Discover Nikkei Project Updates

We are working on a major redesign of the Discover Nikkei website, along with new features and expanded functionality! Our team is working hard on many major changes that will be rolling out over the next year. Here are just a few of the exciting new changes we will be releasing soon:

• A complete redesign of the entire site that we will be releasing section by section
• Integration of Google Translate options
• A new and improved tagging system that will make finding content of interest more effective, regardless of language
• Ability to create accounts and log in using your Facebook and Google accounts
• Improved user profile pages
• Improved online events calendar

We would love your feedback on the new changes! Please email us at editor@DiscoverNikkei.org with your comments. We would also really appreciate if you can report any problems using the new features and pages.

We will be providing updates on this page as we work on and unveil these exciting new features. Check back often to find out what’s new and in progress!

October 3, 2024

We have just released updated designs and features for our user profiles and accounts-related pages! Check out our new Nima-kai Community page!

In addition to a fresh new design, some of the new features include:

Google and Facebook accounts
You can now create new accounts and login using your Google and Facebook accounts! A Discover Nikkei account will be automatically created using the email address used with your Google/Facebook account.

Please note that if you already have a Discover Nikkei account, it is best to log into your Discover Nikkei account first, then go to your user profile page, click the “Edit Profile” button, and use the “Sign in with Google” or “Sign in with Facebook” buttons. You can always disconnect the accounts the same way.

Display Names
You can now add a display name that’s different from your username. Unlike usernames, display names can include spaces, Japanese characters, and other special characters for more flexibility in different languages.

Translations for Bios
User profile bios can now be added per site language. If you leave a language tab empty, Google translations will automatically be added. Please note that if you modify a Google translation (even just adding a space), it will be considered as your edited bio. In that case, it will no longer automatically translate your original bio if you make any updates. In order to revert back to updating Google translations, you will need to delete the entire translation in that language.

Please note that if you had previously added your own translations within your bio, we have made efforts to migrate your original translations into the appropriate language versions. 

New location picker
We have a new location picker! Just start typing in your location and select from the options provided. The locations are now displayed translated for each site language. You can also search for other users based on location.

Please note that as before, you can select whatever level of location you are comfortable with sharing. We strongly encourage you to add at least your country. 

Social Media and Websites
We have provided some fields for you to share your social media and website links. Please be sure to add the full URLs (including https://) so that it will make the links clickable on your profile page.

Nikkei Interests
The Nikkei Interests now use our canonical tags system, so you can add a wide variety of interests. This will make it easier to find and connect with other Nima community members with similar interests. 

Thanks very much to our engineering staff—Waka Ninohira and Grady Martin—for all their hard work in getting these improvements completed! Many thanks also to our volunteer, Xavier Manalo, for designing our new Nima of the Month icon. 

Next up: a redesigned Events section!

July 19, 2024

We are excited to announce that Discover Nikkei is (at last) on Instagram! Because of our multilingual audience, we’ve created two accounts: @discovernikkei (English/Japanese) and @descubranikkei (Portuguese/Spanish). We’ll be using Instagram to share new site content; promote Discover Nikkei programs and special initiatives; and most importantly, connect with new audiences that might not have come across Discover Nikkei previously. Give us a follow and share our profile(s) with anyone who might be interested!

We have also recently added the recording from the In Search of Hiroshi virtual book launch program with author Gene Oishi, his daughter Eve Oishi, and scholar Koji Lau-Ozawa. Watch it now!

This week, we also published the first Nikkei Names 2: Grace, Graça, Graciela, Megumi? submission by Japanese Canadian Chuck Tasaka about unique Nisei nicknames. Read “Kinky, Ken-boh, Gacha-ba” and give it a star if you like it! We have already received several more stories which we will be publishing in the coming weeks. We’d love to share your Nikkei name story too! Learn more at 5dn.org/names2.

June 21, 2024

This has been a busy month for our project! We presented two virtual programs with the next episode of Nima Voices scheduled for next week with Stan Kirk and guest host Masumi Izumi talking about his research into Japanese Canadians who were exiled to Japan at the end of World War II. Check the Discover Nikkei Programs page to watch the recording from the 11th Annual Imagine Little Tokyo Short Story Contest Awards Ceremony, including dramatic readings of the winning stories. Subscribe to Discover Nikkei’s YouTube channel to be notified when the video for the Gene Oishi virtual book launch is available.

