Maui Fil Festival 2012

World Premier

The price for the attack on Pearl Harbor was paid ultimately by thousands of Hawai‘i-born lads who did not deserve the bill. These were the Nisei (second generation) sons of immigrant Japanese, the pidgin-speaking products of Island farm-labor camps. Due entirely to racial prejudice, they were somehow neither Japanese nor American—not until their blood trials on battlefields in Italy and France, during which they became the most decorated combat unit of World War II. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, fighting alongside the 100th Infantry Battalion, earned 3,600 Purple Hearts and forced the U.S. to relinquish its discriminatory anti-Asian practices.

This definitive documentary focuses on interviews with survivors, old-timers who make jokes about those days but still tremble with tears thinking of lost comrades, the carnage of their assault on the Gothic Line, and the human misery they witnessed when liberating the prison at Auschwitz. The film also gives generous insight into the Hawai‘i of a century ago, including revelations about broomstick baseball, the importance of ken or prefecture, and the difference between a "Buddha-head" and a "kotonk." 

Most remarkable, the film is made by a Japan-Japanese crew and utilizes subtitles in both Japanese and English. Thus history folds in on itself, making that gone war feel terribly outdated yet just as close as that old Buddha-head who lives down the street.