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ww2: A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
ww2: A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto one luminous summer morning in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, Rita, a high-school art teacher, knows her mother has a history of dissociation and memory problems, which have led her to wander off before. But never has she stayed away so long.
Unconvinced the police are taking the case seriously, Rita begins to carry out her own investigation. In the course of searching for her mom, she is forced to confront a labyrinth of secrets surrounding the family’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War, their postwar immigration to Toronto, and the father she has never known.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, led the United States into World War II and radically changed the lives of thousands.
The attack intensified racial prejudices and led to the fear that Japanese Americans would scupper the war effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War to establish Military Areas and to remove from those areas anyone who might threaten the war effort. Everyone of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were given only days to decide what to do with their houses, farms, businesses – everything they owned. They were then taken to a internment camp.
Manazanar now is a testament to this horrific time and a national historical landmark
Author/Guide: Leslie Shimotakahara Destination: Toronto, California Departure Time: WW2
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