Erik Matsunaga

The first time you hit a real wall, not a practice spot, you get this rush. Like, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” Especially when you’re running along the El tracks and there’s the third rail, a train might be coming, and you gotta jump onto a roof. It’s a thrill, and even more thrilling when you paint something and get to see it from the train the next day.

– Jamie Dihiansan, aka MENS

In 1990s Chicago, graffiti was an underground art form practiced in less than desirable conditions, by fringe dwellers under threat of legal ramifications ...

This month, we feature just one writer and a beloved one to the Discover Nikkei space at that—Chicago native, Erik Matsunaga. Erik’s piece is a simple moment between old childhood pals and one that sets an image of “home” or places of significance that are, at once, transient and meaningful…enjoy.

—traci kato-kiriyama

* * * * *

Erik Matsunaga is a Chicago-born fourth generation Nikkei American of Japanese and German descent. In addition to regular contributions to Discover Nikkei, his extensive research into Chicago’s Japanese American community has been most recently featured on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio’s The Afternoon Shift ...

In the late 1960s, a group of Los Angeles Japanese American ex-gang members, many at the time either fresh out of correctional facilities or the military, came together to save a generation. They called themselves the Yellow Brotherhood, and organized to get at-risk Asian American youth off drugs and out of gangs. They were particularly active in the early 1970s as a direct result of thirty-some Japanese American youth deaths in one year by drug overdose in the Los Angeles area; the Japanese American establishment of the time attributed these passings to mysterious heart attacks, the elder generations unwilling to ...

Prior to WWII, there were roughly four hundred persons of Japanese ancestry living in Chicago. By 1945, there were twenty thousand, the majority of whom were ex-West Coast Japanese Americans resettled from various WWII U.S. War Relocation Authority concentration camps.

Many were Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants) in their teens and early twenties with a lot of steam to burn, and so in 1946 the Chicago Nisei Athletic Association (CNAA) was formed as a competitive and social outlet with teams competing in sports such as basketball, baseball, softball, bowling, and golf, among others. At its peak, CNAA counted ...

Born in 1896, in 1919 my great‐grandmother Sueno Matsunaga (née Motoshima) of Shimomashiki‐gun, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan, immigrated to the U.S. as a picture bride, speaking no English and having never met her new husband. She joined Gunta Matsunaga, who had immigrated in 1906 from nearby Yatsushiro‐gun, Kumamoto prefecture, in farming a grape vineyard in Del Rey, CA, roughly fifteen miles southeast of Fresno.

My Nisei grandfather was born in 1920, the first of four sons. Upon the sudden passing of Gunta in 1935, Sueno transported his cremated remains to the Matsunaga family in Arisa‐machi ...