Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/1788/

Racial discrimination prepared her in becoming the first transgender trial lawyer

I mean, I kind of look at Japanese American legacy and heritage as I'm really lucky. Those challenges that were put front of me were almost perfect in terms of sequence. If I was going to represent a community of Japanese American lawyers a generation of us really, I would take whatever came from that and I would use that experience to be the first transgender trial lawyer. That's a lot more lonelier position as there’s nobody else like that anyways so I guess in a way I look back on it because I sometimes do nowadays. It's almost like being hated because I was Japanese American, in the wake of the war and all of that and being discriminated against my whole career starting at the beginning was a perfect prelude being hated because I was trans they've got me ready for it in way that that's probably much more calm and deliberate because I sort of experienced that, and I was able to live in my own shoes and that incarnation. And respond to it in that way.


discrimination interpersonal relations Japanese Americans lawyers LGBTQ+ people transgender

Date: July 14, 2020

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Matthew Saito

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum; Japanese American Bar Association

Interviewee Bio

Mia Yamamoto is a Sansei transgender attorney and civil rights activist. She was born in the Poston concentration camp in Arizona in 1943 where her parents were incarcerated. She joined the Army and served in the Vietnam War. Inspired by her father's courage to speak out against the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, she attended the University of California Los Angeles's School of Law and has been a leader in the field of social justice, including working with the Japanese American Bar Association. (March 2021)

*This is one of the main projects completed by The Nikkei Community Internship (NCI) Program intern each summer, which the Japanese American Bar Association and the Japanese American National Museum have co-hosted.

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