Martha Bridegam
Martha Bridegam is a lawyer and freelance writer in San Francisco. For several years she was a part-time estate planning attorney with the law office of Laurie Shigekuni & Associates. She first visited the Tule Lake Segregation Center site in 1993 as an intern with a legal aid office and has returned since then to research the history and context of the site. Her Web site is at marthabridegam.com.
Updated May 2015
Stories from This Author
Filming “Farewell to Manzanar” at Tule Lake: Seeing One Camp in Another ~ Part 3
May 21, 2015 • Martha Bridegam , Laurie Shigekuni
Read Part 2 >> More than a job for the extras The 1975 production used crowds of Japanese American extras, many of whom had themselves been imprisoned in Manzanar, Tule Lake, or other camps. Korty said, “In most movie situations, the extras are there for only one reason, and that’s money… This was a totally different situation because all these extras were emotionally involved in the project. And they wanted to help and they wanted to do these things. It …
Filming “Farewell to Manzanar” at Tule Lake: Seeing One Camp in Another ~ Part 2
May 20, 2015 • Martha Bridegam , Laurie Shigekuni
Read Part 1 >> Several people who worked on filming Farewell to Manzanar at the Tule Lake location spoke about it for this article, beginning in a lunch conversation in 2012 with Korty, as the film’s director, and Lope Yap, Jr., who served as unit manager and location manager. Korty, who is based in Marin County, was then working on a documentary, Peaches by Masumoto, about organic peach farmer and author David Mas Masumoto, a member of the National Council …
Filming “Farewell to Manzanar” at Tule Lake: Seeing One Camp in Another ~ Part 1
May 19, 2015 • Martha Bridegam , Laurie Shigekuni
In the summer of 1975, a film production about Manzanar woke some memories at Tule Lake. The 1973 book Farewell to Manzanar is set in a very particular place. Derived from the experience of coauthor Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, it describes one family’s incarceration during World War II at the Manzanar detention site in eastern California. The Wakatsuki family were among about 120,000 Japanese Americans who, in 1942, were deported from their West Coast homes, forced to sell or give up …