Discover Nikkei is partnering with the Japanese American Bar Association to host two interns this summer through the Nikkei Community Internship  Program (NCI)! Syd Haupt and Melissa Segura will be conducting a life history interview and writing various articles to be published on our website. We are excited to work with them!

Sydney (Syd) Haupt recently graduated from UC Santa Barbara, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in Communication. She is from Pasadena, CA. As a multiracial Yonsei Japanese American, Syd is very passionate about serving the Japanese American community. She is always looking for an opportunity to learn, and cannot wait to see how stories from the Japanese American community will impact her perspective. This fall, she will be pursuing her master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where she is studying racial and ethnic identity formation. She hopes to eventually get a PhD and spend her life conducting research that helps honor the rich diversity of communities like this one.

Melissa Segura is a rising fourth-year sociology student at the University of California, Davis. She is an active member of the Japanese American Student Society at UC Davis as well as the Asian and Pacific Islander community coordinator at the Cross Cultural Center. When she is not working, you can find her figure skating or spending time with her cats. She is excited to be a NCI intern this year since she hopes to go to law school to study civil rights law after she graduates from UC Davis. Furthermore, she is excited to get to meet working professionals in the Japanese American community and learn more about her identity!

And lastly, our engineering team is working on more major updates to the user profile and events pages, as well as making some adjustments for improved accessibility. We have also added Google translations for almost all of the articles in the Journal archive. We hope to have more to unveil next month!

June 4, 2024

On June 1, we announced this year’s Nikkei Chronicles theme. The theme for the 13th edition is Nikkei Names 2: Grace, Graça, Graciela, Megumi? Share your Nikkei name story and help us explore the meanings and origins behind Nikkei names. Check out the submission guidelines page for details, including writing prompts to help you get started. All stories that meet the criteria will be published on Discover Nikkei.

The deadline to submit stories is October 31, 2024, but we will be publishing the stories on a rolling basis starting in July. Readers can begin voting for their favorite stories as they are published to be selected as the Nima-kai community favorite, so we encourage you to submit your stories early! In addition, our Editorial Committee will be selecting their favorites in each language—Kristen Nemoto Jay, Eijiro Ozaki, Mónica Kogiso, and Liana Nakamura.

The Nikkei Chronicles main page and guidelines pages all feature new designs to match our redesigned site. Thanks so much to Chad Grover for his help on both pages. The logo for Nikkei Names 2 was created by Jay Horinouchi (Jay talked about his process for creating our Nikkei Chronicles graphics in episode 5 of Nima Voices).

We are grateful for our Community Partners—Asociación Peruano Japonesa, Brazilian Society of Japanese Culture and Social Assistance – Bunkyo, The Rafu Shimpo, and Nikkei Australia for helping us to encourage people from around the world to participate by sharing their Nikkei names stories. We hope to be reading your Nikkei name story soon!

May 6, 2024

It’s been over a month since we started rolling out the new design for Discover Nikkei. We hope that you appreciate the changes! We are continuing to make some minor tweaks and improvements across the updated pages thanks to our hard-working team of staff and volunteers. Make sure to check out the new illustration by Roxsy Lin on some of our About pages! You can view it at the top of our “What is Nikkei?” page. 

As with any major changes in life, there are growing pains. If you notice any problems with the site or find any of the new features confusing, please let us know! We are continuing to make improvements and plan to add some more helpful hints, instructions, and FAQs where needed, so your feedback is invaluable. We’d also just love to know what you’re liking about the new site design and features so we know we’re on the right track!

Our team is now working on significant changes to our user profile pages, with some exciting new features in the works. And speaking of our team, we have a new staff person starting today! Marjorie Hunt is Discover Nikkei’s new Community Engagement Specialist. She will be handling a lot of our day-to-day content and marketing duties like prepping our daily Journal articles and social media posts, responding to inquiries, and more. We’re excited to have her on board and will have her introduce herself soon!

