Nancy Matsumoto
@nmatsumotoNancy Matsumoto is a freelance writer and editor who covers agroecology, food and drink, the arts, and Japanese and Japanese American culture. She has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Time, People, The Toronto Globe and Mail, Civil Eats, NPR’s The Salt, TheAtlantic.com, and the online Densho Encyclopedia of the Japanese American Incarceration, among other publications. Her book, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth, was published in May 2022. Another of her books, By the Shore of Lake Michigan, an English-language translation of Japanese tanka poetry written by her grandparents, is forthcoming from UCLA’s Asian American Studies Press. Twitter/Instagram: @nancymatsumoto
Updated August 2022
Stories from This Author
Part I - Nikkei Eldercare in Los Angeles
March 25, 2010 • Nancy Matsumoto
My mother is in some ways a typical Southern California Nisei. She has participated in organized Nikkei ballroom dance, camera club, and widow’s groups. She plays marathon card games regularly with a group of Nisei friends, and travels the world on organized Japanese-American tours. A lot of her time also seems to be taken up arranging club dinners or luncheons, or the entertainment and door prizes that are an expected feature of these events. Although my mother is healthy and …
Historian Linda Gordon’s new Dorothea Lange bio
March 12, 2010 • Nancy Matsumoto
I attended a fascinating discussion recently at the New York Public Library, featuring NYU history professor Linda Gordon in conversation with New Yorker writer Ian Frazier. The topic of discussion was Gordon’s extensively researched and beautifully written new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W.W. Norton & Co.). Lange was a force of nature, a fiercely determined and ambitious woman who overcame a physical disability—a lame leg—to become a titan of documentary photography and a lifelong advocate for the …
Reclaiming Photographs of the WWII Japanese-American Resettlement
Nov. 16, 2009 • Nancy Matsumoto
I recently picked up a fascinating book, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi’s, Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943-1945. Hirabayashi teaches in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, where he holds an endowed chair dedicated to research on and teaching about the Japanese American World War II internment, redress and other Japanese-American issues. In Through the Lens, which Hirabayashi wrote with researcher Kenichiro Shimada, the authors brings to light the work of Hikaru …
Manzanar Pilgrims Shine Light on Past, Current Injustices, Honor Forebears
Aug. 10, 2009 • Nancy Matsumoto
On a sunny cold day in April, I boarded a bus in Little Tokyo, one of more than 1,500 people to make the 40th annual Manzanar pilgrimage. Our destination was the remote Owens Valley World War II prison camp where my father and his family were placed behind barbed wire in April 1942. Manzanar was one of ten euphemistically named “internment” camps authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt following the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The nearly 120,000 Japanese …
