‘BUSINESS’: POTENT DOCUMENTARY

“Unfinished Business,” reviewed in The Times on Jan. 26, 1985, by Kevin Thomas, has been nominated for a documentary feature Oscar and will be screened today and Sunday only at 11 a.m. at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills. Excerpts of his review follow:

Steven Okazaki’s “Unfinished Business” is the most powerful and comprehensive documentary yet on the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II. . . . Through the lives of three men who resisted internment to test its legality, Okazaki evokes the plight of all those sent to the camps, euphemistically called “relocation centers.”

He does so by deftly incorporating interviews with his three principals, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui (plus many other people), with extraordinary archival footage, showing not only the rounding up of the Japanese-Americans and their bleak existence in the camps but even, in one unforgettable instance, a government spokesman gingerly defending the action in a prepared speech.

The stories of these three men are heartbreaking; their resistance to Executive Order No. 9066, which effectively stripped all American citizens of Japanese ancestry of their rights and property in the Western states, was doomed to defeat. But these survivors stave off pity through the sheer force of their dignity and character.

For 40 years these three men--and, by extension, the 110,000 Japanese-Americans and their descendants who suffered forced removal--contend that the long upholding of Order 9066 involved false, misleading evidence and the withholding of evidence.

In an understated way Okazaki clarifies all these intricacies and their larger implications for us all. He in fact convinces us that what’s at stake is not merely redress and reparations but the very meaning of U.S. citizenship.