Chris Komai

In Kerwin Berk’s short film, Kikan: The Homecoming the most dramatic moments occur around a dining room table when no one is speaking. The Ito family, trying to absorb the loss of their only son Ken (Ken Takeda) at the end of the war in Europe, is confronted with the reality of his death when a fellow 442nd Regimental Combat Team veteran Jimmy Ibata (Ryan Takemiya) unexpectedly shows up at their home in San Francisco.

As the film depicts, Ken’s dying wish is that Jimmy return an heirloom: a pocket watch. It is a request that Jimmy tries desperately to deflect …

All of my grandparents passed away before I was born. My mother Kay lost her parents to tuberculosis just as World War II began and my father Khan’s mother died in the 1930s. His father Toyosaku Komai is the only one to live into the post-war era and he died in 1950. Because of that, I never had a sense of who my grandparents were when I was growing up. However, through connections of the family business and other circumstances, I have been the recipient of information about Toyosaku from any number of resources over the years. Trying to form …

Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama’s recent capturing of the Master’s Golf Championship at the venerable Augusta Country Club in Georgia is one of the greatest individual achievements for an athlete from Japan. What’s interesting for me is that while I was happy for Matsuyama, his victory was not as impactful as previous Japanese sports achievements once were to me. The reason in this case is Collin Morikawa and a new generation of Japanese American athletes.

First, Morikawa is a young professional golfer whose father Blaine’s family has roots in Hawaii. Collin, whose mother is Chinese American, embodies a certain profile of the …

When I attended college at UC Riverside closing in on five decades ago, I took a sociology class on Japanese Americans and World War II. Like many Sansei, I knew very little about my family’s experiences during the war, but I was stunned at the enormity of the events that swept up our Japanese American community. After being rebuffed by my mother to share her memories of camp, I went to the college library and was dismayed to find how little scholarship existed on the forced removal and mass incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry almost 30 years after …

Keston Hiura has made a habit of breaking barriers and smashing stereotypes on his way to major league success.

Most sports fans understand that the challenges for any young man or woman to achieve a career in professional sports are numerous and often unforgiving. But some of the toughest hurdles are the perceptions or misperceptions that certain scouts may hold involving a prospect’s size, character, background or even ethnicity.

Keston Hiura heard that he had a perceived weakness that had nothing to do with his baseball abilities, but instead focused on his overall priorities: the fact that he intended to …