Janet Ikeda
Janet Ikeda is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She teaches Japanese literature, language and a course on the art of the Japanese tea ceremony. For more information about the Japanese tearoom at Washington and Lee University see: http://tearoom.wlu.edu.
Updated April 2011
Stories from This Author
YAMA: A Nikkei Community in Brazil - Part 3
May 13, 2011 • Janet Ikeda
Read part 2 >> In 1990 I made my first trip to Community Yuba pregnant with hope. The offshoot of Yuba’s legacy had propagated and germinated abroad and we had returned to celebrate a birth. While caring for my newborn son, I felt the artistic impulse in every corner of the community. Pottery, sculpture, painting, theater and music permeated the daily rhythm. I was drawn to poetry and attended an evening haiku gathering. Young and old gathered around the communal …
YAMA: A Nikkei Community in Brazil - Part 2
May 6, 2011 • Janet Ikeda
Read part 1 >> At Yama, where farming, daily reverence, and art converge, the idea of work can mean most anything. The people grow fruits and vegetables, raise poultry and dairy cattle, cultivate shiitake mushrooms, roast coffee, produce butter and cheese, and ferment soybeans for miso and soy sauce. The weekly schedule revolves around adult and youth ballet, chorus, Japanese language lessons, and studio art for the young. Worn footpaths go off in all directions on the farm and one may …
YAMA: A Nikkei Community in Brazil - Part 1
April 29, 2011 • Janet Ikeda
Read the introduction to the Yama Project > YAMA: Embrace the ordinary and nurture a spirit of gratitude 誰の墓と 聞いて子供等 手を合わす whose grave is it? ask the children palm to palm in prayer —Katsue Yuba (b. 1947) With a copy of Rousseau’s Emile and the collected works of Tolstoy packed among newly purchased farming tools, metal pots, and Japanese quilts and bedding, Isamu Yuba in 1926 left Kobe, Japan in search of adventure. Later he would reminisce on that fateful …
The Yama Project
April 22, 2011 • Janet Ikeda
Introduction to the Yama ProjectThis project is a documentary of a Japanese farming and arts community in Brazil known as Comunidade Yuba. The farm is located in a rural agricultural region in the western part of Sao Paulo state. Ranging in age from fourth-generation newborns to first-generation Nikkei immigrants now in their 90s, the farm of seventy members is home to several related families. Known for its annual theatrical Christmas performance and modern dance troupe, Comunidade Yuba warmly welcomes visitors …
