You may know Steven Okazaki as an Academy Award-winning documentarian who's made very serious films about Japanese atomic bomb survivors (White Light/Black Rain, The Mushroom Club) or the Japanese American internment camps during WWII (Unfinished Business, Days of Waiting). But in the late 1970s, he was also part of a San Francisco punk-rock music group called The Maids, and in 1987, he made a wacky romantic comedy called Living On Tokyo Time. It's about a Japanese woman who comes to America and wants to stay, so her friend introduces her to a Japanese American musician she can marry just so she can get a green card. Then they sort of start to like each other.

Musician Goh Nakamura, our guest from last episode, is back to talk about how this is probably the first Asian American film he ever saw, and thanks to filmmaker David Chien for lending Brian and Ada the VHS, because it's not available to watch in any other format -- yet!

Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. Season 2 explores Asian American romance in film.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!