Synopsis for
Come See the Paradise (1990) More at IMDbPro »

While told in the prospective of a Nisei (2nd generation Japanese-American), this film does not fall to maudlin. The historical prospective is the facts leading up to the internment of West Coast Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans just after the Pearl Harbor attack. In addition to telling about the internment camps, it also provides some insight into pre-war union efforts to organize It is told in flawless flashbacks. To a large extent the film is a narrative of people whose ability to lead their own lives were constrained by illegal activities of others.

Jack McGurn (Quaid) moves to Los Angeles from New Jersey in 1936 to escape from troubles that fall on him as a labor organizer. He takes a job as a projectionist in a Little Tokyo movie theater run by a Japanese-American family. He falls in love with his Japanese boss's daughter. Forbidden by the father to see one another and barred from marrying by California law, the couple elope to Seattle, Washington. (The law there permitted inter-racial marriage.) They have a little girl they name Mini, who looks more like an Asian-American than a European-American. McGurn gets a job working as a "fish smasher." He is unjustly jailed for interfering when a peaceful legal protest of working conditions where he works is violently broken up by management goons and police. He is paroled just as the Japanese nation attacks America. McGurn's wife and daughter, and her family, are sent to Manzanar. McGurn parole is suspended but he then has to joins the United States Army without time to return to his wife before she is sent to the internment camp. He goes AWOL to visit his family in the camp.

The movie has reconstructed scenes of the forced sale by Little Tokyo residents and scenes in the camp intended to show injustices that occur as a result of the order to intern west coast Japanese-Americans. 1944 Supreme Court rulings about the camps constitutionality allow American members of the family who had signed loyalty oaths to leave the camp. They go to live with an aunt, since they have no home in Little Tokyo anymore.

The story is told in flashback as the mother tells Mini about Jack, whom Mini barely remembers, as the two of them are walking towards a railroad station where they are to meet Jack coming back from the war after the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.