Emerging from the Shadow of a Hero: A Veteran’s Son Talks About His Own War Experience

シャーロン・ヤマト

As the sun peeked out on a slightly overcast summer’s day, a few WWII veterans gathered with a crowd of friends and families on the occasion of the 15th Anniversary of the Go For Broke Monument in the heart of Little Tokyo. Mostly in their 90s, the white-haired men carried …

Carrying the Torch: Wayne Collins Jr. on His Father’s Defense of the Renunciants

シャーロン・ヤマト

The inscription on the front page of Michi Nishiura Weglyn’s landmark book, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, reads: “Dedicated to Wayne M. Collins Who Did More to Correct a Democracy’s Mistake Than Any Other One Person.” At a time when people barely knew Colllins’ name, …

The Happy Power of Obon

シャーロン・ヤマト

Obon season is a time when communities gather together to celebrate life and death through food and dance. Like the beat of the taiko drum, Obons gather energy through movement, and they move with joyful rhythms all their own. Warm summer days and nights give way to one or two …

What It Means to Go On a Camp Pilgrimage

シャーロン・ヤマト

pil•grim•age noun: pilgrimage; plural noun: pilgrimages

Stranger in a Strange Land: A Sansei’s First Trip to Japan

シャーロン・ヤマト

I’d never felt a passionate connection to the country of my ancestors. I blamed it on the war: postwar America saw Issei and Nisei trying to get over being labeled the “enemy,” and we Sansei children were faced with a curious dilemma in many ways initiated by our parents—how much …

Nanka Nikkei Voices

Kawana’s Kamaboko Kingdom

シャーロン・ヤマト

One thing was clear to businessman Frank Kawana when he took over his father’s Little Tokyo kamaboko business in 1955: people were not clamoring for fishcake. Quite the opposite—once a Japanese American staple, kamaboko sales were declining in the U.S. Like his father Otoichi Kawana, Frank somehow could not abandon …