visas & virtue

[Birgit Kellner]

This goes way beyond the discussion of the film itself, but Alan Kita
wrote:
>
> The concentration camps were not death camps as they were in Europe.
> However, the sentiment at the time - if for some reason the Japanese
> were winning the war, there are several reasons to believe that 120,000
> Japanese descendants (the majority had American citizenship) - their
> lives would have been in peril.

Sentiments aside, there is a huge difference between, on the one hand, a
systematically engineered endeavour to imprison certain groups of
society (not only Jews, but also homosexuals, gypsies, communists,
social democrats, etc.), exploit their labour force as much as possible,
and basically eradicate whatever is expendable as "human material", and,
on the other hand, the systematic endeavour to "contain" a certain part
of the populace, because they have racial/national connections to a
country one is currently fighting in a war. And, on this background - 

> Although officially, the U.S. government had called the camps that
> Japanese American were forced to enter "Internment Camps" on most of the
> lips of the white "protectors" (you will have to wonder who was
> protecting whom, since most of the soldiers - Americans _ had their guns
> pointed inside the camps) as concentration camps.
> 
> You can see why "Internment Camp," makes not a better name, because most
> uses for interment seems to center around death, and an "internment
> camp" seems euphemistic for "death camp."  Or at least a camp for
> zombies and ghouls.

Actually, when I heard the director and the screenwriter for "visas &
virtue", as well as the interviewer, refer to the camps in the US as
"concentration camps", I was kind of shocked. For me, the expression
"concentration camp" captures precisely the notion of imprisoning people
(as members of certain groups) for the purpose of exploitation and
extinction. Not restricted to Jews, and not restricted to Nazi Germany,
but restricted to a particular type of imprisonment facilities. It is
for this reason that I found it nothing short of outrageous that the
camps for Japanese Americans in the US, where, to my knowledge, no
intent of mass genocide was given, were referred to as "concentration
camps" in this particular TV-interview. This did in fact seem like
over-blown, empty rhetoric, which is, as so much of it, emotionally
understandable, but still highly inappropriate. Then, I am not sure to
what extent this reaction against the use of "concentration camp" is
just my personal sentiment. But that's more of an issue for debates
about contemporary political and historical discourse, and not
necessarily a subject-matter for KineJapan. 

> But in this particular case, I think the director and others of the film
> "Visas and Virtures" probably overextended a comparison (or a cause).

That's what I thought. I found it really weird that there was no mention
of the Holocaust, and what Sugihara actually did, at all - instead, the
symbolical significance of his Japaneseness in combination with his
goodness was emphasized ad nauseam. I thought that the only way in which
the Holocaust becomes significant for the motivation to this particular
film was that helping Jews getting out of Nazi Germany is commonly held
to be one of the noblest things anyone could have done in WWII. Thus,
creating a bona fide Japanese hero would have to involve this particular
kind of rescue. 

Let me just add that I would be very grateful if anyone could provide a
description of the film "visas & virtue" as such, since I haven't seen
it. The short bits that were shown as an introduction to the
above-mentioned TV-interview did not look to promising, very wooden
acting, a lot of emphasis on emotion (Sugihara's wife kneeling down and
begging him to keep issuing visas, to not only think of his own
children, but also of all the children 'out there'). From what I know
about the film so far, then, it seems like a lost opportunity to deal
with an intriguing and highly interesting historical incident. 


-- 
birgit kellner
department for indian philosophy
hiroshima university