In the 1930s Paul T. Hirohata gathered copies of speeches given by forty-nine Nisei valedictorians and published them in a collection called Orations and Essays. Seventy years later, his granddaughter, Joyce Hirohata reviewed the book, this time from an adult perspective, and it “took over her imagination.”
By her calculations, Ms. Hirohata realized that many of the students would have been part of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and many, although elderly, would still be alive. She began to wonder what had become of them, and thus, her journey to cre…