10/12/2026
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to remind you that we have a screening of the movie Hito Hata, Raise the Banner (1980) this coming Saturday October 17 at our JACL Hall at 1pm. There will be a Q&A afterwards with co-directors Duane Kubo and John Esaki as well as Amy Kato who was the casting director and an actress in the movie.
The film was shot on location in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. It is in English with English subtitles during the Japanese conversations
https://vcmedia.org/hito-hata-raise-the-banner
A landmark project directed by Robert A. Nakamura and Duane Kubo, HITO HATA: RAISE THE BANNER (1980) is the first feature-length film made by and about Asian Pacific Americans. Capturing the contributions and hardships of Japanese Americans from the turn-of-the-20th century, the film centers on Oda (the late veteran actor/director Mako), a feisty issei (first generation Japanese American) and elderly single laborer living in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Through a series of flashbacks, the story traces Oda’s life as a laborer on the transcontinental railroad to his struggle to save the home of Little Tokyo’s residents when the community is threatened with redevelopment.
An epic Japanese American drama, HITO HATA draws on the talents and support of Asian American filmmakers, writers, theater professionals and literally hundreds of people from the Asian Pacific American community who served as extras, provided locations, props, and moral as well as financial support.
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Reckoning with Redress: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration
Thursday November 5, 2026 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm | Cultural Center at Merrill at UC Santa Cruz
As not all of you got this email, wanted to pass on this very interesting lecture coming up. The event is free and open to the public, but you do need to register.
Please use this link to register
https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/reckoning-with-redress-the-legacy-of-japanese-american-incarceration/
Forty-five years ago, survivors and descendants of the WWII Japanese American incarceration, testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), helping set in motion what would become one of the largest reparations efforts in U.S. history. This year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics lecture marks that anniversary with the launch and premiere of Reckoning with Redress (RWR) — a new cinematic digital history project, along with the lecture “A Debt Owed–Korematsu, Reparations, and the Ever-Recycling Racial Pathology of 1619,” given by Donald Tamaki. Produced by Full Spectrum Features Education, in partnership with Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder, RWR is an Open Educational Resource, which includes a film (Enough), an immersive game, and an interactive learning website, that explores the history and legacies of the Japanese American Redress Movement.
Donald Tamaki is a Senior Counsel at the San Francisco law firm of Minami Tamaki LLP having received his BA and JD from U.C. Berkeley.
In the 1980’s, Tamaki served on the pro bono legal team that reopened the 1944 Supreme Court case of Fred Korematsu, a notorious precedent that validated forcing 125,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps on the claim they were spies. But almost 40 years later, secret intelligence reports and Justice Department memos surfaced, categorically denying that Japanese Americans were spying, admitting there was no reason for the mass removal, and calling the Army’s claims “intentional falsehoods.” Despite whistle-blower protests from government lawyers urging that they had a duty not to lie to the Court, the Solicitor General stood by the Army’s claims knowing they were fabricated. The evidence was suppressed, and much of it ordered burned. On the basis that a fraud had been committed, Korematsu’s criminal conviction was erased. The ruling boosted the call for reparations to redress this great wrong.
In 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Tamaki to serve on the nine-member California Reparations Task Force (the Task Force) that produced the groundbreaking Final Report comprehensively documenting the cumulative impact of 246 years of enslavement, another 100 years of Jim Crow oppression, and decades more of segregation, and to recommend to the Legislature what California should do to address the resulting compounding and cascading harms.
Tamaki is part of the leadership team of the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth (ARRT), a multi-racial statewide coalition working to promote public awareness of the harms wrought by racial subjugation, and to transform the Task Force’s 115 recommendations into legislation.
His awards include the ABA Spirit of Excellence Award (2020), the National Asian Pacific Bar Association Trailblazer Award (2003), and the State Bar of California Loren Miller Award (1987).
Forty-five years ago, survivors and descendants of the WWII Japanese American incarceration, testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) — helping set in motion what […]
