Nishikawa, producer of Our Lost Years visits Geneseo, reflects on Anti-Asian violence over the years

Asian Americans remain a vulnerable population in America today, a cruel consistency which has persisted over the decades. Anti-Asian violence has risen since 2020 in the same way that it rose in 1941: racist Americans inflict cruelty and injustice upon Asian Americans in supposed retribution for some abstract concept that no individual is responsible for.

When director and producer Lane Nishikawa visited Geneseo virtually to answer audience questions, his raw frustration and pain was clear as he spoke about America’s continued anti-Asian attitudes.

“Asian Americans have been depicted as the enemy since the beginning,” Nishikawa said. “‘China flu,’ ‘Kung Flu;’ it just reinforces that we are still not understood. There's still ignorance out there. I wish I knew what was coming when I was making [Our Lost Years]. I wish I knew that there was going to be all of this anti-Asian violence resurfacing.”

This Q&A took place on April 21 following a virtual showing of Nishikawa’s documentary, Our Lost Years (2019) on April 19. This film describes the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese American citizens during World War II through the lens of internees, their relatives and other individuals affected by the camps. Nishikawa visited seven cities to conduct the interviews.

Nishikawa was inspired to create the documentary by the lack of educational materials on Japanese internment camps.

“I have been studying or learning about the internment since I was in college,” Nishikawa said. “I'm from Hawaii. In Hawaii, there was one internment camp, which I didn't even know about until later on. It was a small one, about 3,500 people there. But I didn't even know about the internment.”

Even as a teenager, Nishikawa had difficulties learning about the camps despite his family having been affected directly by them.

“When I was in high school, there was one sentence in our history books; it said, ‘oh, by the way, we put 120,000 Japanese into these internment camps.’ That was all it said,” Nishikawa said. “I didn't know that my California relatives had been interned. I didn't even know that. Nobody talks about it—just like all the people that we interviewed said, nobody talked about it with them until later on.”

With Our Lost Years, Nishikawa shed light on the Japanese and Japanese American community that had been silent for so long.

“Most of these people were either young or they weren't born yet,” Nishikawa said. “The ones that were young kids, I'd just ask ‘what do you remember about the time when executive order 9066 was signed?’ And they would just start going on and on and on.” 

Though pleased to have helped tell the story of the internment camps, Nishikawa regrets not having been able to accomplish even more with this documentary.

“The hard part was the story, letting it unfold,” Nishikawa said. “I wish I could have done more. I wish I could have traveled to more cities but, with the seven cities and two internment camps, I already had a limited budget.”

Students, professors and alumni were grateful to hear Nishikawa speak on his film. Nishikawa has been important to Geneseo for years due to the influence of his former student and professor of theater Randy Barbara Kaplan, who hosted both of Nishikawa’s virtual events. She also admitted to convincing Nishikawa to visit Geneseo to perform on multiple occasions.

“Lane has been my Asian American theatre teacher since 1988,” Kaplan said. “That was when we first met, and for some reason that neither he nor I have ever been able to remember or understand, he decided that he would take me under his wing and teach me everything I knew about Asian American Theatre. He is also the inspiration for GENseng—which is Geneseo’s Asian American performance ensemble, in its 22nd going into its 23rd continuous year.”

Nishikawa came to Geneseo to perform his one man show, “On a Mission from Buddha,” and later joined the Asian American Theatre Company at Geneseo for a separate performance. He also was invited to give the keynote address for Great Day in 2009.

“Lane is a poet, a director, an actor, a producer, and an activist,” Kaplan said. “He wears so many hats and he is so important to the Asian American Theatre movement.”

Geneseo is lucky to have access to such a talented and influential figure in the arts community. Keep an eye out for upcoming projects by Nishikawa—he is sure to give a voice to those previously voiceless in the Asian American community.