Mike Murase
@Mike_Murase
Mike Murase is an administrator at a community-based nonprofit agency in Los Angeles. He lives in Culver City, California. He considers himself a news junkie and a workaholic, but finds the time to enjoy photography, basketball, the outdoors, and Facebook.
Updated July 2014
Stories from This Author
Hiroshima and Obama: His Soaring Rhetoric and the Difficulties of Winning Peace
Aug. 5, 2016 • Mike Murase
A few weeks ago, I awoke in the middle of the night and heard President Obama’s familiar voice. I hadn’t planned on listening in real time to his speech in Hiroshima, but his usual eloquence lured me to stay up and watch. “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world changed,” Obama had begun his solemn address. “Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? … We come to mourn the …
Don't Call Me Michael!
July 8, 2014 • Mike Murase
I was born in Japan. My birth name is Murase Ichiro [村瀬一郎]. My obaachan proposed “Ichiro”—a name not uncommon for a first-born male, but she also had another reason. My grandmother, who taught at Kyoritsu Women’s University in Tokyo, had been a friend of the mother of Hatoyama Ichirō, a Japanese politician who later headed the center-right Liberal Democratic Party and became the Prime Minister of Japan. (He’d be turning in his grave to know that a person with progressive, …
