Kizuna 2020: Nikkei Kindness and Solidarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In Japanese, kizuna means strong emotional bonds. In 2011, we invited our global Nikkei community to contribute to a special series about how Nikkei communities reacted to and supported Japan following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Now, we would like to bring together stories about how Nikkei families and communities are being impacted by, and responding and adjusting to this world crisis.
If you would like to participate, please see our submission guidelines. We welcome submissions in English, Japanese, Spanish, and/or Portuguese, and are seeking diverse stories from around the world. We hope that these stories will help to connect us, creating a time capsule of responses and perspectives from our global Nima-kai community for the future.
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Although many events around the world have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have noticed that many new online only events are being organized. Since they are online, anyone can participate from anywhere in the world. If your Nikkei organization is planning a virtual event, please post it on Discover Nikkei’s Events section! We will also share the events via Twitter @discovernikkei. Hopefully, it will help to connect us in new ways, even as we are all isolated in our homes.
Stories from this series
The Importance of Place: The Manzanar Pilgrimage and COVID-19
June 19, 2020 • Jonathan van Harmelen
Like so many events these days, the 51st annual Manzanar Pilgrimage was cancelled on Thursday, April 17 due to COVID-19. For the first time, the Manzanar Pilgrimage, a tradition that brings former incarcerees, activists, and scholars together, will not be held on the grounds of the Manzanar Concentration Camp. The pilgrimage’s organizing group, the Manzanar Committee, announced in its press brief that while the decision was difficult, “the health and well-being of our community, particularly our elders, is most important, …
Art always unites: drawing for children — the coloring book
June 15, 2020 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Art always unites and, sometimes, surprises in complicated situations such as the quarantine that several countries are following, voluntarily or obligatorily, to stop coronavirus infections. In Peru, various institutions and companies are making efforts and innovations to stay connected with their audiences, and the Pachacamac Archaeological Site and Sanctuary Museum, founded in 1965 and belonging to the Ministry of Culture of Peru, is no exception. Through digital tools such as videoconferences, virtual exhibitions and downloadable posters about their investigations in …
Ronald Arteta Miyashiro — Latin Generation
June 11, 2020 • Roberto Oshiro Teruya
In this quarantine, inactivity makes us seek to see other things that can distract us, to get away from all this news that saturates us and depresses us. Although it is true that it is very important to be informed, the only thing that excess information does is create more stress in us, we must keep in mind that we know what to do, the measures to avoid getting infected, not going out. We cannot change the rest, it is …
How Little Tokyo, Los Angeles is approaching community-led recovery through arts and culture
June 10, 2020 • Kenji C. Liu
Longtime residents will tell you that Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo almost died in the 1990s. Lasting physical and psychological scars lingered from unjust incarceration during World War II, and the city’s planned Civic Center expansion threatened to further dissolve trust and resident control in the historic neighborhood. Facing a long and uncomfortable history with outsider-led policies and redevelopment, many Japanese American residents had been forced out of Little Tokyo and were not returning. The COVID-19 crisis threatens to devastate the neighborhood once …
“I was not afraid of this virus, but I did respect it”
June 8, 2020 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
In Spain, around 240 thousand cases of people infected with coronavirus have been registered. One of them is the Peruvian and former dekasegi Gabriel Ueda Tsuboyama, who has lived in the European country for more than 15 years. Luckily, it is also one of the approximately 150,000 recovered so far. It all started with a throat problem that he minimized, attributing it to a different origin than the real one. “It was all a bit comical. It turns out that …
Energizing Or End Times For a 117-Year-Old Publication
June 3, 2020 • Gwen Muranaka
This is how I go cover a story now. I put on a cloth mask and wash my hands, grab my recorder and put an LAPD press badge around my neck. A while back, photographer Mario Gershom Reyes and I covered Hideki Obayashi of Azuma in Gardena as he fights to keep the restaurant going. Even with masks on, you can see the strain, exhaustion and worry in his eyes. His wife Genie Nakano stopped by with a tin box …