Independent Filmmaker

This play was inspired by the original transcripts of this 1948 hearing

From the Inland Sea is about my grandfather Otokichi Murakami's dream to be a boatbuilder, a dream that began

as a young boy when he apprenticed on a small island in the Inland Sea of Japan (the Seto Naikai). Like many Japanese at the time, he came to Canada in 1903 to build his dream in Steveston, B.C.

The play premieres in my grandfather's original boathouse that he built in 1929 and he was forced to leave behind in 1942, and eventually loose during the mass evacuation of Japanese Canadians during WWII,

After the war he fights for his dream in a few simple things like nails, some bolts, and a can of putty at the Bird Commission Hearings of 1948.

Today, his boathouse (called the Murakami Boatworks) is part of the National Historic Site Britannia Heritage Shipyards in Richmond, B.C. Canada.

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