Sanga moyu (film)

Title Sanga Moyu
Date 1984
Genre Drama
Director Yūji Murakami
Screenplay Shinichi Ichikawa
Based On Futatsu no Sokoku
Starring Kōshirō Matsumoto; Toshiyuki Nishida; Daijirō Tsutsumi; Reiko Ōhara; Yōko Shimada; Kenji Sawada; Toshirō Mifune
Studio NHK
Runtime 51 - 45 min. episodes
Country Japan
Language Japanese
IMDB Sanga Moyu

Japanese television series that dramatized the Japanese American experience. Sanga moyu (Burning Mountains and Rivers) was a 1984 series produced by NHK, Japan's national broadcasting network. Consisting of 51 episodes that ran 45 minutes each, the series debuted on January 8, 1984, and ran through December 23, 1984. The story was based on the novel Futatsu no sokoku (Two Homelands) by Toyoko Yamasaki and focused on the Amo family of Los Angeles whose three Nisei sons chose different paths during World War II while the family was incarcerated at Manzanar : one who volunteers for the U.S. Army and fights in Europe, another who serves in the Military Intelligence Service during the war crimes trials and American occupation, and a third who is trapped in Japan at the outbreak of war and drafted into the Japanese army. Japanese American organizations in the continental United States objected to the portrayal of split Japanese American loyalties depicted in the series and prevented it from being broadcast there in the midst of the Redress Movement . It was shown on the Japanese language cable station Nippon Golden Network (NGN) in Hawai'i beginning in 1989 and reprised in 2002–03.

Authored by Brian Niiya

For More Information

Clements, Jonathan, and Motoko Tamamuro. The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama since 1953 . Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2003.

Hayashi, Brian Masaru. Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Jin, Michael. "Beyond Two Homelands: Migration and Transnationalism of Japanese Americans in the Pacific, 1930–1955." Ph.D. dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2013.

Takita, Sachiko. "The Tule Lake Pilgrimage and Japanese American Internment: Collective Memory, Solidarity, and Division in an Ethnic Community." Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2007.

Wetherall, William. " Dual Nationals Caught in a Storm over their Mt. Fuji Inheritance. " Far Eastern Economic Review , June 7, 1984, 40–42.

Last updated June 24, 2020, 4:07 p.m..