Emiko Tsuchida
@emikotsuchidaEmiko Tsuchida is freelance writer and digital marketer living in San Francisco. She has written on the representations of mixed race Asian American women and conducted interviews with some of the top Asian American women chefs. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice, the Center for Asian American Media, and the forthcoming Beiging of America series. She is the creator of Tessaku, a project that collects stories from Japanese Americans who experienced the concentration camps.
Updated December 2016
Stories from This Author
Robert Tanaka - Part 2
June 29, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Bob, can I go back? Do you remember your experience going from Watsonville to the assembly center? And then from the assembly center to Tule Lake? Oh when we first moved we went to Davis. I would spend my junior year over in Davis. And that’s when Executive 9066 came. And so [a friend] Mr. Kearney had a dairy farm there. He says look we got to get you down to the train, so I’ll drive …
Robert Tanaka - Part 1
June 28, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
When I got married and had a family, that’s when it sort of hit me, what my parents went through. And they never let on that they were panicking because of what was happening to the Japanese people. They were very stoic, strong people. — Robert Tanaka Robert has the kind of serene, light-hearted personality that draws you in. With a touch of dry humor, he’s able to tap into deep emotions that periodically surface through tears and a shaky …
Tomiko Tommy Miyahara - Part 2
June 14, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Did Tommy have to work in camp? So Tommy had been working ever since she arrived and she harvested sugar beets. There was a sugar beet shortage which sounds ridiculous but it was really important because the men were all responding to the draft so the farm labor was down, and farmers in that region were in a crisis. So I think the idea was kind of like a prison labor camp, where they have these …
Tomiko Tommy Miyahara - Part 1
June 13, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
“Her life experience was very American. She worked the land, she was always dirty, she’d been working since she was eight. It was that blue-collar kind of work ethic. I felt she was very American.” —Tomiko Tommy Miyahara I met Tommy’s granddaughter, Carly Perera, in San Francisco. It was our first time meeting in person yet our lives overlapped in coincidental ways. We both were raised in San Jose and were both working on projects to reclaim an unspoken past, …
Masao Tom Inada - Part 2
May 25, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Okay, I see. So then you landed in the Philippines. Yeah. When we were in the Philippines, maybe about two or three weeks later, the war with Japan ended. So the very next day, myself and another desk sergeant who I knew, both of us were flown to Tokyo to the Major Willoughby’s headquarters, to translate newspapers. And that’s another part that, when I got to Tokyo and was stationed at the Dai-Ichi building, I noticed …
Masao Tom Inada - Part 1
May 24, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
That’s the reason I’ve always just got to think to myself, I don’t know what it is but everything happens to me by chance or coincidence. And I get spared. -- Masao Tom Inada Tom Inada believes that someone’s been looking out for him. Despite a myriad of blight situations he might have found himself in–jobless, a replacement in the highest casualty battalion in WWII or not meeting the right kind of woman who would become his wife–Tom seemed to …
Art & Betty Shibayama - Part 2
April 26, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> What city did you grow up in? Betty Shibayama (BS): It was a town, Hood River. It was about 50 miles east of Portland, along the Columbia River. Beautiful country there. It’s like, what they say, like red neck country. [laughs] Well, they wanted to get rid of the Japanese, right. But our neighbors–I only found this out recently from one of my brothers–when the evacuation notice came out, our neighbor who maybe lived a mile …
Art & Betty Shibayama - Part 1
April 25, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
In my case, they denied my citizenship because I didn’t have legal entry. Now, the government brought us here forcibly, on a U.S. army transport, put us in a justice department camp that was administered by the immigration. So, where’s the place where it says I’m illegal? -- Art Shibayama Art Shibayama’s childhood was idyllic. His summers were spent swimming off the coast of Callao, where his loving grandparents essentially raised him. Back in Lima, his father ran a successful …
Larry Nobori - Part 2
April 6, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> What does the band play specifically? Mainly swing, Glen Miller type stuff. Then I was asked to direct this youth band in Portland and it was called the Minidoka Swing Band. We went up to Minidoka, presented the band, that’s part of it. Then the band kept on going after this pilgrimage because we wanted to bring young people up to Minidoka to show them what that was, you know, Japanese, Asian youth. So then it …
Larry Nobori - Part 1
April 5, 2017 • Emiko Tsuchida
If you ever wanted to get a sense of what life actually felt like in camp, look no further than this contraband film from the Nobori family, shot inside Jerome, Arkansas. This 8 mm “day in the life” was filmed by the father, George and leaves a time capsule so perfectly preserved for those of us who want to go beyond still pictures. The family’s candid footage reveals lightheartedness in a sober situation. It shows people making the best of their days …
