Popular Culture Review
20
film to justify the presence of non-white troops, as did the documentary titled The
Negro Soldier (Garrett, personal correspondence).
Another documentary, Our Job in Japan, did mention the distinguished
war record of the Nisei soldiers in Europe (Garrett). However, the mass media
during that time only helped to cultivate the anti-“Jap” attitude toward Japanese
Americans: “many Americans, submerged in a flood of hate from newspapers,
cartoons, public figures, and the powerful images of photographs and films, could
not look beyond appearances” (Garrett 75).
Genesis of Go for Broke!
By 1951, Hollywood already had begun to focus on the Cold War and the
threat of communism and moved away from making anti-Japanese films. The head
of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Dore Schary (the producer of Go for
Broke!) showed interest in “developing a story with a Japanese-American
protagonist” (Pirosh). Writer Robert Pirosh found the idea intriguing, and tried to
create a story about a “Nisei character, perhaps a university student, a beautiful
girl entirely surrounded by Caucasians who would, of course, be portrayed by
dependable contract players” (Pirosh 3).
But instead he found “the story of her brothers and her sweetheart and her
parents and three hundred thousand other Japanese Americans here and in Hawaii
back in 1943 when the ugly flame of race prejudice was being fanned by war
hysteria” (Pirosh 3). It was this story that became central to Pirosh’s directorial
debut.
Go for Broke!: A Summary
"'The proposal o f the War Department to organize a combat
team consisting o f loyal American citizens o f Japanese descent
has my fu ll approval. The principle on which this country was
founded and by which it has alway s been governed is that
Americanism is a matter o f the mind and heart: Americanism
is not, and never was, a matter o f race or ancestry. "
—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
(Quotation appears during the opening sequence of Go fo r
Broke!)
Go fo r Broke! closely resembles a military training film. It opens in 1943
at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where mainland Japanese Americans called “kotonks”
(the sound of someone’s head being knocked) and Hawaiian-Japanese Americans
or “kanakas” are stationed. Although the two groups shared the same ethnic
background, they held animosity toward each other, as Crost describes: