One Fighting Irishman is a 30-minute film that tells the story of San Francisco civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins’s passionate and uncompromising defense of the Constitution that drove him to spend 23 years successfully representing more than 5,000 Japanese Americans who renounced their American citizenship while imprisoned at the embattled Tule Lake Segregation Center, considered the worst of America’s ten WWII concentration camps. As one of only a handful of attorneys who fought on behalf of the rights of Americans of Japanese ancestry while working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Collins also battled the national ACLU and the national Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in representing Fred Korematsu, one of only a handful of people who refused to report for mass detention. After the war, he also represented Iva Toguri, falsely accused of broadcasting as “Tokyo Rose.”
Biography:
Sharon Yamato is a journalist, nonfiction writer, TV producer, and independent filmmaker with more than four decades of experience in media writing and production. She began her career working as an associate producer and producer in the public affairs department at KNBC-TV. She then joined Westinghouse Broadcasting Company to become an associate producer for the syndicated talk shows, EveryDay and The Toni Tennille Show. She also produced segments for the KCBS talk show, Two on the Town.
She began her filmmaking career by writing, directing, and producing Out of Infamy, a short film about celebrated writer/activist Michi Nishiura Weglyn, whose book Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, has become a staple in high school and college classrooms. She then wrote, directed and produced A Flicker in Eternity, based on the diary and letters of WWII veteran Stanley Hayami, who became the subject of the innovative 2020 virtual reality project, A Life in Pieces, for which she served as creative consultant. Her film, Moving Walls, the story of what happened to the scores of barracks found at the site of the former concentration camp at Heart Mountain, was accompanied by the book, Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps, featuring photos by the award-winning photographer, Stan Honda.
