page_title: Propaganda for Japanese-American internment
section_title: Films
hierarchical_section_title: Propaganda for Japanese-American internment / Films
caption_attribution_description: Scope and content: The full caption for this photograph reads: Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado. Farm of Ed. Paulish, 9 miles southeast of Granada, Colorado. A group of high-school students topping beets.
context_page_description: Propaganda for Japanese-American internment is a form of propaganda created between 1941 and 1944 within the United States that focused on the relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to internment camps during World War II. Several types of media were used to reach the American people such as motion pictures and newspaper articles. The significance of this propaganda was to project the relocation of Japanese Americans as matter of national security, although according to a federal commission created by President Jimmy Carter in 1980:
  The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions that followed from it – detention, ending detention and ending exclusion – were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.
context_section_description: As a common form of entertainment for many Americans, motion pictures portrayed a positive image of relocation to non-Japanese movie-goers. Produced by the United States War Relocation Authority, such movies as A Challenge to Democracy (1944) and Japanese Relocation (1943), depicted the internment camps in a positive light and showed the Japanese people as happy and content, benefiting from their new life in the internment camps. To accomplish this, these government-issued propaganda films touched on common positive themes, such as:
  ensuring the safety of internee property
  providing Japanese-Americans with greater opportunities, such as education, employment, internal government, and religion
  cooperation of the internees with the local authorities and federal government
  language comparing the relocated people to early American frontiersmen
  Such motion pictures were made with film from actual Japanese American internment camps with a narrator informing the audience of what they were witnessing. As the UCLA Film and Television Archive writes:
  [This] film reminds us how easily unpleasant truths can be rationalized into banality and individual liberties can be swept away. (UCLA, 2007)
caption: Internees farming sugar beets while relocated at the Amache Internment Camp
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