This article was originally written about programming for the TCM Now Playing newsletter in May 2025.
Nakahama Manjiro, one of the U.S.’ first Japanese immigrants arrived in the country on May 7, 1843. On May 10, 1869, the Golden Spike was driven to create the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, a system of rail lines built largely by Chinese labor. Those two events inspired Congress first to set aside 10 days in May as Asian American Heritage Week, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, then extended to a month and renamed Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month under President George H.W. Bush in 1990.
TCM joins in the celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander achievements in May with three nights of films. The month’s second, third and fourth Wednesdays are each devoted to major salutes to Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans in the film industry.
Keiko Kishi, one of Japan’s biggest stars, is the subject of our kickoff on May 14. Kishi is still going strong as an essayist at the age of 92. TCM highlights her career with four films and Keiko Kishi, Eternally Rebellious (2023), a recent documentary on her life. She was born in Yokohama in 1932 and made her film debut in 1950’s The Angry Street, although that credit is often given to Home Sweet Home (1951), which marked the start of her contract with Shochiku Films. She became a star in What Is Your Name? (1953), the tale of lovers who meet in an air-raid shelter during World War II and are kept apart for years by various complications. In an acting career that spanned over 60 years, she worked with some of Japan’s greatest directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirô Ozu, Masaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa, with whom she made several films.
When Shochiku wanted legendary director Yasujirô Ozu to focus on younger protagonists, he cast Kishi as a secretary involved with a co-worker in Early Spring (1956), a powerful consideration of changes in post-war Japanese life. Ozu wanted to work with her in his next film, Tokyo Twilight (1957), but their schedules didn’t permit it. They never had another chance to work together. Kishi first worked with Kon Ichikawa on Brother (1960) playing a young woman who sacrifices her happiness to run her neglectful parents’ household and raise her younger brother.
As early as 1954, she joined with two other actresses, Yoshiko Kuga and Ineko Arima, to create Ninjin Club, a production company designed to give them more artistic freedom in choosing roles. Her Ninjin Club had produced Masaki Kobayashi’s epic trilogy The Human Condition (1959-1961) and then invested heavily in his film Kwaidan (1964) a collection of ghost stories in which she appears in the second chapter, “The Woman in the Snow.” This was one of the most expensive films produced up to that time in Japan. Though it was hailed by critics and nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it failed at the box office, bringing an end to Ninjin Club. The tribute ends with The Garden of Women (1954) an early film in which she plays a rebellious schoolgirl.
After starring in the international co-production Typhoon Over Nagasaki (1957), she married its director, Yves Ciampi, and moved to Paris. Though she returned to Japan to make films every year of her marriage, earning the nickname “Flying Madame,” she also met with controversy for seeming to have deserted her native land and becoming one of the first Japanese women involved in an international marriage. During her time in France, she became friends with some of the country’s most noted intellectuals and artists, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Cocteau. During that time, she also started writing and publishing collections of essays and a scandalous 2013 novel, “Warinaki Koi,” whose account of a female Japanese filmmaker’s affair with a younger man was believed to be semi-autobiographical. She last appeared in the Japanese TV movie Mango no Ki no Shita de (2019).
Wednesday, May 21, is dedicated to the first Asian to win an acting Oscar and first Asian woman to win an Oscar in any category. Miyoshi Umeki won for her U.S. film debut, playing a woman whose marriage to an American flyer is threatened by government regulations in Sayonara (1957). She was born in Otaru, Japan, on May 8, 1929, and early on developed a love of American pop music. She started out singing with a U.S. Army G.I. jazz band in her teens, growing in popularity until America called. An appearance on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” led to a one-year run on “Arthur Godfrey and Friends.” When Josh Logan was casting Sayonara, an executive recommended he look at her on the show. He was charmed by their first meeting and cast her in the demanding role. After viewing the first few day’s rushes, he was convinced she would win the Oscar for her work. The role also earned her the first of three Golden Globe nominations.
Logan then recommended Umeki to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the lead in their new musical. That led to a Tony nomination, a one-year run on Broadway and the chance to re-create her role as an illegal immigrant who comes to the U.S. for an arranged marriage to a nightclub manager (Jack Soo) in Flower Drum Song (1961), which earned another Golden Globe nomination. Umeki only appeared in seven films, two musical reviews in Japan and five U.S. features. Cry for Happy (1961) is a comic variation on Sayonara with Umeki as a geisha who falls in love with a U.S. naval photographer (Donald O’Connor). She finished her film career playing a Pacific Islander who helps Army intelligence officer Jim Hutton capture an escaped Japanese soldier in The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962) and as a bar hostess in A Girl Named Tamiko (1962).
Umeki made several TV appearances, singing on variety shows and doing guest spots. She then landed a leading role as the housekeeper, Mrs. Livingston, in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” beginning in 1969. The role brought her the final Golden Globe nomination, and she used her popularity to help other Asian American actors like Pat Morita and George Takei land guest roles in the series. When the show ended its three-year run, she retired from acting to go into business with her second husband, Randall Hood, renting editing equipment. After his death in 1976, she retired from public life. Eventually, she moved to Licking, MO, to be near her son, Michael, and his family and refused all offers to return to her performing career. When the Academy Awards celebrated its 70th anniversary in 1998 with an assemblage of past winners, she was notably absent. She died in a Missouri nursing home in 2007.
Asian American representation in Hollywood, both on-screen and behind the camera, has long lagged behind population figures. Yet the studios have hired a few prominent Asian American filmmakers like cinematographers James Wong Howe and Henry Kotani. Among the most successful was Albert Nozaki, who rose from draftsman to supervising art director for features at Paramount Pictures. TCM presents an evening of his work on May 28.
Nozaki was born in Tokyo on January 1, 1912, and moved to Los Angeles with his family two years later. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, he took a job with Paramount’s art department as a draftsman. World War II interrupted his career when he was shipped with his wife to the Manzanar internment camp. He had to sign a loyalty oath and agree to relocate to the Midwest to win his release. After the war, he returned to Paramount and was promoted to art director in 1948. The Big Clock (1948) was his first film in that capacity. His designs for the massive publishing headquarters run by unscrupulous tycoon Charles Laughton helped underline the tension in this film noir about a magazine editor (Ray Milland) assigned to solve a murder in which he and Laughton are implicated. Nozaki followed with the re-creation of King Arthur’s Court for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) — a musical version of Mark Twain’s classic, starring Bing Crosby as an American thrust back in time to the Middle Ages — and the fairy-tale New York of Sorrowful Jones (1949), a Damon Runyon adaptation starring Bob Hope as a bookie stuck with a young child when her gambler father is killed.
Nozaki did some of his most famous films in the 1950s. After working with producer George Pal on When Worlds Collide (1951), he took control of the look of Pal’s The War of the Worlds (1953), storyboarding the film and creating the designs for the Martians and their flying saucers. The film won the Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects. Nozaki won his only Oscar nomination for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), which required him to re-create the world of ancient Egypt. In 1963, he developed retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that led to blindness. Paramount moved him to a supervisory position, but his vision loss forced him to retire in 1969. He died in 2003 at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy as a trailblazer in Hollywood.
