Fiona Potter
@fmpotterFiona Potter grew up in La Canada, California. She is a former Discover Nikkei intern currently living and working in the Bay Area, California.
Updated January 2013
Stories from This Author
Cultivating remembrance: An interview with filmmaker Kenneth Kokka
Jan. 29, 2013 • Fiona Potter
The phrase “Richmond, California, 1942” might call to mind the patriotic bustle of naval shipyards and the stoic biceps of Rosie the Riveter, but this would obscure another story: that of the Japanese American residents who were forcibly removed from their homes and businesses in this coastal town and sent to concentration camps for the duration of the war. The documentary film Blossoms and Thorns: A Community Uprooted (Kokka 2012) reveals the contradictions between these two experiences of wartime Richmond …
Blossoms and Thorns: A Community Uprooted: New documentary portrays a vanishing industry
Jan. 28, 2013 • Fiona Potter
Richmond, California, in the year 1942 calls to mind the bustle of naval shipyards and a whirlwind of housing construction. A semi-rural town before World War II, the city was forever changed by the war and the thousands of defense workers who migrated there to work in various wartime industries. Another story, that of Richmond’s Japanese American residents and their cut-flower nursery businesses, is less well-known. An early twentieth-century immigrant success story, many of these families lost their homes, farms, …
Reflections of a Summer Intern
Sept. 9, 2008 • Fiona Potter
When I first applied to the Nikkei Community Internship, I don’t think I really knew what I was getting myself into. The idea of connecting with my family’s culture in a way that also benefited the community was appealing to me, but I didn’t really think into it much more than that. NCI is organized and supported by the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council and facilitated by the Little Tokyo Service Center in Southern California and the Japanese Community …
