What is in a name? Is your name unique? Have you developed your identity around your name? Were you named after a relative, a movie star, or a song title…? Do you happen to have a surname that is also shared by a famous person? These questions and more usually …
What does your family call Thanksgiving stuffing? In our family, stuffing was called dressing. This food and cooking story entails a tradition that goes back three generations from my maternal grandma, Suye Sakoda to her daughter, Edna Ishikawa, and to me, Troy Ishikawa. Do good cooks run in your family? …
I always liked interviewing people. I learned so much more than I could ever imagine, whether for an informational interview or for graduate school research. Most of the interviews I did in the past, I was contextualized to that person and hopefully that person also knew a little something about …
Every young generation creates their own halcyon days; my parents’ generation was no exception. They came of age during the 1930s and ‘40s in San Francisco’s Nihonmachi. They met outside at a car garage in Japan Town in 1938, married by eloping to Reno in 1940, and moved briefly to …
>>> Read Part 1 We drive around to a remodeled housing track where once quaint one-story Japanese farmhouses have been replaced with two-story mansions. Did everyone strike money? Aunt Nobu-san still resides in a traditional farmhouse framed with the blue tile roof. She was eating a meal and told us …
Mesmerized by Sakurajima, a majestic symmetrical-shaped volcano whose seductive plume obscures the top of this mountain crater, I wonder what mysteries may lie hidden beneath. Could one of the many stories revealed under the plume’s shadow contain my mother’s family ancestors?
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