Madeline Parga is 19 years old and is finishing her freshman year at Cornell University. She has been writing imaginative stories since she was in the 3rd grade, and have been an avid visitor to Little Tokyo. As she continues on her college career and learns more about who she is, she thinks back fondly of Little Tokyo as it was the first place she began to form her own cultural identity.

Updated May 2019

James Toma is a former mayor of the City of West Covina and a supervising attorney at the California Department of Justice.

Married with two young children, James enjoys reading and sports. He coaches his son’s basketball team at the East San Gabriel Valley Japanese Community Center. His exposure to Japanese American basketball inspired him to write a short story for the Little Tokyo Historical Society contest.

James was born in Okinawa, but grew up in the California Central Valley. He graduated from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a past president of the Friends of the West Covina Library and the Japanese American Bar Association.

Updated April 2019

Akira Tsurukame was born in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1941. After graduating from La Salle High School in Kagoshima and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in Kyoto, he joined the international tourism company New Orient Express in 1964. In 1966, he was dispatched to the company's US office as a representative and worked in Los Angeles and New York. He left the company in 1979 and traveled the world with his family. In 1980, he established California Coordinators in Los Angeles, providing local support for Japanese companies expanding into the US and Mexico. He later established Business Cafe in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Tokyo with Japanese and American colleagues to provide support to California entrepreneurs expanding into the Japanese market.

Outside of business, Tsurukame's lifelong interest is in the relationship between Japan and the world, especially the US-Japan relationship. He is also interested in the history of Japanese immigration to the US, and continues to research it. He visited Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etc. for three months to investigate the situation of Japanese communities in North America as well as South America. Recently, he featured pre-war Issei who contributed to the Japanese community and published an article in the Orange News, a monthly publication in Orange County, California. In 2018, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration and Japanese immigration, he launched the "Japanese Pioneer Appreciation Society" with his new Issei friends, and successfully realized a project to express gratitude to pre-war Issei and Nisei. Tsurukame currently lives in Lomita with his wife and son. He is 78 years old.

(Updated April 2019)