Nancy Matsumoto
@nmatsumotoNancy Matsumoto é escritora e editora freelancer que discute assuntos relacionados à agroecologia, comidas e bebidas, artes, e a cultura japonesa e nipo-americana. Ela já contribuiu artigos para o Wall Street Journal, Time, People, The Toronto Globe and Mail, Civil Eats, e TheAtlantic.com, como também para o blog The Salt da [rede de TV pública americana] PBS e para a Enciclopédia Densho sobre o Encarceramento dos Nipo-Americanos, entre outras publicações. Seu livro, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth [Explorando o Mundo do Saquê Artesanal Japonês: Arroz, Água, Terra], foi publicado em maio de 2022. Outro dos seus livros, By the Shore of Lake Michigan [Na Beira do Lago Michigan], é uma tradução para o inglês da poesia tanka japonesa escrita pelos seus avós; o livro será publicado pela Asian American Studies Press da UCLA. Twitter/Instagram: @nancymatsumoto
Atualizado em agosto de 2022
Stories from This Author
Native Sons of Fresno, California Look Back
1 de Novembro de 2013 • Nancy Matsumoto
I’m writing a Densho Encyclopedia entry now on the poet Lawson Fusao Inada. He’s a third-generation Japanese American who was locked up in three different U.S. government prisons during World War II. It’s not surprising that even though he was only four years old when he was first placed behind barbed wire, the “camp” experience became a major theme in Inada’s poetry, a wound he revisited repeatedly. It’s as if he wanted to figure out what happened and recast it …
Fishing as a Form of Defiance: Cory Shiozaki and "The Manzanar Fishing Club"
4 de Abril de 2013 • Nancy Matsumoto
In 2004, The Los Angeles Times published an article about a mysterious man, identified only as “Ishikawa, Fisherman,” taken at the California World War II U.S. government prison camp Manzanar. Included in the story was a photo of Ishikawa, his face weathered and brown, holding a line of what article identified as “trophy size” golden trout. Cory Shiozaki, a Sansei and avid fisherman, read the article—which singled out this photograph from an exhibit of works by camp inmate and photographer …
Roger Shimomura, Artist, Collector
1 de Março de 2013 • Nancy Matsumoto
Earlier this week, I attended the opening of Japanese American artist Roger Shimomura’s exhibit at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute’s new digs at 8 Washington Mews, a part of New York University. The Seattle-born Sansei(third-generation Japanese American), who’s spending this year as artist-in-residence at A/P/A, has made a name for himself as a painter, printmaker, and theater artist. His visual work speaks the language of pop art, comic books, Japanese wood-block prints, and manga, but their bright, shiny surfaces upend expectations by …
Book Review: Exploring the Borderlands of Race, Nation, Sex and Gender
26 de Dezembro de 2012 • Nancy Matsumoto
Growing up in predominantly white Marin County, mixed-race yonsei Akemi Johnson hates her name and just wants to blend in. In college, though, her attitude changes. She studies race and ethnicity and travels to Japan. Though her stated purpose there is to study issues around the American bases in Okinawa, she later writes, ”My real motives were more personal and intertwined with the past, with traumas that had been born many years before.” She reflects on why her grandparents, who …
Bringing New Life to Japanese American Hero Gordon Hirabayashi's Story
5 de Novembro de 2012 • Nancy Matsumoto
Three men, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui, defied President Franklin Roosevelt’s order to 110,000 West Coast Japanese to submit to evacuation and imprisonment during World War II. Among their stories, Gordon Hirabayashi’s has always struck me as the most dramatic. Convinced that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional, he possessed the moral courage to defy it. He ignored a curfew placed on targeted Japanese, refused to post bail that would have sent him to a prison camp, and challenged …
Japanese American Chefs in New York City: Yuhi Fujinaga & Craig Koketsu
16 de Março de 2012 • Nancy Matsumoto
In addition to contributing to Discover Nikkei, I write for Cravings, a site devoted to exploring the best in food, drink, culture and travel. Editor-in-Chief Celia Sin-Tien Cheng and her sister Cynthia Sin-Yi Cheng are global travelers who bring home favorites from every metropolis and hamlet they touch down in. My contributions to the site include profiles of two Japanese American chefs working in Manhattan: Hawaii-born Basque restaurant chef Yuhi Fujinaga, and San Jose-reared Craig Koketsu, chef-partner for the restaurant group …
Tradition: Osechi
27 de Dezembro de 2011 • Nancy Matsumoto
Japanese Americans welcome the New Year with a special feast that can take weeks to prepare.In the waning days of December in the small, hot kitchen of East Restaurant in Kips Bay, chef Syozo Tsurunaga is directing a small army of assistants as they prepare the annual New Year’s feast known as osechi ryori. In one corner, three hygienically capped workers de-vein prawns with surgical-looking metal skewers. In another, two young Japanese men fill small square plastic compartments with julienned …
Retrospective: Magic and Beauty in the Art of Patrick Nagatani
15 de Novembro de 2011 • Nancy Matsumoto
To call Patrick Nagatani a photographer, or even a fine art photographer, seems like such a wan, inadequate description because his work—30 years’ worth of which will be displayed in two Los Angeles exhibits beginning this month—is so richly layered with cultural symbols, narratives, dreams and memories. He is a magician, shaman, set designer, and director who meticulously constructed images recall the fabulous imaginary worlds of Haruki Murakami or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, two of Nagatani’s favorite novelists. Desire for Magic: …
Documenting Manzanar - Part 18 of 18
24 de Outubro de 2011 • Nancy Matsumoto
Read Part 17 >>Post-scriptMy exploration of the Mananzar photographs of Adams, Lange, and Miyatake, along with my readings of the historical, memoir, and fictional accounts of the Japanese-American concentration camps brought me a deeper understanding of the hardships, both physical and psychic, my own family and all of those incarcerated faced. Attending the 40th annual Manzanar pilgrimage in April 2009, I pictured the rows and rows of barracks as they must have looked in 1944, a long line of prisoners …
Documenting Manzanar - Part 17 of 18 (Toyo Miyatake)
17 de Outubro de 2011 • Nancy Matsumoto
Read Part 16 >>Miyatake and AdamsPhotography also provided Miyatake an introduction to Adams at Manzanar. Introduced by Merritt in 1943, their shared passion for photography and the discovery that Edward Weston was a mutual friend forged the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Miyatake and Adams. Archie remembered the day when Adams came to their barrack to photograph his family, resulting in a picture that Adams included in Born Free and Equal. In it, Toyo stands, hand on hip, watching …
