Tamiko Nimura

tnimura

Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American writer living in Tacoma, Washington. Her training in literature and American ethnic studies (MA, PhD, University of Washington) prepared her to research, document, and tell the stories of people of color. She has been writing for Discover Nikkei since 2008.

Tamiko just published her first book, Rosa Franklin: A Life in Health Care, Public Service, and Social Justice (Washington State Legislature Oral History Program, 2020). Her second book is a co-written graphic novel, titled We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press/Wing Luke Asian Museum). She is working on a memoir called PILGRIMAGE.

Updated November 2020

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A Partial and Personal Timeline of Asian American Men on Stage and Screen

By Tamiko Nimura
9 May 2023

Teahouse of the August Moon (1979) I’m dressed in a long dyed-purple tunic that comes down to my knees, with a wide white sailor collar. I am in third grade in Roseville, California. My dad Taku has refused to let the costuming department dye my hair. My hair is still auburn, though I’m supposed to be an Okinawan child in the late 1940s. Together my dad and I are in a college production of Teahouse of the August Moon at California State, Sacramento. In my memory, I have two lines penciled into the script: “Wasureta,” and “Kita yo.” I forgot. Here they c…

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Barbed Wire, Guard Tower, Tar Paper Barracks, Roll Call

By Tamiko Nimura
9 Mar 2023

The Tule Lake-Butte Valley Fairgrounds Museum is miles from the Tule Lake camp site. It’s a small one-story building that feels almost like a portable classroom. When I walk in there’s a tall counter on the left, a wall of leaning shelves on the right with a few books, and, just past the shelves, a display about the camp. It’s a modest room with utility carpet and fluorescent lights overhead. Like other descendants that are here on the pilgrimage with me, I am hungry for traces of camp, things that I can hold on to, glimpses into that past. I have spent so much of my writ…

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Manzanar, Diverted: An Appreciation

By Tamiko Nimura
7 Feb 2023

Manzanar, Diverted trailer Dear Ann, What a road you’ve traveled since I saw an earlier version of Manzanar, Diverted in our Tacoma basement years ago, pre-pandemic! I’m so thrilled to see that the film is traveling widely at festivals, received a national PBS airing. And I’m inspired by the fact that your team is still working with communities around the country to raise awareness of this intersectional history of Indigenous peoples, Japanese Americans, rancher families, environmental justice activists, and water rights advocates in Southern California. I wanted …

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Love and Reckoning: A Meditation On Family Photos

By Tamiko Nimura
6 Dec 2022

In my childhood home in Roseville, California, we had a room we called “the den.” It was not the formal living room, where we had two couches, a fireplace, and a glass-topped coffee table. “The den” was a place for watching TV and listening to records from my dad’s impressive record collection; he’d had a tansu built specifically for that collection, with record-size compartments painted black inside and room for speakers at each end. Every day, I would pass by a framed oval portrait of my Issei grandparents that hung on a wall in the den. Now that I think …

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Writing on the Wall—Text for Resisters: A Legacy of Movement from the Japanese American Incarceration

By Tamiko Nimura
8 Nov 2022

It was a warm summer day in August 2022, but I could feel my feet and hands growing colder, a scratch in my throat developing. I was sitting at my youngest daughter’s desk while she was trying to sleep. My husband and oldest daughter had contracted COVID-19 and were isolating in our basement. Some sunlight was reaching into my daughter’s bedroom over my left shoulder while I sat at her white laminate IKEA desk. I could feel myself almost getting sick with an infection of some kind, but it never developed into a full illness. I think I stopped just in time. But I knew I was deep in…

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Japanese migrants and their descendants

Tamiko Nimura

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The Chuo Gakuen School: The Seeds of Prestige for the Japanese Community in Mexico

Ansel Adams and Born Free and Equal: Another View

10th Annual Imagine Little Tokyo Short Story Contest

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The Ironies of the Japanese Canadian Internment History: Part 2—Discovering Japanese Canadian History

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Kizuna 2020: Nikkei Kindness and Solidarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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The Ironies of the Japanese Canadian Internment History: Part 2—Discovering Japanese Canadian History

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