believes the film was possibly shot by Charles R. Lynn, a reports officer at Jerome, who had been a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, because his name is typed on a label that’s stuck on the can lid. “In my opinion, color photography testifies to the reality of the events it shows, and lessens the distance between the incarcerated and government workers shown in the footage and viewers today,” Prelinger said. “We tend to associate railroad trains with deportations and concentration camps in Europe, and it is striking and somewhat shocking to see the same images of the United States.”
