Sharon Yamato

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Sharon Yamato is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles who has produced and directed several films on the Japanese American incarceration, including Out of Infamy, A Flicker in Eternity, and Moving Walls, for which she wrote a book by the same title. She served as creative consultant on A Life in Pieces, an award-winning virtual reality project, and is currently working on a documentary on attorney and civil rights leader Wayne M. Collins. As a writer, she co-wrote Jive Bomber: A Sentimental Journey, a memoir of Japanese American National Museum founder Bruce T. Kaji, has written articles for the Los Angeles Times, and is currently a columnist for The Rafu Shimpo. She has served as a consultant for the Japanese American National Museum, Go For Broke National Education Center, and has conducted oral history interviews for Densho in Seattle. She graduated from UCLA with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.

Updated March 2023

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The Power of Irei

The Legacy of Resistance: Nimura/Kashiwagi Family at Ireichō

By Sharon Yamato
1 Nov 2023

I feel I have paid many times over for the position I took at Tule Lake.Certainly, you don’t go around telling people you spent time at Tule Lake during the war.You try to push that back somewhere and not think about it.You try to block that part out of your life, but you have to live with it. —Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Swimming in the American Out of approximately 125,000 names of former detainees listed in Ireichō, more than 12,000 of them were once shunned and segregated at the often-maligned Tule Lake Segregation Center. For those who felt they needed to “block out”…

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Rediscovering Poston

By Sharon Yamato
15 Sep 2023

There’s a familiar adage that when Nisei get together, one of the first questions asked is “What camp were you in?” I suppose it’s almost like asking where you grew up, yet it definitely holds more meaning. For example, there’s a strong proprietary nature to individual camps. When I went to Heart Mountain in 1994 for the first of dozens of trips to Wyoming, it was assumed my parents were held there, and I had to reluctantly confess they weren’t. Not to be targeted as an imposter, I was quick to respond that my aunt and uncle were there — just t…

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The Power of Irei

Coming Home: My Family’s Journey to Ireichō

By Sharon Yamato
15 Aug 2023

And what we see is our life moving like that along the dark edges of everything, headlights sweeping the blackness, believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.Looking out for sorrow,slowing down for happiness. . . —Mary Oliver, “Coming Home” It was like coming home when 17 sisters, cousins, grandchildren, and spouses, some who had traveled from different parts of the globe, met on the day after a large family reunion—this time to honor living and dead family members by placing hanko stamps on the names of those reverenced in Ireichō. With an immediate …

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The Power of Irei

A Humble Man: 442nd Veteran Hiroshi Kunimura Honored at Ireichō

By Sharon Yamato
4 Jul 2023

When Dennis Kunimura suggested to his father, 98-year-old former 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) artilleryman Hiroshi Kunimura, that they drive from their home in Ogden, Utah, to Los Angeles, to mark the names in Ireichō of family members held at both the Salinas Assembly Center and the Poston Concentration Camp, the elder Kunimura did not expect the overwhelming reception that awaited him. In fact, when the elderly soldier was welcomed by a three-man camera crew from Nippon TV, JANM executive director and CEO Ann Burroughs, Go for Broke president Mitch Maki, and a host of staff members, …

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The Power of Irei

A Miraculous Family Gathering: Wasuke Hirota’s Mixed-Race Descendants Celebrate at Ireichō

By Sharon Yamato
17 May 2023

The sound of joyful voices and poignant emotions echoed through JANM’s Aratani Hall when on April 27, 2023, some 50 family members of Hispanic, Native American, and Japanese descent gathered for the 150th birthday celebration of their Issei ancestor, Wasuke Hirota. Adults and children of all ages arrived from as nearby as Azusa, California, and as far away as Osaka, Japan, to pay their respects by stamping Ireichō, the sacred book in which the former detainee’s name was listed among some 125,000 others forced into mass detention. Family members were also among the first to ma…

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Sharon Yamato

The Power of Irei

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