Unfinished Business - The Japanese American Internment Cases [DVD] - Good

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Amazon.ca Steven Okazaki's Oscar-nominated 1984 film Unfinished Business was one of the first documentaries to confront the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. As such it has an emotional immediacy that still rings clear today. Okazaki traces the story of Executive Order 9066, which decreed in the wake of Pearl Harbor that Japanese-American citizens living on the U.S. west coast should be uprooted and placed in relocation camps. In particular, we hear the histories of three men who separately defied the order and were arrested and jailed, each with his own particular story: Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, and Fred Korematsu. All three calmly describe their experiences, and Okazaki covers Korematsu's suit to have his conviction overturned. Newsreel footage, including footage from the camps, gives proof of the bleak relocation centers, and excerpts from government public-interest films (on relocation and the celebrated Japanese-American units of the U.S. military) give you-are-there looks at the era. These, and the forceful first-person testimonies of people involved, give weight to Korematsu's assertion that "it should never happen again to any American citizen just because he looks a little different from others." --Robert Horton

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