Videos

A Life in Pieces: The Diary and Letters of Stanley Hayami debuted June 9 at the Tribeca Festival 2021 and brings to life the diary and letters of a Los Angeles teenager whose Japanese American family was imprisoned by the U.S government during World War II.

The exhibition at JANM features three versions of this video:

• a 360-degree, interactive video that was created from the virtual reality (VR) film and can be viewed on a smartphone or mobile device (above)
• a non-interactive version that can be viewed in the Terasaki Orientation Theater on the Museum’s first floor. 
• the original Virtual Reality (VR) version that can be viewed with VR goggles. Time slots are limited, reservations recommended. (See below)

All videos were created by Nonny de la Peña of Emblematic Group, a producer of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality; and Sharon Yamato in collaboration with JANM. (See cast and credits below)

Cast & Credits

PROJECT CREATOR
Nonny de la Peña, PhD

PRODUCER
Dan Brower

LEAD ENGINEER
Chaitanya Shah

ART DIRECTOR
Charlie Park

KEY COLLABORATOR
Sharon Yamato

QUILL ANIMATOR
Haley Tomaszewski

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Jonathan Yomayuza

CAST
Kurt Kanazawa, Nobuaki Shimamoto, Sachiyo K, Kristen Hayashi, Kawai Akiona, Jesse McBride

Nonny de la Peña, the “Godmother of virtual reality” and head of Emblematic Group, uses cutting-edge technologies to tell stories—both fictional and news-based—that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. She pioneered walk-around virtual reality, now known as the field of immersive journalism, with the first ever VR documentary, Hunger in Los Angeles, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Moreover, Use of Force, her immersive documentary experience that puts the viewer on scene when migrant Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was killed by border patrol on the U.S./Mexico border in 2010, was the first ever virtual reality piece showcased at a Tribeca Film Festival in 2014. 

Sharon Yamato is a writer/filmmaker who wrote, produced, and directed Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn; A Flicker in Eternity, based on the diary and letters of WWII veteran Stanley Hayami; and Moving Walls, a story about what happened to the barracks at the Heart Mountain concentration camp. She is the author of the accompanying book, Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps, and co-author of Jive Bomber: A Sentimental Journey, a memoir of Bruce T. Kaji, the founding president of the Japanese American National Museum. She is currently writing and directing a documentary on civil rights activist and attorney Wayne Collins, who helped restore U.S. citizenship to more than 5,000 Japanese American renunciants during WWII. 

Kurt Kanazawa is a Los Angeles native. A Juilliard School, Columbia University, and Harvard-Westlake graduate, Kurt plays the title role of Stanley Hayami in A Life in Pieces: The Diary and Letters of Stanley Hayami. Kurt’s first acting gig was on the Italian drama series Provaci ancora Prof! (Rai 1) while living in Milan. He has also appeared on Grey’s Anatomy. Formerly, he was an award-winning opera singer featured in The New York Times and Time Magazine. Kurt is fluent in five languages (English, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish) and has also worked as a narrator or director on 50+ audiobook titles. Notably, Kurt’s grandmother, Shimeji Ryusaki Kanazawa, is known as “The Florence Nightingale of Hawaii” for her efforts during WWII.