Guilty By Reason of Race (1972) | Japanese Internment Documentary

Documentary film produced by NBC and shown nationally on September 19, 1972, as part of the NBC Reports series. It was the second major network documentary on the wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans after The Nisei: The Pride and the Shame, which aired on CBS in 1965.

Guilty by Reason of Race was produced and reported by veteran producer Robert Northshield and incorporated historic footage and photographs with contemporary interviews with Japanese Americans as well as those who advocated for incarceration at the time to tell the story of Japanese American removal from the West Coast and their subsequent confinement in concentration camps. Several former inmates are filmed visiting the places where they had been incarcerated, including Amy Uno Ishii, J. H. Takeda, and Betty Kozasa visiting Santa Anita and activist Edison Uno (who was an adviser to the film’s producers) at Amache. It is also notable for including an interview in Tokyo with renunciant Masao Amachi, who recalled that he had "lost confidence" in the U.S. and felt that no matter who won the war, that he "would always be looked at as a Jap." The documentary also includes footage from a Manzanar Pilgrimage and from the contemporaneous exhibitions, Executive Order 9066 and Months of Waiting, 1942–1945. The documentary ends with interviews noting the impact of incarceration and raising the question of whether it can happen again; it concludes that "there is no reason why it couldn’t." - Densho Encyclopedia

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