Growing up, I didn't know about the Japanese internment camps until I saw a movie of the week as an adult. I remember going, 'How come that wasn't covered in history class?' Moving to California, you run into people whose grandparents lost everything and their businesses and were put in these internment camps.
When I was trying to figure out how the government might go about creating the camps in 'The Darkest Minds,' I researched the Japanese internment camps here in the United States, specifically propaganda the government used, and how they capitalized on people's fears.
There was a Japantown in San Francisco, but after the internment camps that locked up all the Japanese, Japantown shrunk down to just a couple tourist blocks.
I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.
I did a film called 'Fort McCoy,' based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States.
We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.
I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.
I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.
I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.
You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.
