In today's episode, Colin sits down with his brother and award-winning filmmaker and storyteller Tadashi “Tad” Nakamura—someone whose work has given voice to untold histories, specifically from an AAPI perspective, and whose lens has always been guided by both craft and conscience.

For this conversation, we’re grounding ourselves in two remarkable books: Mike dela Rocha’s Sacred Lessons: Teaching My Father to Love and Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins’ The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well. These aren’t just books to read—they’re invitations. They call us to consider how love can be a political act, how community can be a healer and teacher, and how balance—spiritual, emotional, physical—can be a form of resistance.

Today, we explore how the wisdom in these works shows up in his life—as a filmmaker who chronicles stories of cultural resilience, as an artist who builds bridges between histories, and as a father navigating what it means to pass on love and justice to the next generation.

Tadashi “Tad” Nakamura is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker and the Director of the Watase Media Arts Center, a production company of the Japanese American National Museum. Tadashi was named CNN's ”Young People Who Rock” for being the youngest filmmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Now with over 20 years of filmmaking experience, his films include NOBUKO MIYAMOTO: A SONG IN MOVEMENT (2024), MELE MURALS (2016), JAKE SHIMABUKURO: LIFE ON FOUR STRINGS (2013), A SONG FOR OURSELVES (2009), and PILGRIMAGE (2006). He is currently closing out touring his most recent film, THIRD ACT, about his pioneering filmmaker father, Robert A. Nakamura, and his discovery and battle with Parkinson's Disease. Tad’s father Robert, known to many as the “Godfather of Asian American Media,” passed away and transitioned into the ancestral realm in June of this year. Colin can attest as an audience member who attended the latest CAAM’s (Center for Asian American Media) Film Festival at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco’s Nihonmachi/Japantown, there wasn’t a dry eye in the building as we witnessed this powerful work of art and heart.  

Tad has an M.A. in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz and a B.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA. He made the DOC NYC '40 Under 40' list in 2019 and was a 2020-2022 Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellows and a 2022-2023 Sundance Asian American Fellow. He is currently a mentor for the 2024 CAAM Fellowship and recipient of the 2024 Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellowship.

The Paper Plane is a podcast created and hosted by Colin Masashi Ehara, where he interviews people he is blessed and honored to share community with, and asks them about a book(s) that have had a transformational impact on their lives. In a society where literacy rates are steadily declining and a growing number of podcasts hosted by cishet men, un/consciously champion expressions of masculinity that come at the expense of women, femmes, and LGBTQIA2S+ (especially BIPOC) folx, this space aims to operate as a counter-narrative.

The Paper Plane is a space that intends to highlight the dire importance of relationships, community, dialogue, perpetual learning, honest expression as art, art as honest expression, and freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. It speaks to planes of existence attached to the act of reading, but also as a metaphor for the “flights” we take as we sit in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a one way interface” as readers, and how these “journeys” shape us…