Career
He is Sansei Japanese American (3rd generation) and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Okazaki started at Churchill Films in 1976, making narrative and documentary shorts. In 1982 he produced Survivors for WGBH Boston, a documentary short about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors.
In 1987 he wrote and directed the independent film, Living on Tokyo Time, which premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released by Skouras Pictures.
He continued to make documentary films for Public Broadcasting Service and later with Home Box Office. In 2006 he received his third Oscar nomination for The Mushroom Club, a personal documentary about his journey to Japan to interview atomic bomb survivors on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Okazaki"s production company, Farallon Films, is based in Berkeley, California.
Okazaki was also involved as a multi-instrumentalist in a San Francisco punk-rock music group called The Maids in 1977-1979, whose sole record, a single called "Back to Bataan", gained some notoriety by way of later punk music compilations.