I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico during the 1960’s. My parents had grown up in Hawaii, confident in their Japanese American heritage. There was never any doubt in my mind that I was Japanese American, but I rarely saw people outside of my family who looked like me. During …
The book Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain by Joanne Oppenheim and Nancy Matsumoto captures the emotions and everyday life during World War II at the Wyoming concentration camp. Presented in a reader’s theater format, the book uses primary-source materials from both inside and outside the camp to illuminate the lived …
She was the first baby born at the Topaz Concentration Camp in central Utah. The hospital was not completed yet, so her mother gave birth on a laundry room floor less than two weeks after their arrival in September 1942. A wooden food crate improvised for a crib. Her father …
It was only a year ago that artist traci kato-kiriyama (they + she) launched their second book, Navigating With(out) Instruments at a party in Little Tokyo on April 10, 2022. Navigating was named in Ms Magazine’s 2022 Poetry Roundup and in the 2021 L.A. Taco Book Guide, which recommends LA-centered …
Before World War II, there were sixteen Japanese families (including children, about 100 individuals) living in the resort town of Coronado on a peninsula in San Diego Bay, California. These were Issei who were mostly from Kagoshima, Japan and their Nisei children. Many of the Issei worked at the luxurious …
The artist Mine Okubo is most famous for her book, Citizen 13660, a graphic memoir of the Japanese American concentration camps. She became my hero while I was a student at University of California (UC), Riverside in 1979. As a young woman in my twenties, I felt inspired by Mine’s …
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