In 2025, Coyote Sun Productions won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy for an advertising campaign produced in collaboration with the Chicago Cubs’ promotion team.
The campaign highlighted the contributions of Japanese players to the American Major League, promoting the organization’s second opener in Tokyo after 25 years. The advertisement depicts two of the Cubs’ star players — Seiya Suzuki and Shōta Imanaga — who were both born in Japan and now play professional baseball in Illinois.
“I think that was one of the first [examples of] Japanese content, like pure Japanese content, to win any award in Chicago or [the] Midwest,” Yuki Sakamoto Solomon, the founder of Coyote Sun Productions, said. “You don’t see so many Asians, or so many Asian stories there.”
Coyote Sun Productions is a Chicago-based company that aims to produce content at the intersection of Japanese and Midwestern culture. The company’s name is an homage to that mission, blending Chicago’s population of the wolf-like species with her country’s nickname, the “Land of the Rising Sun.”
Solomon’s passion for filmmaking began during her childhood in Japan, where she later became a director for a public Japanese TV program. She then moved to New York City, and subsequently to the Midwest, where she took on a role as an in-between for professionals seeking translation between English and Japanese at Chicago film festivals.
But she felt that public perceptions of Japanese film in the Midwest were still “primitive” and only brought to mind big names in Japanese animation like Hayao Miyazaki.
“I felt especially compared to people in New York, when you say Japanese cinema, it was very much a stereotype,” Solomon said.
Despite a lack of awareness of Japanese culture in the Midwest, Solomon said Japanese presence in the region has a long history rooted in manufacturing industries. Companies like Kikkoman Foods in Wisconsin and Japanese automakers in Michigan and Ohio hire corporate workers who bring their families to the region.
Chicago had a small Japanese population before the 1940s, when internment under Executive Order 9066 — the forced relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps around the country during World War II — brought much of the population to the region.
After Japanese Americans were released from the camps, the federal government initially barred them from returning to the West Coast, said Michael Bourdaghs, an East Asian languages and civilizations professor at the University of Chicago.
But after they were granted permission to leave the region, many of the 20,000 to 25,000 people who were settled in Chicago stayed.
“About half of the people that came to Chicago did leave and go to the West Coast, but about half stayed and established a really tightly-knit community that’s still very much around today,” Bourdaghs said.
One of Coyote Sun Productions’ films, “Resettlement,” is a fictional story based on true accounts of formerly imprisoned families starting new lives in Chicago.
Solomon believes that she made the right decision by starting her company in the Midwest, not only because she believes the region needs more cultural representation, but also because Illinois offers unique financial incentives to media entrepreneurs like herself — such as a 30% production spending credit from the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
“Illinois [as a] state was inviting film productions, TV productions for such great tax incentives. When a group of people who are still small gathers together, we have even more useful resources to come along than being competitive with each other,” Solomon said.
Solomon also founded the first-ever Japanese American film festival, the Chicago Japan Film Collective, in 2020 — the same year she founded Coyote Sun Productions.
In 2025, Solomon produced “Hāfu,” a film named for a Japanese anglicism meaning someone who is half-Japanese and half another race or ethnicity. The story follows a biracial woman connecting with her Japanese grandmother through wedding traditions.
Like the protagonist she portrays in the film, actress Luka Oida is half Japanese. She grew up and is based in Los Angeles, but has extended family in Chicago and lived there while attending university.
“Yuki [Sakamoto Solomon] came into our lives through this film and brought a lot of insight. She was able to approve everything that we were doing and made sure that it was authentic,” Oida said.
Half of the dialogue in “Hāfu” was in Japanese, so Solomon helped verify the pronunciation of the actors’ lines. She also locally sourced cultural props, like a “shiromuku,” a white Japanese wedding dress, that was difficult to locate in the city.
“There was only one in all of Chicago, and she knew the woman who had that garment,” Oida said. “Without that we could not have made the film.”
Alongside media production, Solomon also receives clientele from Japan’s entertainment industry who venture out to American film festivals, and in turn fall in love with the city.
“I think people come here just [because] they really love Chicago and the Midwest,” Solomon said.
One of Solomon’s clients, Tokyo-based film composer Yoshihiro Hanno, recently directed his fourth film, “Lightning Over the Beyond.” Solomon was one of his producers responsible for communicating in English on Yoshihiro’s behalf and submitting the work to American festivals. The film won awards at festivals across the Midwest, like Best Narrative at Ohio’s 2025 Columbus International Film and Animation Festival.
“I think the Midwest is potentially — [while] not LA or New York’s size — [where] maybe Japanese culture can be a business in a way,” Solomon said. “I guess that it just was an untouched place where I decided to be.”
