Tamiko Nimura
@tnimuraTamiko Nimura, PhD, is an award-winning Asian American (Sansei/Pinay) creative nonfiction writer, community journalist, and public historian. She writes from an interdisciplinary space at the intersection of her love of literature, grounding in American ethnic studies, inherited wisdom from teachers and community activists, and storytelling through history. Her work has appeared in a variety of outlets and exhibits including San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Magazine, Off Assignment, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Seattle’s International Examiner. She has written regularly for Discover Nikkei since 2016. She is completing a memoir called A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake.
Updated October 2024
Stories from This Author
“The Gold That Heals and Transforms”: A Conversation with Dr. Satsuki Ina
Feb. 7, 2024 • Tamiko Nimura
It’s an incredible honor for me to speak to Dr. Satsuki Ina. Ina is a Sansei activist, therapist, community healer, and now memoirist with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment and Protest (Heyday, March 2024). The book is a family memoir using various archives and documents of her parents during World War II as they navigated wartime hysteria, imprisonment, racism, and resistance. She was generous to share her time with me to speak about two …
Growing Up Nikkei As An Adoptee—A Conversation with Author Susan Ito
Nov. 13, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
I “met” Susan Ito online close to a decade ago on a social media site, where we bonded over being Japanese American writers and bloggers. The online friendship deepened over time. I discovered that she even met my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi at a Tule Lake pilgrimage. And we finally met in person a couple of years ago over cookies and crafts, with a mutual friend. I’m so glad that Susan is telling her story with the 2023 publication of her …
One Fighting Irishman — A Conversation With Filmmaker Sharon Yamato
Oct. 17, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
Wayne Mortimer Collins is an important name for my family. I first learned about this heroic, brash and outspoken attorney nearly twenty years ago while editing my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s first book, Swimming in the American (2005). I was surprised to see the book dedicated to Collins, and learned a bit about him while reading about my uncle’s struggle to regain his American citizenship after renouncing it under intense pressure by the United States government. My admiration for Collins only …
Wisdom Grown Wild: A Conversation with Filmmaker Rea Tajiri — Part 3
Sept. 10, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
Read Part 2 >> TN: Do you think you make art as a way to fill in those gaps or to speak to these silences that are created by the lack of having these these artifacts or heirlooms? RT: Yeah, probably that, and certainly my father had a lot of stories that he would share. And honestly some of them were really like “what?” I was probably too young to handle some of these but they left a very intense …
Wisdom Grown Wild: A Conversation with Filmmaker Rea Tajiri — Part 2
Sept. 3, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
Read Part 1 >> TN: I’ve been starting to think about what it is to write memoir and I’ve really felt so strongly that you [the writer/narrator] are the portal to this larger thing but at the very least you have to get your audience, in your space, in your doorway before they get to these larger things but the better you can get the portal prepared for your audience, the better the connection is, the better the relationship is. …
Wisdom Grown Wild: A Conversation with Filmmaker Rea Tajiri — Part 1
Aug. 27, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
In Rea Tajiri’s documentary Wisdom Gone Wild, an elderly Nisei woman is sitting outside in a wheelchair. An installation of golden yellow streamers is billowing around her, as she’s joined by children running and playing through the space. The woman is laughing in delight, as the streamers and the children are constantly changing the way she’s seeing the world—and how she’s seen. The elderly woman has dementia, and she is Tajiri’s mother. The film reframes two intensely creative processes—filmmaking and …
Notes on Hoarding
June 7, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
My mom tells me that when my oldest Nisei auntie died in 2016, there were so many boxes in the shed next to her house. Fruit crates, to be exact. Corrugated white cardboard, insulated. Interlocking flaps on the top—enough to let the air circulate over and around the Bartlett pears, Concord grapes, freestone peaches. Some release and some relief, a pleasure to close the boxes as the flaps locked into place, a slight struggle to open. What we hoarders recognize …
A Partial and Personal Timeline of Asian American Men on Stage and Screen
May 9, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
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 …
Barbed Wire, Guard Tower, Tar Paper Barracks, Roll Call
March 9, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
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 …
Manzanar, Diverted: An Appreciation
Feb. 7, 2023 • Tamiko Nimura
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 …
Discover Nikkei Updates
