American Pastime (2007) NR
American Pastime asks what it truly means to be an American. Good question these days, when we find ourselves looking around with more suspicion than ever. The film is a valuable history lesson not often taught – that of the Japanese internment camps in America.
The story fictionalizes one family’s experience – the Nomura family – who were enjoying a relatively happy middle-class life in Los Angeles until December 7, 1941. The Nomuras and thousands of other Americanized Japanese families, most of them American-born, were ordered to report for reassignment to internment camps. Nearly 120,000 in all were given one week to sell all of the possessions and take only what they could carry with them.
However appalling it seems now, we can learn a lot from this culture. The interned families used their funds industriously, constructing private quarters and purchasing and growing agricultural crops. At the heart of the story is a young Lyle (Aaron Yoo), who had been awaiting a future that included a baseball scholarship. He’s also a saxophone player and he gets a clique of various people within the camp to play with him, including a budding love interest, Katie Burrell (Sara Drew). Unfortunately, her father is a camp guard. While the romance reeks of Romeo and Juliet, American Pastime has qualities that prove inspirational to teen audiences. A baseball game between the local bigoted townies and the “Japs” (yes, that’s what they used to be called) has a great redemption theme.
Also inspiring is Lyle’s brother, Lane (Leonardo Nam) who decides to join the 442nd Regiment in Europe along with a dozen other young men from the camp. That’s right, they joined the very army they were being “imprisoned” by.
On a final note, titles at the end of the movie indicate that when the camps were closed in 1946, no Japanese were ever convicted of a single act of sabotage before or during the war. In fact, after a commercial release of the film in downtown LA, elderly Japanese appeared to demonstrate the healing that has taken place. No hard feelings. In fact, many of these people went on to become America’s most affluent minority group. Watch American Pastime with your teens. It’s got romance, baseball and a history lesson to boot.
By Sara-Lynn White
