Proof of Loyalty: Kazuo Yamane and the Nisei Soldiers of Hawai’i

Abstract

Reviewed by: Proof of Loyalty: Kazuo Yamane and the Nisei Soldiers of Hawai’i Emelie Mahdavian (bio) Proof of Loyalty: Kazuo Yamane and the Nisei Soldiers of Hawai’i, produced and directed by Lucy Ostrander and Don Sellers. Stourwater Pictures, 2017. 55 minutes. $25 personal use DVD. Proof of Loyalty: Kazuo Yamane and the Nisei Soldiers of Hawai’i mixes archival footage with interviews, still photos, and voice-over to tell the story of World War II’s 100th Infantry Battalion, a battalion of Japanese American soldiers from Hawaii. The bulk of the film is dedicated to telling the history of Japanese Hawaiians from their immigration up to World War II. Hawaiians of Japanese ancestry have a unique history and represented as much as 40 percent of the Hawaiian population at the outset of World War II. Nonetheless, Japanese immigrants and their American-born children, called nisei, faced segregation-style policies in education and employment. Through a heavy reliance upon interviews with American studies professor Franklin Odo, historian Tom Coffman, U.S. Army historian James McNaughton, and Military Intelligence Service veterans Mark Matsunaga and Ted Tsukiyama, Proof of Loyalty sets up this context clearly. It then goes on to show how, because of their large, tight-knit community, the World War II experiences of Hawaiians of Japanese descent differed from those of Japanese Americans living on the mainland. One of the strongest archival images in Proof of Loyalty is a long take of a Japanese American soldier dancing hula as other soldiers look on. This archival footage illustrates, in cinematic language, the rich culture of the film’s subject: Japanese Hawaiians. The broad-strokes history presented throughout most of the film is provided specificity via the story of Kazuo Yamane, an American-born soldier who worked as a translator during the war. Through his work at the Pentagon, the film recounts, Yamane would end up playing an important role in bringing the war to an end. Unfortunately, the film frequently relies upon interviews or narration relating the importance of Yamane’s work in general terms, and it feels like much more screen time is devoted to historical context than to the telling of this apparently remarkable soldier’s story. The film uses him as a story device but is not able to provide enough detail about his life to flesh out his character. This is likely the result of the limited archival material on Yamane himself, but it does leave the impression that the protagonist and titular character receives only superficial treatment. According to the film, the 100th Infantry Battalion was used by the U.S. government as a test case in the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Furthermore, Proof of Loyalty provides an example of how American military strength has come from the linguistic skills of ethnic groups who, ironically, have faced persecution as a consequence of that same ethnic identification. Kazuo Yamane’s determined loyalty to the United States, even in the era of the incarceration of [End Page 455] mainland Japanese Americans, is presented as evidence of the unique value of the Japanese Hawaiian experience. In addition to its largely superficial treatment of the lead subject, the film contains one other concerning choice: namely the way first-person voice-over is presented. Proof of Loyalty has two strands of voice-over: a female voice providing omniscient, contextual information and a male voice speaking in the first person as Kazuo Yamane. Elsewhere in the film, on-screen text identifies individuals (e.g., soldiers in photographs) and provides context. However, the filmmakers never identify the source of Kazuo’s first-person narration––neither on screen nor in the end credits. Given the age of the story, it is unlikely that it is Kazuo Yamane himself speaking. Viewers may hope that he has left behind some written materials that are being read by a narrator. However, with no identification of the source material provided in the film, the concerning possibility remains that the filmmakers wrote Kazuo’s “first person” voice-over themselves in order to impersonate Kazuo Yamane and compensate for scant archival material. On the other hand, if the material was in fact taken from personal diaries or some other...