<Begin Segment 27>

SY: I was just looking at the next film, though, you did after Wataridori which was Hito Hata. And that, wasn't that more of a... I mean, did you consider that more of a mainstream film even though you were thinking of doing sort of these...

RN: Yeah. 'Cause we had done a lot of films before Hito Hata, and then there's a period, it was... I just want to make sure...

SY: I have 1980 for Hito Hata.

RN: Yeah, so I had left VC in 1975 and I went to teach photography at San Diego City College. And so then I came...

SY: And that move was purely...

RN: Financial, and my marriage was falling apart.

SY: So you actually made a geographical move.

RN: Yeah, and it was a nice opportunity for me to teach kind of basic photography and just get away. Because everyone gets burned out eventually, Eddie got burned out and Duane, we all had to leave. But I tried to pull my marriage together, which I eventually didn't. So I went to teach in San Diego. And then I met Karen there and I got divorced, then got married, etcetera.

SY: How was it that you met Karen?

RN: I had known Karen from different... I met her at different conferences. I first met her at a big JACL convention in Washington, D.C., where we were going to take over JACL. [Laughs] This whole group wanting to take over JACL. Anyway... so I first met her there, and then later I'd see her now and then, and then she lived in San Diego.

SY: We should say Karen's full name.

RN: Oh, Karen Ishizuka.

SY: And you subsequently became work partners?

RN: Yeah, she did work with me, we partnered on a lot of the films. She does all the proposal writing.

SY: So you don't have to do it anymore?

RN: So we get money, yeah. So I came -- so then both of us wanted to leave San Diego 'cause at that time it was very conservative, very few Asians there, if you can believe that. And so we -- actually, I was planning to just quit and move back to L.A. and see if I can find work or teach or something. Then just by the stroke of good fortune, we were in L.A. and we were eating at a ramen place in Sawtelle, and Lucy Chang, who was the director at that time of Asian American Studies Center, happened to be there. And she said, "Oh, would you be interested in teaching?" I had a joint appointment with Asian American Studies and film. I said, "Oh, yeah." So I got that position. I started out as an assistant professor there, and that was... I guess '79... yeah, 1979 I started teaching at UCLA. And at that time, Steve Tatsukawa was the director of VC and Duane was one of the senior members. It was pretty much run by Duane, Steve and... anyway. So they had a major grant called Nation Builders and they were, told us to do a series of half hour programs on Asian Americans, stories of different communities. I guess as a group, VC, they wanted to do, try their hand at a narrative film. And so we kind of consolidated all the money for the series into one film instead of five or six films. So that's how we began to put Hito Hata together.

SY: And was there talk of a possible audience for that? Who were you aiming...

RN: Well, that, we were... we deviated from our initial goals, and also that time, public broadcasting was, I guess it was just beginning. PBS was... I think, anyway, it wasn't like PBS now. And so we were looking toward PBS and maybe, although I didn't think we'd make it into the theaters myself, but some of us thought we might do that. But the idea was to kind of make a bigger statement, and I think some of us just wanted to work in a narrative form.

SY: And feature length, too.

RN: Yeah, feature length.

SY: So it was a fairly big undertaking?

RN: Yeah, it was a monumental task. We tried to work in a more collective manner, so the whole script was meeting after meeting after meeting. So we turned out, we wanted to do something historical, but we wanted to also link it to something in the present. So at that time there was the whole redevelopment of Little Tokyo, and they were moving a lot of the Issei bachelors out of the old hotels here and moving them off to wherever. And so there was a, quite a bit of community action against the redevelopment and moving the senior citizens out of the area. And so we all decided that that would be the contemporary story, and we'd all put it in this one character, Oda. So that's, so we had a rough idea, and meeting after meeting we got that far, and then meeting after meeting the script started, not coming together to be quite truthful. And that's when we realized something like that, a large narrative film cannot be done by committee. So we had the rough idea and some of the scenes, so essentially Duane, myself, and John Esaki that took what we had all worked on, put it into a script, final. I can't even say it's a final script.

SY: Working script.

RN: Working script. Because we had to get it into production because of our funding. So the film, so this is the first time we really -- not the first time, but we formally had like a director and all, Duane and I became co-directors and Steve became producer and we hired... anyway, our director of photography...

SY: So sort of changed directions, really, with this one big project.

RN: In terms of the process, but in terms of what we wanted to do and all of that. Well, actually process, and yeah, we were aiming for a larger audience.

SY: And looking back, how do you feel about that, that particular experience?

RN: It was probably one of the most rugged experiences I've had. Because remember, I had just started, I had a new spouse, and in 1980, Tad was born, and Karen already from her first marriage had Thai Binh, our daughter, she was four. I had just started teaching at UCLA film school, and then we started Hito Hata. Because Tad was born 1980 when we started, so we have him in the, leaving for Manzanar, the camp, moving out of Little Tokyo. Nancy Araki's holding this baby as she gets onto the bus, that's Tad. So he's like five days old.

SY: His first foray into...

RN: But it was really harrowing for me because I was doing all these things. So that I don't know how I survived that. And then that, having the responsibility of the film. So yeah, that's, I think that was, we had just moved into our house in L.A., Karen was pregnant, I just was starting at UCLA, and then we started working on Hito Hata.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.