Nikkei Chronicles #12
Growing Up Nikkei: Connecting with Our Heritage

Our theme for the 12th edition of Nikkei Chronicles is Growing Up Nikkei: Connecting with Our Heritage.

We invite you to submit your stories, essays, and vignettes about the ways in which you have connected with your Nikkei heritage. What kind of Nikkei community events did you attend? What kinds of childhood stories do you have about Nikkei food? How did you learn Japanese as a child? We look forward to hearing stories from all generations about their own, their family, or community experiences.

All submissions that meet the guidelines and criteria will be published in the Discover Nikkei Journal on a rolling basis as part of this series and will be eligible for selection as the Nima-kai community favorite. Four additional stories (one each in English, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese) will be selected by the editorial committee. Selected articles will be featured and translated into Discover Nikkei’s other site languages.

We are accepting submissions until Tuesday, October 31, 2023 at 6 p.m. PDT.

• ENGLISH
  Alden M. Hayashi is a Sansei who was born and raised in Honolulu but now lives in Boston. After writing about science, technology, and business for more than thirty years, he has recently begun writing fiction to preserve stories of the Nikkei experience. His first novel, Two Nails, One Love, was published by Black Rose Writing in 2021. His website: www.aldenmhayashi.com.

• JAPANESE
  Emily Anderson is Project Curator at the Japanese American National Museum and a specialist on modern Japan. Having received her PhD in modern Japanese history from UCLA in 2010, she was assistant professor of Japanese history at Washington State University (Pullman, Washington) from 2010-2014, and postdoctoral fellow at University of Auckland in 2014. She is the author of Christianity in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014) and the editor of Belief and Practice in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on religion and imperialism in Japan and the Pacific. She also has extensive experience developing museum exhibitions, including co-curating Boyle Heights: Power of Place (JANM, 2002-2003), Cannibals: Myth and Reality (San Diego Museum of Man, 2015-ongoing), and Sutra and Bible: Faith and Japanese American World War II Incarceration (JANM, 2022-2023).

• SPANISH
  Harumi Nako Fuentes has a B.A. in Communication Studies with an emphasis in journalism from the University of Lima. She has worked at both public and private institutions—as a teacher, media analyst, editor, and publisher of several publications. She has also taken specialization courses in brand image and marketing, and has a degree in Cultural Management. Currently, she is the Communications Manager at the Japanese Peruvian Association (APJ), editor of Kaikan magazine, and a member of the editorial board of the APJ Editorial Fund.

• PORTUGUESE
  Laura Honda-Hasegawa, born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1947, worked in the field of education until 2009. Since then, she has dedicated herself exclusively to writing essays, short stories, and novels from a Nikkei point of view. She grew up listening to Japanese children’s stories told by her mother. As a teenager, she read the monthly issue of Shojo Kurabu, a youth magazine for girls imported from Japan. She watched almost all of Ozu’s films, developing a great admiration for Japanese culture all her life.