Word: alien
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...father had to walk away from his business; he couldn’t own his store anymore because he was an alien,” Fujimoto recalls. “They were given a week’s notice to leave everything behind, and were sent off to live in horse stables for a year at a racetrack in Seattle. After that, they were imprisoned for two years at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. They weren’t even allowed to attend my graduation...
...those days, there was enormous discrimination against any Japanese,” recalls Fujimoto. “Alien Japanese were not allowed to own property and had very little rights. On the West Coast in particular, the discrimination was excited in great part by the ‘Yellow Peril’ propaganda put out by the Hearst newspapers,” Fujimoto says—referring to the chain of papers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Examiner, owned by Harvard dropout William Randolph Hearst...
...Here I was, a college graduate from Harvard University, and not a single company or place would offer me a job,” says Fujimoto. “Not only that, but my draft board had the audacity to classify me as an ‘enemy alien.’ When I applied to graduate school at [University of] Illinois, they turned me down on the basis that there was an Army air base right next to the campus. I saved that letter. I saved everything...
...unconventional and far from stereotypical Hollywood, is impeccable, as is the decision to have the characters speaking a Mayan dialect (no worries, this, like “The Passion of the Christ,” has English subtitles). In English, the movie would be ludicrous, but in Mayan the alien words contribute to the recreation of this long gone world...
...course, Crichton's ambition is never merely to scare us. The Crichtonian view of humanity is that we're all a bunch of overeager meddlers, so high on greed and curiosity that we can't resist trifling with complex systems (you know--DNA, nanotechnology, alien spheres, Japan) in the name of progress, which then turn around and bite us, often literally. This view is not necessarily incorrect, and Crichton has expressed it in some first-rate, even prescient, works of genre fiction, notably Congo and Jurassic Park. (Crichton is in real life famously tall--he's usually reported...