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SY: Is that the first Manzanar pilgrimage in '69?

RN: Yeah, yeah.

SY: And that was something that Gidra was just involved with.

RN: I just, I shot it and they printed it.

SY: 'Cause that was organized really by, was it the Manzanar Committee then?

RN: No, it was pretty much Warren Furutani and Victor Shibata, they kind of organized it.

SY: So they organized it and you shot it, so that meant... and I know this is the subject of another film that your son did, right? The first Manzanar pilgrimage?

RN: Yeah, right.

SY: So that was something, I'm curious if you could sort of give a recap of what that was like.

RN: Well, we had talked about... I talked about the first, told him about the first Manzanar pilgrimage, and when he was a little kid we went to all the, we used to go quite often to the annual pilgrimages. And so Tad's kind of grown up with, knowing the kind of early movement people and hear all these stories. And then later, when he made his first film, Yellow Brotherhood, and that was kind of about the continuation of the Yellow Brotherhood from the movement to the basketball leagues. And then he wanted to do a film on the pilgrimage, but different as he wanted to show a Sansei's view, third generation's view of the movement and the pilgrimage.

SY: But I guess I'm asking what was it like for you going on that original Manzanar pilgrimage.

RN: Oh. No, it was great. Tad was not interested in film at all, up until when he got into UCLA, undergraduate at UCLA. I mean, he didn't hate it, but he never showed any interest in it. Then he took my class, and I'm quoting him, he said, "to get an easy A." And so he made, he started Yellow Brotherhood, the film, in my communications class.

SY: But I guess I'm thinking also, when you made that first trip back to Manzanar, had you already started thinking about or re-thinking this whole camp experience or was it a slow process?

RN: See, I'd gone on the pilgrimage -- I have to backtrack a little bit. Because I went on the pilgrimage, and that was very emotional 'cause I hadn't gone back there at all.

SY: So that was a conscious decision that was made when you heard about it?

RN: Oh, yeah, I heard about it and I knew I had to go. Because I kind of, like everyone else, kind of blocked it out. Although the movement was beginning to kind of redefine the camp experience from a Nisei's point of view. So, yeah, and remember, there was no other pilgrimages or anything, it was like really out there with sagebrush and all of that. So it was kind of, quote, "untouched." And so wandering around, I was able to recall, "I used to play here, we used to do that there." So very, very emotional. I kind of repressed, like a lot of the Nisei, the whole experience was repressed, and just came out all at once at the pilgrimage. That's why I... it was kind of like going to the Eames, working at Eames, that was kind of a life-changing experience there, going back to Manzanar.

And then after that, this was '69. So the Asian American Studies Center was formed, I think, early '69 or '68. And they, along with the other Ethnic Studies Centers, put together a program to kind of integrate the UCLA film school. And so it was a program called EthnoCommunications, and so the four Ethnic Studies Centers recruited people who wanted to come in and do kind of community-based filmmaking. So there was about sixty of us that came in, black, Chicano, African American, Asian American. So I was recruited by Alan Nishio, who was acting director of the center, of the newly formed center, and so he kind of recruited a lot of us to join the program. So we came in, some of us came in as undergraduates, I came in as a graduate student to the film department under this program, EthnoCommunications, it was a great program. We took some of the regular classes but we had our own special classes and they're all in there with the purpose of doing films about our communities or making change through film. So that's where Eddie Wong and myself and Duane Kubo, and actually Steve Tatsukawa, there's a lot of us that went through that program. Mike Murase was I think there for a while. And, but Eddie and myself and Duane decided we want to continue on after film school, so we decided to form VC, Visual Communications. Well, actually while we were still in film school.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.