シャーロン・ヤマト

What began last March as a few months of social distancing has now turned into the prospect of long-term isolation as COVID19 increases at a staggering rate. As a proud member of the senior population considered “high risk,” I can personally attest to the stresses and strains of home confinement.

Perhaps the greatest deprivation has been the loss of social interaction except for who we can see on a phone or computer screen — with Skype, FaceTime, and Zoom becoming regular activities, not to mention rising to Webster dictionary status of actual verbs. I still yearn for the social connections that ...

I’ve been struggling with what more to say about the pandemic now known as the worst disaster of our lifetimes. I don’t ever remember feeling this fearful and uncertain about the future, particularly knowing as infection and death statistics grow with steady predictability, this highly contagious virus will most certainly infect someone I love, many of whom are in the dangerous high-risk age group.

In the midst of this immediate fear, I realized that most of us baby boomers and younger don’t have the first-hand experience of that other terrifying time in American history when our families ...

Tule Lake Committee chair Hiroshi Shimizu attended his first Tule Lake Pilgrimage in 1994, clutching a folder of papers written in Japanese. He had seen an article announcing the pilgrimage in the Hokubei Mainichi, the former Northern California daily newspaper that his father, Iwao, not only helped to start but also served as its Japanese editor for nearly 25 years. Hiroshi was curious about the place where he had spent time as a child, even though he had always considered Topaz his “home camp” since that’s where he was born. Still, not knowing much about Tule Lake he was ...

Michelle Yamashiro has been told she has little trouble expressing herself. The vibrant 28-year-old Nikkei is not sure whether her outspokenness comes from her Japanese Peruvian parents, who taught her to “think critically and to have an opinion,” or from her Okinawan grandparents, who wanted her to know and understand their tri-continental family history. Whatever the origin, the former interim director of the youth empowerment group, Kizuna, wants others to share her proud passion for learning about and sharing family history and culture—regardless of how diverse and turbulent the past might be.

Hers is a complex family history that ...

I first learned about Fresno’s landmark mochi shop, Kogetsu-do, 16 years ago while doing research for the Japanese American National Museum’s Annual Dinner Gala. The event’s theme, “Honoring the Family,” paid tribute to more than 70 businesses run by families for three generations, many of them starting out as mom-and-pop operations that were still going strong after more than a century.

Most of the honorees were businesses that had managed to survive despite all odds, the biggest obstacle being sudden and prolonged interruption by the wartime incarceration. Four of them were well-known in their regional Nihonmachis for ...