Chris Tashima won the Academy Award for best Best Live Action Short Film for Visa and Virtue in 1998.
The film chronicled the real life story of Chiune Sugihara. Sugihara wrote passports for 6,000 Jews escaping Nazi persecution despite the opposition of the Japanese government.
Yet the road through Hollywood has hardly been paved with gold for him.
He told the Nikkei Voice, he feels like he’s been in a battle zone.
“I’ve been in the trenches and fighting to get change for so many years,” he says.
That’s quite a change from when his career started. He looks back now and realizes he wanted to be white. Now he embraces his heritage as a Japanese American filmmaker.
You can read about his transformation in the Nikkei Voice.
You can watch a clip from Visa and Virtue below.