Tamiko Nimura

A maneki neko statue keeps moving mysteriously around a “sort of” Japanese restaurant in Boyle Heights. A music teacher keeps hearing some drumming in Leimert Park, with no visible drummer. A team of kid detectives roams Los Angeles, looking for ghosts—not to vaporize or “bust” them, but to listen to their stories. The ghosts are friendly, funny, talkative, near cuddly, some with rainbow auras.

The Los Angeles of Elizabeth Ito’s City of Ghosts Netflix series is not what you might expect.

City of Ghosts is a beautifully told animated series which uncovers layers of stories about specific neighborhoods ...

Was I looking at a pile of charred kindling, a set of raven’s wings or feathers?

“I’m interviewing this 99-year old Kibei Nisei artist, Koho Yamamoto,” I wrote on my social media page, with a link to her 2021 exhibit. “Anyone heard of her?” I’d been sent a press kit to Yamamoto’s show, Under A Dark Moon at New York City’s Noguchi Museum, and was immediately struck by her powerfully evocative sumi-e paintings. Her life story and artistic path reminded me of Kibei Nisei Tacoma artist Fumiko Kimura, who I wrote about last year for ...

In a heightened wave of anti-Asian racism, including attacks on Asian elders and the murders of 8 Asian women in Atlanta, I have felt the need to reach out—to family, to friends, to community. (For more about what’s been happening in the Seattle area, including a response from Yonsei professor Vince Schleitwiler, click here.)

I wanted to find out more about how we can learn from each other through working together, particularly in crossracial solidarity. As always, I found inspiration, solace, and comfort in doing so. I asked several Nikkei artists/activists in the Seattle area to respond ...

As we survey the past year of lockdowns and quarantines that started here in the States by mid-March, 2020, we take stock of a wide spectrum of revelations and experiences over the last twelve months. From new personal practices and experiments in the arena of safer-at-home, to illness and loss, further exposure of inequities and suffering, uprising and reckoning, community unlearning and building—we share the works of two artists who give us a glimmer of their lives through poetics about this last year, oriented to the pandemic. Veteran author Amy Uyematsu returns to the column with just a few ...

When I was a little kid in California in the early 1980s, it was cool to be a rebel, or a resister. On the sawdust-covered playground of my elementary school, we played out different scenes from the movie Star Wars. A popular scene reenactment was the trash compactor scene, when we would pretend the wooden play structure was closing in on us and we had to fight our way out. I had to play Princess Leia, the only role that felt available for girls then. (I’m glad that today there would be a wider range of roles and role ...