Alumnus showcases film ‘Nisei’

San Jose State alumnus Darren Haruo Rae, debuted his film, “Nisei,” based off of his grandfather’s diaries as a Japanese American World War II veteran, at the Hammer Theater Center on Saturday.

Rae said the word “nisei” refers to second-generation Japanese Americans.

“That means your parents immigrated to America and you were born here,” Rae said. “My grandfather was nisei.”

Rae’s grandfather, Minoru Miyasaki, volunteered to serve in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team while his family was displaced in incarceration camps along the West Coast.

The U.S. Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which included the 100th infantry battalion, was a unit mostly comprised of Japanese Americans that served during World War II. The unit is widely regarded as the most decorated regiment in U.S. military history, according to a Sept. 24, 2020 article by The National World War II Museum. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which forcibly detained an estimated 120,000 Japanese American families along the West Coast, sending them to internment camps, according to The National Archives and Records Administration. 

“They called them internment camps, but they really were prisons,” Rae said. “You were ripped from your homes, locked up and weren’t allowed to leave and stripped of all your belongings and possessions.”

The short film takes place during World War II in 1944, a couple years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Rae said his great-grandfather was an immigrant and was not allowed to own property. 

“He was a sharecropper – he was a farmer and grew strawberries,” Rae said. “But he wasn’t allowed to own the land he grew the crops on.”

He said when his great-grandfather was incarcerated, he was promised by the landowners that his crops and belongings would be cared for.

“Of course, when they came back, everything was gone,” Rae said. 

Costume and weapons wrangler Francis Hamada provided all of the U.S. military uniforms and combat gear for “Nisei.”

“Imagine building your wealth and business, have it all taken away from you, thrown into a camp and then dumped back onto the street with a suitcase, building your institutional wealth from scratch when you’ve already done it once,” Hamada said.

Rae said his great grandfather first immigrated to Hawaii, where he worked on pineapple and sugarcane plantations before migrating to the mainland.

In response to the Pearl Harbor attacks on Dec. 7, 1941, Rae said Japanese Americans in Hawaii were eager to fight for their country, but were denied by the Department of War until the formation of the 100th Infantry Battalion in 1942.

Even after having their citizenship and belongings revoked, Hamada said many Japanese Americans volunteered to fight to prove their loyalty for their home country.

“That’s kind of how my grandfather volunteered,” Rae said. “They sent a couple members from the 100th to recruit for a new regiment.”

Rae said after the 100th Infantry Battalion was sent to Europe, its success led to the government’s approval of detained Japanese Americans volunteering to fight.

“Ever since I was a little kid, anytime I had to do a book report or anything for school where I could pick the topic, I would do it on this,” Rae said. “It really made me realize how much it’s not talked about.”

He said his grandfather wouldn’t share war stories with his daughter, Rae’s mother, who would eventually hear stories of her father through her son.

“A lot of these stories my mother didn’t even know,” Rae said. “It was a cool emotional journey for us to relive his stories.”

Rae said his generation is one of the last to have a direct connection to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and fought in World War II.

“It’s so hard for people to get invested into subjects when you don’t have a direct connection like that,” Rae said. “No one talked about the 442nd – I think in 6th grade, there was one little paragraph that mentioned it.”

He said it’s important to remind people that the U.S. wasn’t the shining beacon of light during the war that some people like to think it was.

“The story has a lot of true elements to it, but it’s more of a representation of the whole community and what they went through during the war,” Rae said. “It’s using my family’s name as a way to represent that.”

One scene from the film depicts Rae’s grandfather, Minoru Miyasaki, who, after signing up to fight, confronts his dad, causing the two of them to clash.

“You have this hierarchy of disappointing family and doing what you think is right,” Rae said. “Take out the gunshots, take out the death – it’s the family dynamic of it that’s really heartbreaking.”

Radio-television-film senior, Yolanda Ha, worked alongside other students on the production of “Nisei” during summer last year.

“We all started off as production assistants, and if we had a specific department we were more interested in, we would let Darren know of our interest,” Ha said. “We showed up everyday and put in the work to show that we were serious.”

Ha said she and her team worked to support both the lighting and camera department while on set.

“When I did the summer program, we had outside professionals come and talk to students,” Rae said. “I had to remind myself and made a point to give these students as much understanding of what goes into filmmaking.”

He said one important takeaway for students was to understand that directing and producing a film is a team sport that involves the passion of everyone involved.

“When the project finished, all of a sudden all of these student shorts started popping up,” Rae said. “Students that didn’t know anything at all before the shoot were leading teams to make projects – if I wanted to get anything out of [“Nisei”], it was that.”