Mia Nakaji Monnier
@miamMia Nakaji Monnier is a writer in Los Angeles. Her journalism and essays have appeared in BuzzFeed News, Shondaland, The Washington Post, and more. She started her career in Little Tokyo at Discover Nikkei and The Rafu Shimpo. You can find her on Twitter @miagabb and read more of her work at mianakajimonnier.com.
Updated May 2021
Stories from This Author
Eagles of Heart Mountain, Bradford Pearson Uses Football As a ‘Trojan Horse’
Nov. 5, 2021 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
In Eagles of Heart Mountain, football is all but pretext. The book, journalist Bradford Pearson’s debut, follows the high-school football team that formed at the Heart Mountain concentration camp during World War II. Despite being made up mostly of boys who had never played football before their arrival at Heart Mountain, the Eagles competed against local high school teams and finished their first season undefeated. After two chapters closely following the team’s main players and their families, though, the book …
Interview with a Nikkei forager: mushroom hunting with Sayuri Shinya
July 16, 2019 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
On still-damp, foggy mornings after the rain has cleared, Sayuri Shinya and her husband drive from their home in the San Francisco Bay Area and into the woods, looking for mushrooms. Shinya began forging five years ago, when she met her husband, who grew up in Germany and has hunted for mushrooms since childhood. “At first, I thought it was weird,” she told me. “I was like, mushrooms, really? Foraging is not something you hear about all the time. Mushrooms …
“Thirty Minutes Over Oregon” Introduces Children to the Complexity of War and Friendship
March 26, 2019 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
When we talk about World War II, it’s often in terms of major milestones: the racist incarceration of Japanese Americans; the bombings of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. But there are infinite smaller-scale stories that many of us will never hear, like that of Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot sent on a mission to bomb Oregon. Because nobody was injured during the bombings, they didn’t become major news in either the U.S. or Japan. Twenty years later, the town of …
Author Andrea Tsurumi on kindness and the role of uncertainty in art and cultural identity - Part 2
Feb. 12, 2019 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Read Part 1 >> Monnier: How do you describe your identity when you describe yourself? What words do you like? Tsurumi: Well, it depends on who I'm talking to or why I'm describing it. If it's with a friend or somebody I'm close with or in the context of this interview, it's a longer conversation, right? If it's somebody who's like, 'Well, what are you?" which is the common thing, I think, if you're mixed-race in America, then it's like, …
Author Andrea Tsurumi on kindness and the role of uncertainty in art and cultural identity - Part 1
Feb. 11, 2019 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
In the undersea world of Andrea Tsurumi’s new picture book, Crab Cake, the community has a steady rhythm: “ Seahorse pretends to be seaweed…Parrotfish crunches coral and poops sand…Pufferfish puffs up…And crab bakes cakes.” When a (human-caused) disaster brings this routine to a halt and all the animals into hiding, Crab takes action. What results is a warm-hearted affirmation of individual effort, art, and caretaking, with joyful, richly textured illustrations sure to inspire curiosity about ocean ecology, environmental responsibility, and …
Ben Furuta, the Air Force Academy’s First Cadet of Color
May 31, 2018 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
I was conscious of being different, but only in the sense of looking different. —Ben Furuta Ben Furuta was only four when his family was forced out of Oakland, California, and incarcerated at Poston during WWII. “I have only flashes of memory, little incidents,” he says, like an image of his father with bandages on his arms, covering chemical burns he received at his camp job, working in the camouflage factory. He remembers older boys, teenagers or young men, who …
Full Disclosure: How My Ambiguous Looks Mean I’m Constantly Coming Out as Biracial
Sept. 12, 2017 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Some years ago, an old friend stopped in L.A. for her summer job, driving across the country in a classic car to promote a vacation rental company. I went out to meet her and her driving partner near their rental in Hollywood, and in an act of company-paid luxury unthinkable to fresh-from-college me, we took a cab to The Stinking Rose for dinner. We settled around our booth table in a dark corner of the restaurant for a meal of …
A Conversation with Nancy Oda, President of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition
April 8, 2017 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Nancy Oda was very happily retired when she learned about Tuna Canyon. “Very happily retired,” she says for a second time. “It was like a call to action.” We’re sitting together in the small back room of the Hirasaki National Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum, just past Only the Oaks Remain: The Story of Tuna Canyon Detention Station, the special display that Oda helped to develop. Four years ago, she may not have heard of the historic …
Sewing Lessons
Sept. 21, 2016 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
My mom and I discovered the Japanese fabric store together two years ago. Under a blue awning, in a part of town we rarely went, these Japanese-print clothes hung in the window, and we both stopped to admire them. The store gave lessons, so we signed up, and for some Saturdays in a row, we sat across from each other at sewing machines, making our own clothes. It’s hard to untangle all these parts of a simple story about sewing …
My Life with the Anime Nerds
Jan. 28, 2016 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Last month, I worked at Kinokuniya Bookstore’s booth at Anime Expo for the second year in a row. For two days, I stood in front of a display of posters, phone charms, and T-shirts featuring half-naked manga characters, both female and male. And for two days, I tried not to embarrass customers who walked shyly up to the register, asking if I could take a few life-size, cartoon-girl body-pillowcases out of their plastic packages, so they could see which one …
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