{"id":667753,"date":"2026-10-28T11:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T11:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/667753\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T11:30:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T11:30:17","slug":"yuriko-gamo-romer-marc-smolowitz-talk-diamond-diplomacy-tokyo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/667753\/","title":{"rendered":"Yuriko Gamo Romer & Marc Smolowitz Talk \u2018Diamond Diplomacy\u2019 \u2014 Tokyo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAfter a year on the U.S. festival circuit, with buzzy stops at Mill Valley and Hot Springs, Diamond Diplomacy<\/a>, the feature documentary from San Francisco-based filmmaker Yuriko Gamo Romer<\/a>, receives its first international screening this week at the Tokyo<\/a> Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe screening will serve as a unique homecoming for Gamo Romer and the doc. Produced between the United States and Japan, Diamond Diplomacy traces more than 150 years of shared baseball history between the two nations.<\/p>\n

\n\tUsing rare archival footage, the film explores baseball\u2019s arrival in Meiji-era Japan through Babe Ruth\u2019s 1934 tour and World War II to the modern era of Japanese stars such as Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani. Using the sport, the doc examines the history of diplomacy, racism, war, reconciliation, and cultural exchange between the two countries. The story centers on Masanori \u201cMashi\u201d Murakami, the first Japanese player in Major League Baseball, and Warren Cromartie, who starred for the Yomiuri Giants.<\/p>\n

\n\tGamo Romer previously directed and produced MRS JUDO: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful (2012), a feature documentary about Keiko Fukuda, the first woman to attain the 10th-degree black belt in judo. Her other credits include the shorts Baseball Behind Barbed Wire (2023) and My Immigrant Story (2018). Readers may also recognize her name from media reports about the Trump administration\u2019s brutal cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gamo Romer was one of the few NEH recipients who spoke publicly about how the wide-scale cuts affected her work. Diamond Diplomacy had received substantial grants from the NEH. Overall, the Trump administration canceled more than 1,400 previously approved NEH grants. The cuts were later ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. court.<\/p>\n

\n\tGamo Romer\u2019s public advocacy attracted new funders and partners. U.S.-Japanese diplomat Glenn S. Fukushima boarded the project as an executive producer after hearing Gamo Romer on NPR. He was later joined by Steven Okazaki, Jacqueline Glover, and Mari Nakachi, who helped to fill gaps in the film\u2019s funding. Strand acquired North American distribution rights in May, and the film heads to Tokyo with a freshly minted local distribution deal with Wondergenic. Producers on the doc are Gamo Romer, Marc Smolowitz<\/a>, and Loi Ameera Almeron. <\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, Gamo Romer and Smolowitz speak with Deadline in depth ahead of their Tokyo screening about how they rebuilt their production after Trump\u2019s NEH cuts and how they dug into the MLB archives to explore U.S.-Japanese history.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Tokyo Film Festival<\/a> runs until November 4. <\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Yuriko, this film began as a short?<\/p>\n

\n\tYURIKO GAMO ROMER: The initial spark was the 1949 San Francisco Seals coming to Japan during the postwar occupation. General MacArthur sent the baseball team to Japan as a goodwill gesture. That was the story I was drawn to. It turned out my friend\u2019s father had been a pitcher on the Seals and had a movie camera with him when he went to Japan. That\u2019s how the project started. I started opening history books and meeting people, and the project got longer and bigger. We did release a short focused more on the World War II Japanese American incarceration story. It came out a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

\n\tMARC SMOLOWITZ: The short, called Baseball Behind Barbed Wire, was a big festival success. It allowed Yuriko to talk about Diamond Diplomacy and gave us a way to keep communicating to funders and supporters that the feature was coming. The short helped the project pick up momentum, and the feature scaled up after that, around 2023. We got a grant that made the short possible. We were strategic about making clear that the short and feature were part of the same film enterprise, even though the short came out first.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Yuriko, talk me through the research process. Was it easy to uncover this story? I only fairly recently learned about the internment camps in California. You don\u2019t learn about that in the U.K., where I went to school.<\/p>\n

\n\tGAMO ROMER: I\u2019m old enough that when I went through the California school system, it wasn\u2019t taught at all. I didn\u2019t learn about it until the 1980s, when there was a movement to get reparations for people\u2014especially American citizens\u2014who were suddenly thrown into prison, basically. For the film\u2019s research, I started coming across books. Historian Rob Fitts, who is in the film, has written several books on this area. I met him about a year into the research, and he had written a biography about Masanori \u201cMashi\u201d Murakami, the first Japanese player to play in the major leagues. I went on a book tour with Rob, met a lot of people, and learned much more.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe history isn\u2019t covered extensively, but the Babe Ruth tour comes up right away. Rob wrote a book about that; it\u2019s a dramatic story. You bump into all these connected stories, but they aren\u2019t covered in depth. Some are only in Japanese-language books. There are a few books around. I probably have most of them in my library now. I\u2019ve been working on this film for more than 12 years. Through the research and meeting people, I kept discovering stories. It just kept getting bigger. One of the challenges was keeping the film short enough for people to sit down and watch it.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Marc, there are a lot of great producers and executive producers on the film. We know how difficult it is to get documentaries off the ground. Could you talk about how you built this production?<\/p>\n

