Nancy Matsumoto

I lived in Manhattan for 13 years before I went to my first JAJA meeting. An acronym for Japanese Americans and Japanese in America, JAJA is an informal group that meets monthly in a large and accommodating loft space near Union Square. On my first visit, I exited the elevator on the third floor of a former commercial building and heard a muffled din coming from behind a door to my right. I opened it and entered a boisterous world brimming with loud talk, a clatter of kitchen sounds, and the smell of good food. By virtue of existing for ...

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 on his own terms, not those of the government—who said it was for ...

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 Toyo Miyatake—and was immediately struck. He knew that golden trout are only found above 8,000 feet ...

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 delivering sly doses of subversive commentary on race and exclusion.

The A ...

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 were imprisoned at the Tule Lake and Gila River concentration camps, never talked about those experiences. Eventually she returns to ...