Director to discuss film on Japanese-American Internment

BELLEVUE, WASH. -- Bellevue Community College’s Center for Liberal Arts will present award-winning film producer and director Frank Abe on Tuesday, Mar. 22, screening and discussing his film Conscience and the Constitution.

The free, public event begins at 7 p.m. at the Bellevue Regional Library (1111 - 110th Avenue NE, Bellevue).

Conscience and the Constitution tells the story of a little-known group of young Japanese-Americans during World War II. Refusing to be drafted from an American internment camp unless the government restored their rights as U.S. citizens, the group was prosecuted as criminals, imprisoned for two years and written out of the official history of Japanese America for the next 50 years.

The lecture is a presentation of Bellevue Community College’s Center for Liberal Arts, which through its BCC Reads! program is promoting the study of the Japanese-American internment this year.

Each year, the BCC Reads! program selects one topic and one book to be incorporated in as many courses as possible across the curriculum. This year, the book is Julie Otsuka’s novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, a story of one Japanese-American family’s experience in a World War II internment camp.

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