When John Esaki was growing up during the 1950s, his father, George Teruo Esaki, ran a camera shop in their hometown of Monterey, California. Esaki’s Photo Shop stood on Alvarado Street where Portolá Plaza is today.
“My earliest memories of going to visit him at his photo shop was him in the dark room in the back. He would be developing photos in chemical trays. It was the old-style photography where you expose the light on a sheet of paper,” said Esaki.
Watching his father develop photographs in his dark room was Esaki’s introduction to a career behind the lens. When his father’s shop was demolished in the 1960s to make room for the plaza as part of the city’s urban renewal movement, all of the dark room and lighting equipment was stored in his grandmother’s basement.
“In high school I did have an interest in photography so my friends and I set up a dark room in my grandmother’s basement and we would have a little weekly—almost like a club—where we would go in and we’d take our photos and develop them in this big closet in the basement of my grandmother’s house,” said Esaki.
His grandmother’s house was a hub of activity and the place where his father’s family lived before World War II. When his grandfather passed away before the war, his father and uncle were raised by their grandmother. Meanwhile, Esaki’s mother, Michi Jean Esaki (née Oishi), grew up with her sisters on their family farm in Gardena, California, and they later met at the Gila River concentration camp in Arizona.
“I remember him advising me that in my own career I should think about sales as a professional option because he said he always made more income in his new job as a car salesman than he ever made running a photo studio or a camera shop,” said Esaki, laughing as he recalled the memory. “You don’t really process advice from your parents that deeply when you’re younger.”
But something about his parents did strike a chord with him. Neither of them graduated from college, but they encouraged Esaki to continue his education. His mother graduated from high school at the time of her family’s forced removal from their family farm. His father earned a teaching certificate and became certified to teach at Gila River.
“Maybe that kind of subconsciously influenced me into wanting to go into teaching,” he said.
After earning his BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, he was accepted into the university’s teaching credential program. He taught in Berkeley and Walnut Creek and earned his teaching credential at twenty-three. He went on to teach middle school for five years, including classes in reading, typing, health, and art.
“There was an art teacher who did photography. He had a dark room in his part of his art studio and I got assigned to pick up one of those classes. This is very challenging because you have twenty-five to thirty kids and you can only have two or three in the darkroom at a time. At that age, mischievous behavior happens all the time, so I was trying to juggle going into the dark room to give some instruction and then coming back and making sure everyone is still working on some kind of project,” he said. “One of the activities that I devised for them involved a Super 8mm movie camera I discovered in a classroom closet. I would assign people to make little animated films where they would have to take single frame shots of an object in motion, so it’s very time consuming. Hopefully it absorbed them for a while, while I could go into the dark room. These classes were very imaginative, and they whetted my interest in both photography and the moving image.”
After five years, his school district gave him a leave of absence to explore other options, including traveling or applying to graduate school. At first, he thought that he would apply for his master’s in education but instead he decided to apply to graduate programs that were more fulfilling to him on a personal level.
“On a lark I applied to the UCLA and USC film schools in addition to applying to some education departments. I did get accepted to both options. I said, ‘What the heck, I should go to film school.’”
His first film project at UCLA was with Robert Nakamura, founder of Visual Communications and the UCLA Center for EthnoCommunications and cofounder of JANM’s Media Arts Center (MAC). The first film that Nakamura showed the class was Wataridori: Birds of Passage, a documentary about his own Issei father. Nakamura’s class and film was not only a turning point for Esaki but an inspiration for him to make his own film, Oshogatsu, about his grandmother.
“Bob is a tremendous, inspirational teacher,” Esaki recalled. “He was working at the time for Visual Communications, and they were doing the film Hito Hata, which was the first Japanese American historical drama produced as a fictional feature film. He encouraged us, after we finished our Project One, to volunteer for Visual Communications (VC) because they had to shoot over spring break. I wanted to learn as much as I could so he and the VC crew were shooting up near Manzanar.”
Founded in 1970, VC supports and mentors Asian American and Pacific Islander film and media artists who challenge perspectives, empower communities, and foster connections among people and generations. Esaki was at VC for almost twenty years working on all aspects of filmmaking including sound, videography, and editing. When JANM’s Pavilion opened in 1999 he documented the huge milestone with multiple cameras and joined the Museum’s staff.
“It looked like there were going to be a lot of possibilities here for interesting work so I left VC and I came here,” he said.
At JANM he rose from media arts specialist to the director of MAC, where he made documentaries, exhibition media, and life history videos with the team in support of the Museum’s mission. He served as the vice president of programs and transitioned into development, where as senior philanthropy officer he worked with members, volunteers, and donors to raise funds and awareness for the Museum’s comprehensive campaign.
Esaki recently retired from JANM with great fanfare from the Japanese American and Little Tokyo communities. Over 200 guests—family, friends, and community members—came to celebrate his career and the contributions that he made to JANM and the Little Tokyo community. Throughout the evening, colleagues praised him as calm, gracious, and compassionate, and as an extraordinary mentor for young filmmakers. A man who could wear many hats in the worlds of community and media, he was dependable, dedicated, playful, with a deep personal belief in JANM’s mission.
JANM is also an institution and historic place that holds a special place in his heart. Back in 1946, his parents were married in the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, now known as JANM’s Historic Building. “That’s always been a special connection for me, to walk by that building every day knowing that they got together as husband and wife there,” said Esaki. “There was always some interesting aspect of Japanese American history, culture, and sports that was important to document.” As he embarks on his retirement journey, he’s also beginning a new adventure: Becoming a treasured JANM volunteer. Congratulations, John!
A rewarding career in film and media arts was just one of the ways that Esaki contributed to the Japanese American and Asian American communities in Los Angeles. His family also donated artifacts to JANM’s collection, including a scrapbook and other personal objects. Find out more about his family history on Discover Nikkei.
Featured image: John Esaki and Chief Development Officer Kelly-Ann Nakayama with their playful hats at JANM’s Natsumatsuri Family Festival. Photo by Kazz Morohashi.
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