Ryan Masaaki Yokota

On June 29th, 2017, the Alphawood Gallery, in partnership with the Japanese American Service Committee (JASC) was glad to announce the opening of their first original exhibit Then They Came For Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties. This exhibit ran for approximately four and a half months until November 19th, 2017.

Founded as an initiative of the Alphawood Foundation, the Alphawood Gallery approached the JASC in March, 2017 regarding the development of an exhibit on Japanese American incarceration and resettlement that could not only speak to the lessons of history, but also to ...

“This actually happened. This happened to somebody I love,” stated poet and author Dwight Okita, in talking about why he writes poetry about the Japanese American World War II incarceration experience. “This can happen again, maybe to someone you love, or maybe to you. So let’s not repeat the mistakes of history.”

With a packed audience in attendance, Okita was joined at this year’s Day of Remembrance (DOR) main program by Jason Matsumoto, Executive Producer of the film “The Orange Story;” and Erika Street Hopman, Writer/Director of “The Orange Story;” Kazuko Golden, Writer and Director of the ...

Welcome back to this month’s edition of Nikkei Uncovered: a poetry column. As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the signing of E.O. 9066 and the 50th anniversary of the official Manzanar Pilgrimage, we look to the virtues of and stories behind resistance with pieces from Los Angeles Sansei writer and activist, Miya Iwataki, and Yonsei JA/second generation Okinawan American educator and writer, Ryan Masaaki Yokota (based in Chicago)—from a song stoked by struggle in Heart Mountain to the reasons we marched then and now and again and again…enjoy.

—traci kato-kiriyama

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Miya Iwataki’s life ...

“So, one of the questions that mixed people get asked a lot is ‘What are you?’” stated Laura Kina, a Professor at DePaul University, speaking at a July 19, 2016 forum on mixed-race identity in Chicago. “I don’t particularly look Japanese American. I think physically I probably read as Latina, so that is the way that I mostly go through life.”

“My ethnic background is that my mom is white but also within whiteness there are also ethnicities as well, so her background in terms of her mother’s family was Spanish Basque, and her father was from Texas ...

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Schooling in Chicago

At the end of World War II, many Japanese Americans resettled in places like Chicago, as they tried to rebuild their lives after roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans had been incarcerated in Japanese American Concentration Camps during the war. And for some young men and women, returning from the camps or active military service, an eagerness to rebuild their lives brought them to the lucrative trade of “chick sexing,” an occupation that was emblazoned in full page ads in Japanese American magazines and guidebooks, and which could be paid for with G.I. Bill ...