They Took My Father Too
What would you say to your father if it was the last time you'd see him? Japanese American filmmaker Konrad Aderer (Resistance at Tule Lake) directs a film about family separation at Tuna Canyon Detention Station near Los Angeles.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government tore apart thousands of west-coast Japanese American families. Agents arrested fathers and locked them up in nearby detention facilities. Their wives and children were often left on their own as they themselves prepared to leave their homes to live in concentration camps.
March 1942, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles - A heartbroken middle-school kibei boy struggles to salvage his father's legacy as his family is pushed out of their home.
They Took My Father Too adapts a story written in Japanese by a young prisoner named Fujiwo Tanisaki. This powerful, incisively researched retelling incorporates:
- A recreation of Tuna Canyon Detention Station near Los Angeles, where families drove for brief visits with imprisoned fathers.
- The erasure of the culture of Little Tokyo: literature, journalism, cinema. All these threads were cut off and physically destroyed as families destroyed their heirlooms.
- Japanese-language diaries, newspapers, and histories that have been left out of the historical understanding of 20th century U.S. Nikkei.
Directed by Konrad Aderer
Adapted from the story Father Was Also Taken (Chichi Mo Hipparareta) by Fujiwo Tanisaki, published in 1944 in Tessaku, the Japanese-language literary journal of Tule Lake Segregation Center.
News about the film
Konrad Aderer's They Took My Father Too Awarded Federal Grant from Japanese American Confinement Sites Program
In partnership with 📽️ Third World Newsreel, Aderer will bring to life a Japanese American narrative of forced displacement and family separation, focusing on the lesser-known Tuna Canyon Detention Station in California. The film, adapted for educational purposes, aims to engage students with historical and current civil liberties issues.
The film will weave together a dramatic adaptation of Tanisaki's story with the Japanese-language sources and films that formed the consciousness of Little Tokyo Nikkei (Japanese Americans and immigrants). From the 1930s until 1942, the parents of the new generation devoted themeselves to bringing up their children as Americans who were also fully Japanese. Their dreams were shattered by the outbreak of war.
outreach@lifeorliberty.org | They Took My Father Too is a project under the fiscal sponsorship of Third World Newsreel (aka Camera News, Inc.), an alternative media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people of color and social justice issues.
This project is funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.