Kristen Hayashi
Kristen Hayashi, Ph.D. is the collections manager at the Japanese American National Museum where she oversees the permanent collection. She is a public historian who has worked on museum exhibitions and historic preservation advocacy. After earning her B.A. in American Studies from Occidental College in Los Angeles and spending a year in Japan with the JET Program, she worked at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. As a result of being part of the content team for the Natural History Museum’s semi-permanent exhibition Becoming Los Angeles, she became highly engaged in research into the region’s rich history through her doctoral work in History at the University of California, Riverside. Although her interest in Los Angeles spans a multitude of subtopics, her dissertation: “Making Home Again: Japanese American Resettlement in Post-WWII Los Angeles, 1945-1955” examines what it took for Japanese Americans to reestablish themselves following the wartime incarceration. In addition to her ongoing work at JANM, Kristen stays connected to the Japanese American community in Los Angeles through her involvement with the Little Tokyo Historical Society and Makoto Taiko.
Updated November 2019
Stories from This Author
The Return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast in 1945 and the Challenges of Starting Over
March 26, 2021 • Kristen Hayashi
In late October 1945, Kimiko Keimi and her thirteen-year-old son Harold “Hal” Keimi left Heart Mountain, Wyoming, one of America’s concentration camps, to return to Los Angeles.1 Although they were returning to their hometown, they were unable to reclaim their house, which was adjacent to the laundry that they previously operated in Hollywood. Instead, their final destination became a temporary trailer installation, which the federal government opened for Japanese Americans returning from America’s concentration camps. The trailer that the two shared …
The Sakamoto-Sasano Collection: Bringing New Meaning to Family Mementos
Nov. 14, 2019 • Kristen Hayashi
As staff of the Collections Management and Access (CMA) department at the Japanese American National Museum, my colleagues and I make little rediscoveries in JANM’s permanent collection regularly. I refer to them as rediscoveries rather than discoveries since we’re certainly not the first to become well versed with the stories anchored to artifacts in the collection. These constant rediscoveries remind us that we arguably have the best job at JANM. It’s also one that comes with great responsibility since we’re …
Japanese Hospital: Keeping the Community Healthy
April 7, 2017 • Michael Okamura , Bill Watanabe , Kristen Hayashi
Beginning in the late 19th century, boosters of Los Angeles touted the region’s sunshine and mild climate as a place for health-seekers. Yet residents of ethnic enclaves in Los Angeles were often denied access to health care at mainstream hospitals. Japanese and other recent immigrant groups depended on itinerant midwives for assistance with childbirth and traveling physicians to make house calls to treat serious illnesses. By the 1910s, the increase in birth rate that resulted from the arrival of scores …
