Karen Ishizuka
Karen L. Ishizuka is the author of Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Sixties (2015), Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (2006), and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (2008). An award-winning documentary writer/producer and museum curator who helped establish the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, she received a Master’s Degree in Social Work from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. A third-generation American of Japanese ancestry, Ishizuka lives in Culver City, California with her husband, filmmaker Robert A. Nakamura and has two children and three grandchildren.
Updated September 2017
Stories from This Author
Sansei Legacy: Never Again!
Sept. 8, 2017 • Karen Ishizuka
When pressed, Sansei give lip service to the obvious fact that we are now old. But we don’t really believe it. In the cosmology of Issei, Nisei, Sansei - Issei are old, Nisei are middle aged, and Sansei are forever young. But here I be, with the honor of having been asked to write on the Legacy of the Sansei. The juxtaposition of those two words: Sansei + Legacy is an undeniable clue that Sansei = Old. Old enough to …
Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Aug. 12, 2016 • Karen Ishizuka
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first of two atomic bombs on the small island nation of Japan—the only time a nuclear weapon of mass destruction has been deliberately used to annihilate an entire city. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped another atomic bomb on another city in Japan, a mere 261 miles—less than the distance between Los Angeles and Las Vegas—from the first. Because of the overwhelming devastation and resulting chaos, the …
