Nancy Matsumoto

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Family is important to Yagi, explains his daughter Sakura, because his own was fractured when he was very young. His father died when he was five, leaving his mother to raise Yagi and his four brothers on her own. Before his life was cut short, Yagi’s father, “had a vision of technology taking over the future” of Japan, recalls Yagi. Anticipating the change, he moved from selling fish by bicycle rickshaw to selling electrical lamps for fishing boats. After the family home was burned down during World War II he had to start over from scratch ...

The first time I interviewed Bon Yagi, the New York City businessman who has built an empire of 13 Japanese specialty restaurants featuring everything from soba to sake, he tried to sell me something completely unexpected: a Toto Washlet toilet. Though the topic at hand was his sake specialty restaurant Sakagura, when I happened to mention I was in the midst of bathroom renovations at home he couldn’t resist the business opportunity. “Let me know if you’re interested in a Washlet,” he reminded me politely at the end of our conversation.

Acting as the local agent for the ...

Late last month I attended a pilgrimage to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the former U.S. Government concentration camp where my mother and her family were placed for three years during World War II. My mother had not been back to Heart Mountain for 70 years, since she left as a girl of 12. She wanted to go, she told us, to see the mountain the camp was named after one more time. Its iconic shape, more like the angled smokestack of a cruise ship than a heart, had found a permanent home in her memory. While living in the prison ...

Kyoto—In a well-appointed kitchen at the La Carriere Cooking School in Kyoto, Japan, Hawaii-born chef Aaron Pate carefully assembled the dish he hoped would win him gold at the Washoku World Challenge 2015 (WWC). A chef at Seattle’s Shiro’s Sushi, his idea was a tonyu (soy milk) shabu-shabu, into which judges would dip and gently cook fresh oysters, king crab leg, salmon, wild yellowtail, and maitake mushrooms. As each judge’s individual hot pot simmered over a flame, a layer of yuba, or tofu skin, would form on its surface.

Next to Pate, an international roster of ...

The stories of the valiant all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Infantry Regiment of World War II have been told in art forms ranging from haiku to the graphic novel. But choreographer Marla Hirokawa may well be the first person to bring the tale of discrimination, imprisonment, and battlefield glory to life in the form of a ballet.

Hirokawa, a Hawaiian-born Sansei and the artistic director of Covenant Ballet Theatre of Brooklyn and CBT Dance Academy, is readying her original ballet “Nisei” for its third public staging since its inception, as part of August’s New York City Fringe ...