Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (film)

Landmark feature film produced by Visual Communications (VC), a Los Angeles based non-profit in 1980. Centering on the life story of an Issei man, Hito Hata was likely the first dramatic feature film about Asian Americans by Asian Americans since the silent film era.

The origins of the film stemmed from a $300,000 grant awarded to VC by the U.S. Department of Education in October 1978 to produce ""television programming for the national audiences about the Asian American experience in the United States." ^[1] The VC staff collectively decided on the concept for the film and scripted it. Wanting to address both contemporary and historical issues, they decided on a storyline about an elderly Issei bachelor, Oda (played by academy award winning actor Mako ), who, along with various Issei friends, was threatened with eviction from his Little Tokyo residential hotel due to the redevelopment of the area, an issue that was then current in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. As Oda goes about his daily life, various events trigger flashbacks to his days a migrant worker on railroads and farms in the 1910s and 1920s including the death of friend who is hit by a train; a Nisei Week celebration in 1935 at which he meets his best friend, Tatsumi (Hiroshi Kashiwagi); and the forced removal of Japanese Americans from Little Tokyo in 1942. Anticipating the closing of the hotel, Tatsumi moves out to a less safe area, where is killed by robbers. Oda is plunged into depression and suffers a stroke that lands him in a convalescent home, losing hope for the future. But he eventually returns to Little Tokyo to join with younger activists to fight the evictions brought about by redevelopment.

Robert A. Nakamura and Duane Kubo directed the film. Scripting and production planning began in the late summer of 1979 and production began in early 1980. Despite the grant, budget concerns proved to be an issue throughout the making of the movie and its aftermath, with the film eventually going $100,000 over budget, and necessitating a temporary halt in production in May. With the cooperation of the Little Tokyo community, the large scale recreation of the 1935 Nisei Week was filmed with 300 extras from various community organizations. The railroad scenes were shot in Laws, California, using trains from the Laws Railroad Museum. Working around the clock, the filmmakers completed the film in time for its premiere at the Los Angeles Music Center on October 26, 1980. VC toured the film around the country in subsequent months in a series of fundraisers to recoup the debt incurred in its making, a strategy that had the side benefit of building a national Asian American media network. ^[2]

In January 1981, the national Public Broadcasting Service rejected the film for a nationwide airing citing its length and slow pacing. Despite a letter writing campaign, Hito Hata was never shown nationally, though it aired on many local PBS stations and received a national broadcast on NHK in Japan. In 2022, a digitally restored version of he film premiered at the Japanese American National Museum . ^[3]

Might also like Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1974); Issei: The First Generation (1984); The Wash (1988)