Nanka Nikkei Voices

My mother, Kinuko Saito, was holding me in her arms as we left Japan. I was six months old when we embarked on a military ship headed for Los Angeles via Seattle. Without knowing any English, my mother left her family and friends to start a new life in the United States. We had arrangements to stay with my father’s relatives whom she had never met before.

We patiently stayed and waited for my father to arrive; he was a G.I., a Nisei soldier serving in the United States Army. Before he joined the Army, he and his family were …

For journalists, there are stories, perhaps only a handful, that never leave you. That’s the way I feel about the Alan Hotel in Little Tokyo.

It was almost a lifetime away, in 1986, when I was a foot soldier, or more officially a reporter, for The Rafu Shimpo Japanese American daily newspaper. I wore my long hair wild in perm, with bangs cut short so I could see. Seeing was important for a reporter—and what I was about to witness I could not believe.

In the mid-1980s, Little Tokyo was on the edge of being flattened and transformed into fancy …

About a year ago, a friend and I were boarding an elevator in a downtown high-rise. I pushed the button for the fifth floor.

My friend wanted to know how The Rafu Shimpo manages to gather the student’s names for it graduation issue every year. “It’s getting harder and harder every year,” I admitted. “School officials don’t always want to give us the names of students of Japanese ancestry.”

A man, who was already standing in the elevator, overheard us and piped in. “Why is it that Japanese American students do so well in school?”

My first thought was, “Hey, …

For Japanese Americans of my generation (second generation Nisei over 60), the source of our moral and cultural values is both clear and easily defined.

Our moral and cultural values spring from the Japanese cultural heritage of our parents and grandparents. If a group of Nisei, unacquainted with each other, were to gather in a room and a discussion arose about our childhood days, you would find an instant bond as the sharing of stories showed common stories of Issei (first generation) values.

What are some of these values? The list would most certainly include stories of values that we …

Akio “Lawrence” Nakagawa, a Kibei from the Sacramento Delta region, was interned at the Topaz, Utah camp. Answering the loyalty question “No-No,” he was transferred to Tule Lake, California, where he remained until the war ended, leaving in September of 1945.

When he was released from Tule Lake, he decided to head towards the Midwest to Minneapolis, Minnesota. There, he enrolled himself at the North Central Bible School, a school he had heard about through an Oakland-based Caucasian minister whom he met before his forced relocation into camp.

Akio’s train ride to Minneapolis was uneventful except for one incident. At …