\n\tSMOLOWITZ: I\u2019ve been with Yuriko on this since the beginning, so we\u2019ve built a long partnership. I always tell the story about the National Endowment for the Humanities funding because it\u2019s important. We first received development funding, which was a big milestone. Later, we received a larger amount. Ultimately, that money was taken away during the DODGE controversy. We were on a trajectory to finish the film and had enough money at that point, with other funders who had stepped up. The cuts happened in the final year of making the film. We couldn\u2019t have predicted that it would become one of the biggest gifts to the film\u2019s story: it led us to our largest supporter. Yuriko was brave enough to speak out about the controversy. It became a case study in crisis PR\u2014something terrible happens, and you communicate it publicly in a way that can turn into a win.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe went on NPR, and Glen Fukushima found us. Over several months, he became the perfect executive producer\u2014not only filling the funding gap, but bringing a high-level diplomatic connection between the U.S. and Japan. He understood the film\u2019s value as a cultural product that could encourage dialogue. Then we found Mari, Jackie, and Steven. These people became building blocks that gave the film credibility with funders. That\u2019s how you do it: nurture the project for years.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Trump\u2019s NEH cuts have been so devastating. I did a panel recently with Rita Coburn. She directed a great film about W. E. B. Du Bois. She told me that during the production, she could sense that their NEH funding was about to be cut, so she told her crew to get their invoices in quickly.<\/p>\n

\n\tSMOLOWITZ: We could report the same kind of thing. Rumors were coming down. When we were cut, about 14 people were working on the movie. It was a real hit to people\u2019s livelihoods. We recovered pretty quickly\u2014within about three months we were back at full pace. We shifted our delivery target by about one festival season. Many filmmakers weren\u2019t able to solve their crisis that way. It has created a lot of discussion in the nonfiction field about how we value the humanities and how we\u2019ll fund films if those kinds of funds aren\u2019t available. There has been some recovery. California Humanities, for example, recently re-announced grants that had been on pause for about a year and a half. It\u2019s looking up, but it\u2019s tricky for filmmakers who have worked for years on important projects and then get cut off.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Yuriko, where did you find all the great archival baseball footage? Does the MLB have a robust archive?<\/p>\n

\n\tGAMO ROMER: Very early on, Marc helped a lot with negotiating a licensing agreement. It was a huge line item, and I wondered how I\u2019d ever pay for it. Fortunately, they let us pay over several years. In retrospect, it was a wonderful deal. It was a blanket agreement, and they did all the research. The MLB asked me to send a list of what I wanted, along with a script, treatment, or rough cut. That helped them think beyond what I knew to ask for. They provided things that shocked me. A lot of footage in the film that you wouldn\u2019t expect to come from MLB archives did come from there. The archive team knew where everything was and what the stories were. Ken, the editor, and I would receive material and ask, \u201cWhat is this?\u201d It was incredible.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: When you came to Japan to shoot, how were you and the project received? It\u2019s not the easiest material for people involved in the story to relive.<\/p>\n

\n\tGAMO ROMER: I shot twice at the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, which is essentially an expatriate club filled with Americans and Brits. Some people knew bits and pieces of the story. But there\u2019s a general interest. The story is less known among the broader population, especially younger people. We had a press screening last week. Mashi and I spoke and answered questions afterward. He gave a heartfelt speech about how grateful he was that I made the film. He feels people don\u2019t know or appreciate baseball history, and that knowing more might help them appreciate it. The hope is that younger people will see the film, learn, and expand their horizons. Part of the problem is that there hasn\u2019t been much access to this information and history.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: So how are you thinking about the release? <\/p>\n

\n\tSMOLOWITZ: Strand is handling the U.S. release. Wondergenic Films is our Japanese distributor. They\u2019re essentially a distribution startup. One partner is a Japanese distributor who has acquired individual films at Venice and released them in Japan when they otherwise wouldn\u2019t have had a Japanese release. His young business partner, Michael, is binational and bilingual; he grew up in the U.S. and now lives here in Japan. They\u2019re interesting young partners, and our film is their prototype\u2014the first one they\u2019re giving this kind of commercially oriented launch. They\u2019re both huge baseball fans. Michael, the American-side CEO, is the grandson of Cappy Harada, which is a remarkable personal connection. For them, it will be about seeing which exhibitors come on board. They\u2019re reasonably confident in predicting at least 60 screens, but it could be more. They haven\u2019t officially announced the start date, but the plan is April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a year on the U.S. festival circuit, with buzzy stops at Mill Valley and Hot Springs, Diamond…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[189507,93,61,60,282863,270,6627,70334,282864],"class_list":["post-667753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-diamond-diplomacy","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-marc-smolowitz","tag-movies","tag-tokyo","tag-tokyo-film-festival","tag-yuriko-gamo-romer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}