I met Elizabeth just after I’d finished working for two months in succession with Hanako Minatoya. Through April and May, during the making of our films, we saw one another every day. Since we were both still living in Little Tokyo at that time, and since Mr. Moran’s fifty-acre filming complex was in Pacific Palisades, Moran would send a car to pick us up and bring us to the ocean. The driver took Sunset Boulevard, which was then just a dirt road that wound through canyons and hills, passing citrus groves so lush that one could reach out the window and pluck oranges right off the trees. Los Angeles was beautiful on those early spring mornings. The sun rose slowly from behind the mountains and cast an ethereal light across the city; the air was filled with the scent of flowers and the morning songs of birds. There was a stillness then, a perfection, that existed at no other time of the day, and I felt fortunate to be able to share it with such agreeable company. The trip to the Palisades took an hour and a half, and during the drive, Hanako and I would talk of anything that came to our minds—the theater, the growing numbers of Japanese in California, the people, sights, and foods we missed from home. We would speak in both English and Japanese, the two languages woven together, between them making possible a world of topics and descriptions that neither could encompass alone.
It was on one of these drives that Miss Minatoya described to me the unusual circumstances of her upbringing. She had come to the U.S. with her parents at the age of fourteen to take a driving tour of California. But while Hanako was at the home of family friends in San Francisco, her parents, the Kuriyamas, were killed in an automobile accident. Since she had little remaining family left in Japan—both sets of her grandparents were dead, and her older sister had a family of her own—she decided to accept her hosts’ invitations to stay with them in San Francisco. She assumed their name and entered an American high school, but when Japanese students were barred from attending public schools, she decided to follow her dream and join a theater troupe. With that company—and much against the Minatoyas’ wishes—she traveled around the country, which is how I came to see her perform in Madison. Within a year, she was the head of the company, and two years after that, she and several other members were signed by William Moran.
“And what about you, Nakayama-san?” she asked when she had finished. “Is your family still back in Japan?”
“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t seen them in several years. In some ways it seems like I just left Nagano; in others it feels like I’ve been away forever.”
Hanako nodded. “They must have been sorry to see their eldest son go.”
“I am not the eldest, despite my name. In fact, I am the second son. But on the day of my birth, I struggled to escape my mother’s arms, and my father said he knew I would always choose my own path. He gave me the -ichiro designation to prepare me.”
She smiled. “He sounds like a wise man, your father.”
“Yes, I suppose he was.”
Once we arrived at Moran’s filming complex, it was as if we had entered not one but several different worlds. Because the landscape was so varied, any number of films could be shot at once. In the valleys, you might see dozens of horses and men recreating a Western shootout. In the hills, the small figures of a group of fictional prospectors, panning the rivers for gold. Down below, a shipwrecked crew on the beach, building a fire in the sand. And in the fiats, a replica of a Japanese village, with a red Shinto shrine, rickshaws, pagoda-roofed building façades, even fichus trees with glued-on bits of white paper that were meant to be cherry blossoms. There was constant activity at the complex, constant noise, and Moran, when he wasn’t busy directing, traveled from set to set on horse-back, surveying his various projects.
It is amusing, in retrospect, to think how primitive our efforts were in those early years. For my first two films, all of the interiors were shot on outdoor sets, with canvases draped over them to soften the sun. All copies of Jamestown Junction have long been lost, but if the film had survived, and if you could see it, you would notice that during the office scene the papers on my desk are disturbed by a mysterious breeze. And in the very next scene, you would see a shadow moving in the corner, caused by the canvas flapping in the wind. These were the conditions in which we shot at that time, and because we worked without the benefit of artificial light, there was always a rush to complete the day’s filming before the shadows grew too deep in the afternoon. In late May, when we endured an unexpected heat wave, Moran had giant ice blocks delivered to the sets, and powerful fans placed behind them to blow the cool air in the direction of the players. If it rained, filming would halt altogether, and we
