Tamiko Nimura
@tnimuraTamiko Nimura, PhD, is an award-winning Asian American (Sansei/Pinay) creative nonfiction writer, community journalist, and public historian. She writes from an interdisciplinary space at the intersection of her love of literature, grounding in American ethnic studies, inherited wisdom from teachers and community activists, and storytelling through history. Her work has appeared in a variety of outlets and exhibits including San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Magazine, Off Assignment, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Seattle’s International Examiner. She has written regularly for Discover Nikkei since 2016. She is completing a memoir called A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake.
Updated October 2024
Stories from This Author
A Seven-Year Dream Realized: The Remembrance Gallery at the Washington State Fairgrounds
Sept. 3, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
Nestled underneath the grandstands at the Washington State Fairgrounds, across from the regionally famous Fisher Scone stand, there is a new exhibit opening in 2024. Organized by the Puyallup Valley chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Remembrance Gallery stands as a powerful testament to the 7,500+ persons of Japanese descent who were incarcerated at the fairgrounds in 1942. Many Japanese Americans in the area avoided going to the Fair for decades, finding the memories too painful. Though a …
Writing In the Shadows of Tule Lake: A Conversation with Akemi Johnson
July 5, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
Akemi Johnson is a mixed-race Yonsei writer and author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa. She’s currently at work on a second book about her family history and Tule Lake concentration camp. I “met” Yonsei writer Akemi Johnson through that social-media-site-which-shall-not-be-named (except with the letter X), and we moved our conversation to e-mail and social media. Generously, Akemi invited me, Diana Emiko Tsuchida, and Kyoko Oda to participate in …
The Tacoma Japantown Project
June 16, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
This year, 2024, marks 10 years that I have been researching, writing, and marking the story of Tacoma’s historic Japantown. Readers of Discover Nikkei might have read about this work in different formats: encyclopedia article, personal essay, walking tour, smartphone application, day of gathering. I’ve also written essays about Tacoma-related Japanese American people and places. I’ve wanted to compile and share this knowledge with as many people as possible, though, and online seemed to be the easiest place to do that. For …
How Do We Remember Japanese American History? A Descendant's Perspective
April 4, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
The following is adapted from a talk I gave at Plymouth Church in Seattle in February 2024. Good afternoon. I’m honored to be here with you all. I’m an Asian American writer from Tacoma, half-Filipina American, half-Japanese American. I have so many emotions being with you here today on this day before a national Japanese American Day of Remembrance. This commemoration began in Seattle back on Thanksgiving weekend in 1978, when a group of Asian American activists, many of them Japanese …
Naomi Hirahara’s Meticulously-Researched Mystery about Postwar Midcentury Japanese America
March 14, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
There’s a haunting in Naomi Hirahara’s latest novel, Evergreen—a much-anticipated sequel to her novel, Clark and Division. After wartime incarceration in Manzanar and then resettlement in Chicago, Aki Ito, now Nakasone, and her family have returned to Southern California, and much has changed. The haunting comes in several forms—as the voice of Aki’s deceased older sister Rose, asking not to be forgotten; as the PTSD of Aki’s 442nd veteran husband Art Nakasone; and as the material losses and livelihood of the Ito …
Why the Language We Use to Describe JA Incarceration During WWII Matters
Feb. 23, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
Out the front windows of our bus, we could see acres of sun-dried grasses during a hot and arid Northern California summer. On either side of the road stood barbed-wire fences, like the ones many of our family members spent years behind, surrounded by armed guards and guard towers, living in crowded tar-paper barracks with little to no privacy. “How many of you have been here before or were here during World War II?” our tour guide asked. A few …
“The Gold That Heals and Transforms”: A Conversation with Dr. Satsuki Ina
Feb. 7, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
It’s an incredible honor for me to speak to Dr. Satsuki Ina. Ina is a Sansei activist, therapist, community healer, and now memoirist with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment and Protest (Heyday, March 2024). The book is a family memoir using various archives and documents of her parents during World War II as they navigated wartime hysteria, imprisonment, racism, and resistance. She was generous to share her time with me to speak about two …
Growing Up Nikkei As An Adoptee—A Conversation with Author Susan Ito
Nov. 13, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
I “met” Susan Ito online close to a decade ago on a social media site, where we bonded over being Japanese American writers and bloggers. The online friendship deepened over time. I discovered that she even met my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi at a Tule Lake pilgrimage. And we finally met in person a couple of years ago over cookies and crafts, with a mutual friend. I’m so glad that Susan is telling her story with the 2023 publication of her …
One Fighting Irishman — A Conversation With Filmmaker Sharon Yamato
Oct. 17, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
Wayne Mortimer Collins is an important name for my family. I first learned about this heroic, brash and outspoken attorney nearly twenty years ago while editing my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s first book, Swimming in the American (2005). I was surprised to see the book dedicated to Collins, and learned a bit about him while reading about my uncle’s struggle to regain his American citizenship after renouncing it under intense pressure by the United States government. My admiration for Collins only …
Wisdom Grown Wild: A Conversation with Filmmaker Rea Tajiri — Part 3
Sept. 10, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
Read Part 2 >> TN: Do you think you make art as a way to fill in those gaps or to speak to these silences that are created by the lack of having these these artifacts or heirlooms? RT: Yeah, probably that, and certainly my father had a lot of stories that he would share. And honestly some of them were really like “what?” I was probably too young to handle some of these but they left a very intense …
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