Karen Matsumoto
Karen Matsumoto, granddaughter of Wakaji Matsumoto, serves as project liaison for Wakaji Matsumoto: An Artist in Two Worlds. She lives in Washington State and is a retired educator. Her current work focuses on issues of social and environmental justice. Karen is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community. She has co-produced several video documentaries and has designed curricula related to the Japanese American WWII incarceration experience. Karen has also been a consulting teacher for the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco for National Park Service teacher workshops and summer institutes.
Karen was executive producer for a documentary film on her father, Honor & Sacrifice: The Roy Matsumoto Story, completed in 2013. This film features photographs by Wakaji Matsumoto, seen there for the first time in the U.S., which provided inspiration for sharing the Wakaji photo collection with a broader public.
Updated September 2022
Stories from This Author
Wakaji Matsumoto: An Artist in Two Worlds
Sept. 20, 2022 • Karen Matsumoto
My grandfather, Wakaji Matsumoto, traveled across the Pacific Ocean to help his father in a foreign land, but he returned to his native Japan as an artist. He was a Japanese photographer who lived in two worlds—Los Angeles, California, and Hiroshima, Japan. His images captured the lives of Japanese immigrant farmers living in rural Los Angeles in the early 1900s, and also events and the everyday lives of people in Hiroshima. While living in Los Angeles as a farmer, Wakaji …
