The Banner Is Raised: Robert A. Nakamura’s Groundbreaking Activist Cinema

The credits do acknowledge the participation of three Hollywood-adjacent performers who lend their voices to the three issei. The Academy Award–nominated Mako was a mainstay of the bourgeoning Asian American entertainment scene in Los Angeles, having cofounded the East West Players theater company. Mako’s wife, actor Shizuko Hoshi, and screen and stage performer Yukio Shimoda fill out the cast of voices. Since they are heard but not seen, the appearance of their names at the end gives the film the gravitas of a major collective effort, indicating that Japanese Americans from all parts of the Southland, including Hollywood, helped realize this landmark self-history.

Different stakes emerge in Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), which Nakamura codirected with UCLA classmate and Visual Communications cofounder Duane Kubo. Commonly considered the first Asian American feature film, Hito Hata held dual aspirations: to again tell the history of Japanese Americans while also dignifying and elevating it in a commercially viable format. Mako, Hoshi, and Shimoda appear, as does Pat Morita, nationally famous as Arnold in the television show Happy Days, who joined this community project because Hollywood wasn’t offering him serious roles. Moving from documentary to fiction, Nakamura and Kubo take the basic scenarios and immigrant trajectories mapped out in Wataridori and flesh out a dramatic costume epic that moves across decades and generations.

The stars bring a Hollywood air to the film, but the production was classically independent. Visual Communication board members took on bit roles. Everyday residents of Little Tokyo populated scenes as extras. Scenes that show professional and nonprofessional actors conversing have a tension that is perfectly Los Angeles: the dramatic theatrical style of Hollywood clashes with an otherwise unassuming neighborhood of aunts and uncles. The film aspires to be both a general-interest history lesson like Roots and a neorealist film like Killer of Sheep, the debut feature of Nakamura’s UCLA classmate Charles Burnett. The tension is awkward, sincere, and inspired. Films that are cinematic “firsts” tend to either choose a tentative approach or take monumental swings, knowing that a first chance may be their last. Hito Hata is squarely in the latter camp.

In some ways, it was indeed the last work of its kind by its filmmakers. Hito Hata famously sent Visual Communications into financial ruin, and it would be decades before the organization would help produce another narrative feature. Nakamura went back to making occasional short documentaries, including the extraordinary Something Strong Within (1995), compiled from home movies shot by Japanese Americans within the camps. It was during these years that Nakamura became the “godfather”—perhaps more a symbol and a figurehead than an auteur. His filmography was rarely seen outside of Asian American studies classrooms or institutions like the Japanese American National Museum, where Nakamura served as the head of the Media Arts Center. Meanwhile, Nakamura himself downplayed the artistry of his filmmaking practice. He described art as “being a very Eurocentric part of a system of elitism” and vowed instead to highlight the films’ community functions.

As his films went relatively unseen, they were remembered by a generation of critics, fairly or unfairly, as a foil to the New York school of Asian American filmmaking, led by dynamos like Christine Choy, who also passed away in 2025. If the early Visual Communications films were full of gaman—a Zen Buddhist word for persevering through unbearable circumstances with utmost dignity—the New York filmmakers associated with the collectives Third World Newsreel and Asian CineVision didn’t think twice about spitting in the eye of the oppressor. If the first four minutes of Wataridori begin with serene shots of nature, the patter of rain, and an issei elder fishing, the first four of Choy’s historical reclamation project From Spikes to Spindles, released the same year, throw the audience in the middle of activist demonstrations in support of Peter Yew, a Chinese American beaten by white cops in 1975. The political bite of the New York films was seductive. But revisiting Nakamura’s documentaries is a reminder that early Asian American filmmaking could employ both grit and grace in the pursuit of social justice and third-world liberation.

Where Nakamura’s “godfather” title is most apt is in regard to his role as teacher. His own filmmaking identity emerged out of calls for culturally relevant pedagogy in the late 1960s and ’70s. The multiracial coalition at UCLA’s film school known as Ethno-Communications was founded through affirmative-action initiatives at the university. Early Visual Communications productions, including Wataridori, were funded by the U.S. Office of Education under the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972, which aimed to combat school segregation and support minority students. Influenced by this extraordinary moment of transformation in education, Nakamura’s teaching philosophy necessarily twinned the teaching of film production with the teaching of ethnic studies. As an instructor at UCLA’s film school after graduating, Nakamura was a mentor to members of the famed LA Rebellion, including Zeinabu irene Davis, Carroll Parrott Blue, and Julie Dash, the latter of whom thanks him in the credits of her acclaimed thesis Illusions (1982).

In 1996, Nakamura established the Center for EthnoCommunications in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, where he taught a generation of Asian American talent including future comedian Ali Wong and his son Tadashi Nakamura, who recently paid tribute to his father in the feature documentary Third Act (2025). Calling back to Wataridori, Tadashi’s film is also a portrait of three generations of Japanese American men and how they have been shaped by (while also shaping) an America that can be hostile and estranging. While Tadashi is credited as director, Robert may have been, as he was in the ’70s, an uncredited collaborator, seen on-screen directing his own son, while infusing the film with charm and feeling. Third Act is unflinching in its condemnation of American racism, and soulful to its core, a work befitting the godfather’s grit and grace. As recent Asian American filmmakers like Celine Song and Destin Daniel Cretton achieve mainstream success unfathomable in the days of Hito Hata, the Nakamura family continues to foster a community and pedagogical practice that has both paved the way for commercial representation and remained a stalwart alternative to it.