Joy Yamaguchi
Joy Yamaguchi (she/they) is the Public Programs Coordinator at JANM. Joy is also a queer, mixed race, yonsei community organizer with Nikkei Progressives in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles and a coordinator for Summer Activist Training. She is a descendant of survivors of the Santa Anita Assembly Center and Rohwer, Jerome, and Gila River concentration camps. Joy’s activism and work is grounded in this family history and they are committed to carrying on a legacy of building resilient communities through transformative justice and abolitionist practices. She graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Ethnic Studies with a focus on public humanities and representations of WWII Nikkei incarceration.
Updated May 2020
Stories from This Author
On the inside
May 21, 2020 • Vicky K. Murakami-Tsuda , Joy Yamaguchi , traci kato-kiriyama
Welcome to another special edition of Nikkei Uncovered: a poetry column. Two staff I work closely with at the Japanese American National Museum, public programs extraordinaire Joy Yamaguchi and digital guru Vicky Murakami-Tsuda, allowed me to facilitate a process with them to write poetry grounded in this particular era of Covid-19, lockdowns, missing and finding family, and the overall unknown of now. They took a risk, trusted the process, and ran with it and crafted some really lovely work. We …
