In Remembrance: Lane Nakano

     Lane Nakano, the Japanese American singer and actor who starred in the 1951 drama Go For Broke!, has passed away on April 28, 2005 in Studio City, California. He was 80.

     Born in 1925 in Los Angeles to first generation Japanese immigrants, Nakano’s family was taken to the Heart Mountain interment camp in Wyoming following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was here that Nakano and his brother Lyle volunteered for the army, joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team- a segregated combat unit composed of Japanese American soldiers. The unit would become one of the most decorated units in United States military history. After serving in France and Italy, Nakano rose to some prominence in Los Angeles’s Japanese American community as a singer.

     Nakano relived his war service with his role as a soldier in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Go For Broke!. The film starred Van Johnson as a bigoted Army officer assigned to train the unit for combat. Nakano was cast in the film’s largest Japanese American role after writer-director Robert Pirosh spotted him performing. Nakano was one of many former members of the 442nd to appear in the film.

     Go For Broke! would be Takano’s only major film role. Previously he had bit parts in the Humphrey Bogart film Tokyo Joe (1949) and in I Was An American Spy (1951). Afterwards, he would appear in films such as Peking Express (1951) and King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride (1952). Nakano starred in 1965’s Three Weeks Of Love, shot in Japan and Hong Kong, though the film did not do well at the box office. He also appeared in guest roles on a handful of television series including Hawaiian Eye and Route 66.

     Nakano retired from show business in the late 1960s to go into the aluminum awning and greenhouse businesses in Los Angeles. His son Desmond is a screenwriter (Black Moon Rising, White Man’s Burden).