Some
120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were relocated from the
West Coast to internment camps during World War II, an event
recorded on a Movietown newsreel from 1942 that prefaces the
recent film Buddha Heads. Although
such movies as Come See the Paradise
(1990) have depicted events about one of the saddest violations
of constitutional rights in American history, Buddha
Heads is the first to explore what happened
after the camps closed, when Japanese attempted to reintegrate
themselves into American society, in particular to Los Angeles.
In the first part of the film, through black-and-white photography,
the injustice of the wartime experience is recounted briefly,
and there is also mention of the fact that once-proud Japanese
entrepreneurs who worked hard to accumulate capital before
the war became employed as gardeners and even cleaned toilets
after the war because they lost nearly everything to meet
the forty-hour evaluation deadline. Some, according to the
film, banded together as gangsters, primarily to protect the
community, which was will still held in low esteem immediately
after the war. Buddha Heads centers on the Sugimoto family,
which by 1968 finally saved enough money to open a mom-and-pop
store. Father Sugimoto practiced kendo and taught his eldest
son Suggzy (played by Calvin Hung) other fine points of Japanese
culture. One day, however, a Caucasian robber entered the
store and killed both parents. Suggzy then located the culprit,
killed him, and received a twenty-five year prison sentence,
though the Japanese community regarded him as a hero. Marco
(played by Eddie Mui) was then two years of age, so he was
sent to an orphanage. When he escaped at age eleven, he was
given shelter by Wallace Chin (played by A.M. Lai), a Chinatown
gang lord, who as his dai lo (adoptive father) trained him
to do his dirtywork, and he became the leader of the Savage
Boys, a small group of multicultural homeboys in Chin's employ.
When the color cinematography begins, Suggzy has been released
from prison in 1993. The first Asian in an American prison
after World War II, he retained pride in his culture by practicing
tai chi daily. When his mother was dying in his arms, he promised
to take care of Marco, so his primary goal upon his release
is to carry out that mission, which he bungled twenty-five
years earlier because of his punk mentality as a gang member.
When he meets Marco, he tries to dissuade his punky kid brother
from being a criminal. On one occasion he takes Marco on a
nostalgic tour of Little Tokyo, including the cemetery where
their parents are buried; he invites Marco to kneel and show
respect alongside him at the graveside, an action that proves
to be a turning point in Marco's thinking about himself as
a Japanese who is being exploited by a Chinese. Meanwhile,
some Vietnamese punks try to grab a piece of the action from
Chin by waving guns at a Chinese restaurant that is being
protected by Marco and his homeboys, and Marco increasingly
is coming under the influence of Helen Yoshida (played by
Helen Ota), a UCLA student who is the daughter of one of Suggzy's
buddies who went straight two decades earlier. One day Marco
gets a call for help from the owner of the Chinese restaurant,
which is again being hit by the Vietnamese. When Marco sees
Chin to protest that the Vietnamese should be dealt with to
stay out of his territory, Chin responds that he has made
a deal with the Vietnamese: in exchange for causing a little
trouble, he can collect higher protection fees. Marco then
announces that he is quitting the gang, and the inevitable
shootout occurs. Suggzy and Helen die, but Marco survives,
now honoring his brother by abandoning a life of crime. Marco's
voiceovers open and close the film. Buddha Heads,
directed by Brian T. Maeda, is a fictional story that provides
considerable information about Japanese culture. One Japanese
American even explains that he eats Spam sushi to show respect
to his parents, who once ate that unusual delicacy on a regular
basis while employed as sugarcane plantation workers in Hawai`i.
The cast, nevertheless, is multicultural and mostly Mainland
Asian. MH
I
want to comment on this film