April 11, 2024

A new day and more exciting changes to Discover Nikkei!

Check out our redesigned homepage and Journal! Some significant changes to point out:

Mobile friendly—The new templates have mobile-friendly versions. 

Google Translated articles—Almost all of the articles that did not previously have translations have been translated by Google Translate, giving you a good approximation of what the stories are about. Machine translated content will have an alert message and we are adding machine translations for most of our site.

Canonical Tags—We are really putting the new canonical tags to extensive use with the articles (please see my previous post explaining how the tag aliases and implied tags work). If you are interested in helping us add more relevant tags to content or would like to help us in other ways, we invite you to join our volunteer team!

As with the other sections, there are a few things that we are planning to update, but please let us know if you have any feedback on these changes—in particular the mobile-friendly templates, language icons, and canonical tags. We would really appreciate it! 

Stay tuned for much more to come!

April 10, 2024

We launched the fresh, new look for the Interviews section yesterday! In addition, you will also see other changes that will significantly impact how users can read and find content, regardless of language, throughout our site. 

New Interviews pages—A clean, modern interface and mobile-friendly pages! Thanks to Waka Ninohira for getting the new templates completed. There are still a few more minor tweaks and refinements that we are planning, but we would love to get your feedback on the new layouts, and especially, let us know if you run into any problems or confusion.

Google Translate—We have added machine translations for most of the articles and interview transcripts that don’t have vetted, official translations. Machine-translated content will have a warning/alert message.

New language icons—You will find the new language icons on the redesigned Interviews pages that determine which language version is the original language, which are official translations, and which were done via Google Translate. We are still tweaking the text and colors, but please let us know if it makes sense / is helpful.

Canonical tags—The Interviews are the first time we’re publicly using our new canonical tags system! A LOT of work has gone into replacing our old tagging system with one that (hopefully) eliminates redundancies and typos, while also allowing us to translate tags.

• Tag Aliases—The new system incorporates tag aliases (to reduce redundancies, but still acknowledges common alternate terms). For example, you can start typing in “WWII” and it will show “WWII camps → World War II camps” as an option.

• Implied Tags—It also adds implied tags. For example, if we add “Little Tokyo” as a tag, it will automatically also add “Los Angeles,” “California,” and “United States.”

Thanks so much to Grady Martin for all of his work in setting up the new canonical tags system and getting them to work, despite the added functionality that kept expanding the scope. Also, we are indebted to Cheryl Toyama who took on the MASSIVE job of reviewing and cleaning up over 18,000 tags from our old tagging system. There are now nearly 12,000 canonical tags. We are also very thankful to Silvia Lumy Akioka (Portuguese), Milagros Tsukayama (Spanish), and Naho Hatada (Japanese) for reviewing the canonical tag translations.

Because of the overwhelming volume of tags, it is inevitable that some errors were made, and aliases and implications missed. Please send us any corrections or additions that we should make. Email us the tags that are incorrect or missing and the corresponding page.

March 26, 2024

We’re continuing to roll out the new design on Discover Nikkei. Today, the Japanese American Military Experience Database has gotten a new look! The changes will give you a preview of what’s to come in other parts of the site. Stay tuned for much more!

March 25, 2024

Did you notice the look of our new About pages? We just released the first of the many design changes coming to Discover Nikkei! We are SO excited to FINALLY begin to share these changes with you, which have been nearly two years in the making.

Thank you to the team at Urban Insight for their help with the new design. We love the fresh, clean look which incorporates some unique touches that connect us with our cultural heritage. We have kept the kokeshi to represent our global Nima-kai community, and we absolutely love the illustrations created by volunteer Roxsy Lin! If you look at the About pages, you’ll see two different versions. In addition to the new look, you may also notice the responsive design which means viewing Discover Nikkei on your mobile and tablet devices is easier to view.

Thank you especially to Discover Nikkei’s engineers—Grady Martin and Waka Ninohira—for doing a tremendous amount of work to get this all ready for you! We also have many volunteers and others who have been working behind-the-scenes.

Much, much more will be released over the next week, so keep checking back!

Illustration by Roxsy Lin