Filmmaker/Director Kayo Hatta
March 18, 1958 - July 20, 2005

PICTURE BRIDE director Kayo Hatta died Wednesday, July 20, in Encinitas, California. The essay below was written shortly after completing production.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

In filmmaking, there is sometimes a magical moment when you forget you are making a movie. All the years of endless grantwriting, fundraising, research, screenwriting, the frantic weeks of pre-production and finally, the daily battles of production, are momentarily forgotten. For many of us who worked on PICTURE BRIDE, this happened on the first day we shot our canefield scenes in Waialua on O'ahu's North Shore.

A hush fell over the set as one by one, the extras began arriving in costume over the crest of the hill, some holding the hands of small children, also dressed in period clothing. It was as if we were watching an old sepia-toned black and white photograph coming to life in vivid colors: the deep blue indigo of the women's work clothing, the pearly white of clouds against blue skies, the lush green of endless acres of canefields, undulating in the morning breeze as they have for over a hundred years.

Then, actress Tamlyn Tomita arrived and began warming up her voice, soulfully singing a "hole hole bushi" work song: "Today's hoe hana work doesn't seem so bad/Because last night I received a letter from home." The other women answered with a rousing chorus of "yoishare, yoishare." As they continued singing, I felt a surge of renewed energy, reminded of why we struggled for five long years to tell this story.

The vision for PICTURE BRIDE began with voices - women singing hole hole bushi. I still remember the first time I heard them. In 1986 I contacted Harry Urata, a music teacher and ethnomusicologist in Nu'uanu, Honolulu and he sent me an audiocassette of songs sung by retired plantation workers whom he had recorded in the 1960s. These earthy, sometimes bitter or angry, sometimes tender, sentimental, or raucously humorous songs were a revelation - we had our own blues, the Japanese Hawaiian blues - similar to the call-and-response slave songs of the cotton plantations in the old South.

The songs connected me in a visceral way to the souls of the plantation workers, shattering for me stereotypes of issei (first-generation) women - that our grandmothers had gone through untold hardship, but endured it all with enryo (quiet reserve) and gaman (perseverance). This was perhaps true, but more often it was an over-reverential, rarefied image that bypassed the flesh and blood of who these women were, and only mythologized them. For me, the hole hole bushi songs made these women very real.. These plain-spoken, earthy lyrics expressed their feelings about work, their hatred of the luna, their home life, complaints about their husband's gambling, and everyday topics such as burning the rice or how the baby cried all night. But the simplicity of these songs is deceptive.

In researching and writing the PICTURE BRIDE story, we found that it was precisely the small, seemingly mundane details of daily life - giving birth, raising children, the hardship of daily work - that revealed the lives of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers most intimately. Through these details we come to understand and appreciate who they really were - and ultimately, who we are today. This is what we hoped to accomplish in telling their stories. Indeed, some of most gratifying responses to the film are from the many people who have told us that the film inspired them to find out more about their own family history, and to interview surviving grandparents before it was too late.

Although the personalities of the main characters in PICTURE BRIDE are largely inspired by my grandmothers, the picture bride experience was not actually an immediate part of my own family history. My grandmothers, both wives of Buddhist ministers, were already married when they immigrated to Hawai'i. Thus, one of the most vital collaborations during the research and writing stage was with local historian and writer Barbara Kawakami. Barbara, who had been doing years of research for her book on Japanese immigrant clothing in Hawai'i, facilitated my own efforts to do the primary research of interviewing actual picture brides. She helped me locate the few surviving brides and often accompanied me on interviews. The oral history process is a long and arduous one, requiring time and patience to develop rapport with one's subjects. But Barbara had already gained the trust of her interviewees, and they felt comfortable in speaking openly and intimately with me about their experiences.

However, the work we set out to create was not a documentary or docu-drama, but a dramatic film - a film that we hoped would reach broad audiences, and especially younger generations. Narrative film at its best has the power to transport the audience into another place and time, so that you forget you are watching a movie. The challenge for us as filmmakers was to make a film that was both historically accurate and narratively compelling. It took many drafts of the scripts to strike the right balance.

Perhaps the turning point came in 1991, late one afternoon in the middle of the Waialua canefields. In PICTURE BRIDE, the characters' lives are intrinsically connected to the land and the landscape was becoming more and more of a character in our screenwriting. Wanting to immerse myself as much as possible in that environment, I would often drive out to Waialua from Honolulu. There I had a favorite place to think and write: a tiny, neglected graveyard in the middle of the canefields where Japanese and Portuguese cane workers had been buried. On this afternoon, I had brought along the cassette tape of the hole hole bushi songs. As the sun set, the evening winds picked up and blew through the silhouetted canefields, and I got "chicken skin" hearing the ghostly whispering sound accompanying the old songs. This was how the supernatural aspects of the film found its way organically into the narrative.

In combining history and fiction we felt that as long as we stayed true the essential spirit of the stories, we could strike the right balance. PICTURE BRIDE is historically based, but ultimately, it is an artistic interpretation of history. Hopefully, we have succeeded in creating a film that stirs the imagination and leaves some questions unanswered, encouraging viewers to find out more on their own.

When we finally premiered the film in Hawai'i in 1995, we felt great joy and relief at having arrived at the end of a long and difficult journey. But we also experienced unexpected feelings of sadness and loss. Much of what we had tried to capture in the film was gone: many of the picture brides who had been interviewed had passed on; Waialua Sugar Company, where we shot principal photography, had announced its last harvest; Hamakua Sugar Company, where we re-shot the cane-burning scene, had already been closed for over a year; the old cane worker's house in Kawaialoa Camp that had served as the film's production office and the house that was Riyo and Matsuji's shack in the film, had been razed.

The day after the Hawai'i premiere, my producers Diane Mark and Lisa Onodera and I revisited Kawaialoa Camp. Walking around the closed plantation, it was difficult to figure out where our production buildings had once stood. We realized that the site might one day be a golf course, and that the only canefields that future generations would see might be in films like PICTURE BRIDE. As the evening winds picked up and blew through the cane, we silently gave thanks to all the people who had helped us preserve a precious part of Hawai'i's past.

-Kayo Hatta