Sitting in the upper deck overlooking right field at AT&T Park in San Francisco for the first game of the Dodgers-Giants series in September, I was feeling pretty low. As part of the biennial Komai Family Reunion this year, our Northern California relatives had arranged to get tickets to this …
Do you know who Pat Suzuki is, and why she is significant to Japanese Americans? I suspect you would have to be at least as old as me (a Sansei born in the early 1950s) to recognize her name and know that she was a popular singer. Any Nisei would …
Eighty years ago, the inaugural Nisei Week was organized in Little Tokyo in 1934. A distinctive Nikkei community event that was actually created as a marketing campaign, Nisei Week reflects the bicultural character of its founders. It has a parade that features ondo dancers (which explains why the parade with …
This year, 2014, Little Tokyo is celebrating its 130th anniversary. Which is remarkable, since it has constantly been threatened with abandonment and extinction since World War II. In fact, twenty-two years ago, I thought Little Tokyo was dying. But in each case, a common remedy allowed the historic Nikkei neighborhood …
My mother passed away last October at the age of 92 and there are so many things about her that I will never know. Mom had a tumultuous early life, but as the youngest of her four children, I was privy to few of her darkest moments. When she and …
On April 4, 1942, The Rafu Shimpo produced its final edition before everyone of Japanese ancestry was unconstitutionally forced to leave the West Coast by the U.S. government. No one, least of all my uncle Aki Komai, could know with any certainty if this was an interruption in the operation …
Read Part 1 >>REDRESSFor Norm Mineta, passing redress is still his most satisfying achievement in Congress. The formal push came when the National Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) passed a resolution in 1978 advocating for legislation. Representatives Mineta and Robert Matsui and Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga worked together …
When Norman Yoshio Mineta looks back on his life, he shakes his head and wonders how a little kid from San Jose wound up in Washington, D.C., first as a Congressman and then as a member of two Presidents’ Cabinets. Moreover, he has distinguished himself as an advocate for civil …
Growing up, Jane Aiko Yamano never dreamed that she would be the heir to her remarkable grandmother and the various beauty and health schools she fostered. Nor could she imagine being at the forefront of perpetuating and modernizing the Japanese traditional kimono with an eye at engaging young people in …
When Stan Sakai’s father Akio heard that his son wanted to work as an illustrator of comic books, he was, not surprisingly, skeptical. “You can’t make a living as a cartoonist,” his father told him. “Why don’t you go into accounting or computers?” In some form, this parent-child conversation has …
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