Emiko Tsuchida
@emikotsuchidaEmiko Tsuchida is freelance writer and digital marketer living in San Francisco. She has written on the representations of mixed race Asian American women and conducted interviews with some of the top Asian American women chefs. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice, the Center for Asian American Media, and the forthcoming Beiging of America series. She is the creator of Tessaku, a project that collects stories from Japanese Americans who experienced the concentration camps.
Updated December 2016
Stories from This Author
Lily Yuri Tsurumaki - Part 4
July 2, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 3 >> And did your mother work in camp? You know, she was doing embroidery here before they went to camp. Oh, this is when we’re leaving Heart Mountain. There was a Mr. Kinushita. Being it’s a desert area there’s a lot of Jasper rocks and dinosaur bones sometimes. And Mr. Kinushita started a rock group so they can go outside the campground and look around the desert area for rocks. Adina: Oh, is that how they got …
Lily Yuri Tsurumaki - Part 3
June 25, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 2 >> And how was the relationship between your parents? Did they have a good marriage? I think so but my father was much older than she, but they were introduced by a family friend in Japan but because he never came after her she said it was embarrassing. They were sort of like betrothed. That’s why she says she’s going to go to America herself. So she came on the boat by herself. Yes. Were they still …
Lily Yuri Tsurumaki - Part 2
June 18, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Oh wow what a beautiful picture. So this is like the office? That was our Japan Airlines office and I was taking care of the PBX board at the time. And as a senior in high school, they called us a certain name for those who were in the top category and we had to do service, and I had to do the switchboards early in the morning before the regular operator came in so that’s …
Lily Yuri Tsurumaki - Part 1
June 11, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
“One day, a classmate saw my name is Lily Oki and she was surprised she says, ‘You know I asked my mother, you disappeared you didn’t come back to class to school.’ And someone remembered me all those years? I thought my gosh, it was touching but she said I guess no one talked about it.” — Lily Yuri Tsurumaki I would not have met Lily had it not been for the wonders of social media. Her granddaughter, Adina Mori-Holt, …
Teresa Maebori - Part 2
April 3, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> And where did your family end up after the war? How did you come to Philadelphia? So this is interesting, too. My parents had just gotten married and they had all their wedding stuff and they were renting a house. And their landlord said, ‘Well, you can store it here and this place will be available when you come back.’ Oh wow, so they were lucky. They were lucky. And my dad had a job because his …
Teresa Maebori - Part 1
April 2, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
“I think that generation isn’t like our generation that grew up with the thought that we’re all equal. I think they understood it but they also knew that their parents were immigrants, and so they weren’t quite ‘up to par.’ Then of course what happened with Pearl Harbor just destroyed their lives. And they would forever be associated with the enemy.” — Teresa Maebori Educator, author, and Philadelphia JACL board member, Teresa Maebori, started to retrace her family’s WWII experience …
Paul and Alice Takemoto - Part 2
March 1, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Do you speak Japanese? Alice Takemoto (AT): Just like a second grader. So when I went there, we were there for three months and we went to about seven different universities and since Ken couldn’t speak Japanese, so I spoke in my kitchen Japanese. You know, the immigration stopped at a certain point so the people didn’t come from Japan, so my mother and father’s speech is what they called the Meiji Era. So I learned …
Paul and Alice Takemoto - Part 1
Feb. 28, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
“I grew up thinking women were stronger than men in terms of the absence of anger and self-pity. Absence of bitterness.” – Paul Takemoto If you ever have the pleasure of meeting Alice and Paul Takemoto, you will be in the presence of an endearing mother and son relationship. Sitting with them felt like a reunion with old friends, full of unexplainable but palpable comfort. Alice has a voice so sweet, she could deliver bad news and you’d receive it …
James Tanaka - Part 2
Jan. 31, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
Read Part 1 >> Did you get the sense that for whatever reason, Minidoka’s security felt more relaxed than the other camps? In my diggings I found the April 7th meeting of DeWitt, Eisenhower, and the ten Western governors in Salt Lake City. And on page four it says ‘distinction between internment and evacuation.’ It spelled out clearly the difference between the two. And then, poor Mr. Eisenhower had a problem with sleeping because knowing American citizens were locked up …
James Tanaka - Part 1
Jan. 30, 2018 • Emiko Tsuchida
"The guard tower had a heavy duty machine gun. Of course no one was standing directly behind it but it looked in. Later as an adult I learned another reason they locked us up was for our protection. If somebody's going to hurt us, shouldn't it be pointing out?" - James Tanaka As a longtime docent at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, James Tanaka is a wealth of knowledge. He knows government documents, dates and WWII particulars …
