After the outbreak of World War II, Robert Nakamura and his family, like 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, were forcibly removed from their home and placed in a remote internment camp.
It was 1942, the year Mr. Nakamura turned 6. He would later recall that on the roughly 250-mile trip north to the camp from Los Angeles in a convoy of buses, one gas station owner refused to let any of the displaced people aboard them use the bathrooms.
On Mr. Nakamura’s second day of internment, he cried after getting lost amid the camp’s identical tar paper barracks. When he brought home a poor report card from his camp school, his mother, who gave birth to another son while the family was interned, sobbed with despair for more reasons than bad grades.
Making sense of this early, indelible trauma became the leitmotif of a trailblazing career during which Mr. Nakamura became widely known as the godfather of Asian American media.
As an independent filmmaker, photographer, teacher and activist, he explored issues of justice, identity, memory and racism. He was a founder of Visual Communications, the oldest community-based organization of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists in the United States.
In 1980, Mr. Nakamura and Duane Kubo directed “Hito Hata: Raise the Banner,” set at the turn of the 20th century in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo; The New York Times called it the first full-length feature film about the Japanese American experience to be made by Asian Americans.
Mr. Nakamura died on June 11 at his home in Culver City, Calif., from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife and longtime collaborator, Karen L. Ishizuka, said. At his death, which was not widely reported at the time, he was 88.
“He was a champion for documenting and interpreting the lives of Asian Americans to counter racist stereotypes and our erasure in mass media,” Eddie Wong, a former executive director of the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco, told the Japanese American website Nichi Bei News after Mr. Nakamura’s death.
In 1971, while a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Nakamura made the landmark short film “Manzanar,” named for the camp where his family was interned in the high desert of Central California. It was one of the first documentaries to depict camp life from personal experience.
After returning to the camp in 1969, he went back again and again, in person and through documentaries like the lyrical “Wataridori: Birds of Passage” (1974), which depicted the lives of three first-generation Japanese Americans, including his father, and “Something Strong Within” (1995), a collection of home movies made by the interned that detailed what they endured in the camps, sent there under an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In “Third Act” (2025), a documentary made by his son, the filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura, Mr. Nakamura spoke about the ambivalence he felt toward Manzanar.
He and his friends in some ways had typical high-spirited boyhoods in the camp, he said, making slingshots from tree branches, playing adventure games and keeping scorpions, lizards and snakes in bottles as pets. But he was also left with scars from a shameful episode of American history, one that he said left him with a feeling of inferiority, lost pride and a sense of otherness.
“The camp experience, or just generally living in a racist society, really messes up your mind,” Mr. Nakamura said in “Third Act.” “It continues, and I don’t see any cure for it other than dealing with it through the arts.”
Robert Akira Nakamura was born on July 5, 1936, in Venice, Calif. His father, Harukichi Nakamura, was born in Japan and emigrated to the United States, where he was a gardener and ran a produce business. Mr. Nakamura’s mother, Kimiko (Nitao) Nakamura, who was born in California, helped run the business and worked in grocery stores.
Until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Mr. Nakamura considered himself an “all-American kid,” Ms. Ishizuka, his wife, said in an interview. But after the attack, his white friends quickly turned on him, flinging rocks and epithets.
“All of a sudden, he wasn’t who he thought he was,” Ms. Ishizuka said. “He realized he had the face of the enemy.”
After the war, the family returned to Los Angeles only to encounter more racism. Robert joined an all-white Boy Scout troop but was not allowed to swim with the others at a public pool.
He said in “Third Act” that he had been embarrassed that his father was a gardener and had wished that he had another, one without a Japanese face or accent. It was, he said, the “ultimate self hatred, wanting to be someone else.”
“There were times when I almost wanted to go back to the camp,” he said. “At least at the camp, you had friendly Japanese American faces around you.”
Instead, he tried to fit in. “I was trying to be whiter than white, trying to achieve more,” he said.
He played high school football and ran track, reaching the Los Angeles city finals as a sprinter. For a time, he was a copy boy in the newsroom of The Los Angeles Examiner and later worked there as a photographer. Repressing his memories of Manzanar, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 in photojournalism from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and, based in Germany, taught photography for the Army Signal Corps from 1959 to 1961.
He later opened his own studio, did commercial work and had his photos published in Life and McCall’s magazines. He was, by most standard measures, successful.
But his work began to feel meaningless to him, he said. He remained an outsider, convinced that others considered him “an exotic Oriental.” He moved briefly to Japan, but was viewed there as an American, his son said. Disheartened, Mr. Nakamura returned home. He finally began to find himself in the late 1960s by joining the social and political awakening of the Asian American Movement.
“It gave meaning to my life,” he said in “Third Act.”
Filmmaking grew, for him, into a form of resistance, and his experience at Manzanar became a source of empowerment instead of shame.
In 1970, Mr. Nakamura helped found Visual Communications, which continues to support and present the work of Asian and Pacific Islander artists. That same year, he enrolled at U.C.L.A., where he received his master of fine arts degree in 1975. He taught film and Asian American studies at the university for 33 years. In 1996, he founded U.C.L.A.’s Center for EthnoCommunications, to promote the expression of diverse ethnic experiences.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1978, and his son, Mr. Nakamura is survived by a daughter, Thai Binh Checel; a brother, Norman; and four grandchildren. A previous marriage ended in divorce.
In 1997, the Smithsonian presented a retrospective of his career, which included the documentaries “Looking Like the Enemy” (1995) and “Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray” (2002), about a photographer who secretly took photos inside Manzanar. In 2022, “Manzanar,” Mr. Nakamura’s 1971 short, was added to the National Film Registry for its historical significance.
“We needed to see ourselves reflected in this society,” Mr. Nakamura said of his career. “Up to that point, we were invisible.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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