Nikkei Chronicles #7—Nikkei Roots: Digging into Our Cultural Heritage
Stories in the Nikkei Chronicles series have explored many of the ways that Nikkei express their unique culture, whether through food, language, family, or tradition. For this edition, we are digging deeper—all the way down to our roots!
We solicited stories from May to September of 2018 and received 35 stories (22 English; 1 Japanese; 8 Spanish; and 4 Portuguese) from individuals in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. For this series, we asked our Nima-kai community to vote for their favorite stories and an editorial committee to pick their favorites. In total, four favorite stories were selected.
Here are the selected favorite stories.
Editorial Committee’s Selections:
- ENGLISH:
Sharing Heart Beats
By Mori Walts
- JAPANESE:
The Tea of Soul from Aizuwakamatsu Revived After 150 Years
By Nao Magami
- SPANISH:
The Japan Inside Me
By Akemi Figueredo Imamura
- PORTUGUESE:
Crossing the World
By Heriete Setsuko Shimabukuro Takeda
Nima-kai selection:
- 27 stars:
The Mochitsuki Tradition in the Hikari Group of Londrina, Paraná
By Alba Shioco Hino, Nilza Matiko Iwakura Okano, Kiyomi Nakanishi Yamada
Stories from this series
Obāchan
Oct. 10, 2018 • Jessica Huey
“I wish you had shared more about your Japanese-American grandmother’s story.” – Professor Anderson In the fall of my freshman year in college, I took a class called Growing Up Ethnic and Multicultural. The final project for the course was to share your life story. Excited to share what I felt was my unique life story at age 17, I wrote fifteen pages about what it was like to grow up as an Asian-American in Ukiah, a small, rural town …
Kenji Igei, the Peruvian Nikkei singer-songwriter with Uchinanchu inspiration
Oct. 9, 2018 • Roger Jesús Gonzales Araki
“This is a story that goes beyond my own history, it goes back to my ancestors, to my roots, but it is still mine. This is a journey that goes beyond crossing an immense ocean, of feeling an emotion that is willing to never go out again, this is the story of this journey, an encounter with my identity, with the strength that I inherited in my soul and abilities. smiles that break out when saying Uchinanchu Yaibin.” This is …
Of Food and Identity: My Grandmother’s New Years
Oct. 8, 2018 • Cody Uyeda
Japanese New Years was one of the few traditions that made the jump when my great grandparents, like many others, left Japan for a better future on American soil. My grandmother, the designated New Year’s host for as long as I can remember, always began her preparations several days in advance, so every year my parents, my brother, and I would drive from our Orange County home up to my grandmother’s Los Angeles residence to help her prepare. For as …
The Gift
Oct. 5, 2018 • Grace Morizawa
My mother died on December 21, 1976. That Christmas was numbing. We already had the tree and gifts for my niece, but we took down the decorations. My niece was only three so it was ok with her. These days I look forward to Christmas and the whole commercial shebang. The lights, the carols, the brightly wrapped packages—all of it starting from Macy’s Christmas parade on Thanksgiving morning on TV. Some consider it crass, but I know from the Christmas …
War, Coffee and hope took Ryo Mizuno to Brazil
Oct. 4, 2018 • Luci Júdice Yizima
With the strength of a samurai who was fearless, determined, and convinced, Ryo Mizumo brought the first wave of Japanese immigrants to Brazil in 1908. Mizuno lived in Japan during the tumultuous time of the Meiji Restoration which, among other changes, opened the country's ports after more than 200 years of isolation. Mizuno was born a samurai in the transition from the feudal to the industrial era. A radical activist in the Movement for Freedom and People's Rights, he became …
Visiting the Former Family Temple
Oct. 3, 2018 • Edna Horiuchi
I had not expected to ever touch the temple entrance gate from the 1939 photo of my great-grandfather and his family. But here I was in Yamaguchi, Japan, reverently stroking and leaning against the weathered wood pillars and admiring the “Saikoji” sign. I was visiting my son, Kenzo, who did a study abroad semester during his junior year. This journey began nearly forty years ago, when I was a young woman in my twenties. I was intrigued by an old …