Nancy Matsumoto
@nmatsumotoNancy Matsumoto is a freelance writer and editor who covers agroecology, food and drink, the arts, and Japanese and Japanese American culture. She has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Time, People, The Toronto Globe and Mail, Civil Eats, NPR’s The Salt, TheAtlantic.com, and the online Densho Encyclopedia of the Japanese American Incarceration, among other publications. Her book, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth, was published in May 2022. Another of her books, By the Shore of Lake Michigan, an English-language translation of Japanese tanka poetry written by her grandparents, is forthcoming from UCLA’s Asian American Studies Press. Twitter/Instagram: @nancymatsumoto
Updated August 2022
Stories from This Author
Unforgotten Voices—Heart Mountain Holidays
Dec. 25, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
The following are holiday-themed excerpts from our book, Unforgotten Voices: An Oral History of the Incarceration, a collection of first-person accounts culled from original interviews, diaries, letters, and archival research. Together, they tell the story of the U.S. government concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming between the years of 1941 and 1945. They reflect the surreal quality of celebrating Christmas behind barbed wire: receiving gifts from anonymous church donors, the longing to return to the west coast, and the sense …
Historian Arthur A. Hansen on his latest book, Manzanar Mosaic
Oct. 26, 2023 • Nancy Matsumoto
Arthur Hansen has spent the past 50 years researching and writing about the World War II Japanese American incarceration, one of the ugliest chapters in American history, in which 120,000 people of Japanese descent were summarily exiled to remote, desolate prison camps, their civil rights having gone up in smoke along with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His latest book is Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America’s First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp. Recently Discover Nikkei …
Uka Sake: Closing the Circle on a Trans-Pacific Rice-Growing Legacy
May 30, 2023 • Nancy Matsumoto
Rice farmer Ross Koda’s immigrant grandfather Keisaburo was larger-than-life, a pioneering rice farmer known throughout the California agricultural community in the early 1900s as “The Rice King.” He was an energetic entrepreneur who won big and gave back generously, to the industry and to his home prefecture in Japan. After the family’s unconstitutional World War II incarceration devastated the business, Ross’s father Ed and his older brother Bill and their families labored to bring the business back to prosperity. They made …
An excerpt from Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain: As American As Apple Pie—Yellowstone - Part 2
May 2, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
Read Part 1 >> BACON, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENT We boy scouts went camping at the river and had a lot of good times. But there was one time I will never forget...we saw a patch of watermelons. One boy had a pocketknife, so we plugged melons trying to find some ripe ones. The next day, there was a bulletin put out by the camp newspaper reporting the incident and were we scared. We had damaged food for our own use. …
An excerpt from Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain: As American As Apple Pie—Yellowstone - Part 1
May 1, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
Unforgotten Voices From Heart Mountain: An Oral History of the Incarceration* is different from the usual memoir or biography of an individual family and it’s different from a historian’s narrative about the Incarceration and how it happened. These are unforgettable voices of Japanese Americans, many of them young people who were imprisoned during WWII, as well as those who imprisoned them, and townspeople in the harsh high desert of Wyoming. Told in their own words, from interviews, diaries, and letters these …
Niki Nakayama: How a JA Angeleno Conquered the Rarefied World of Japanese Kaiseki Cuisine
Nov. 29, 2022 • Nancy Matsumoto
Niki Nakayama, who heads n/naka restaurant in Los Angeles, is the most famous kaiseki chef in America. You can watch her on 2015’s season one of Chef’s Table, surgically cutting open a prickly-skinned sea urchin with gloved hands and a big pair of scissors, then layering its mustard-colored lobes with ikura fish roe and garnishing it with a small, delicate square of edible gold foil and a red-veined sorrel leaf. Or you can read about her in the Michelin Guide …
Sitting Down with Writer Gil Asakawa to Talk Japanese Food and His New Book: Tabemasho! (Let’s Eat!): A Tasty History of Japanese Food in America
Oct. 7, 2022 • Nancy Matsumoto
“Let me microwave something real quick.” It seems fitting that this is the first thing Gil Asakawa says to me before we start our phone interview. His wife Erin has made him a soup of nori, tofu, ground turkey, and green onions from their garden. It’s only 10:30 a.m., but to him this is “lunch-ish.” Breakfast was some leftover ribs from the night before. “We have very eclectic dining patterns,” he explains unapologetically. This prologue to our conversation is fitting …
Music at Work
April 1, 2022 • Nancy Matsumoto
A feel-good, nostalgic genre of Japanese dance tunes called City Pop has become the kitchen soundtrack for a community of Toronto chefs—one that sets the tone for a kinder, brighter, kitchen culture. When Shori Imanishi opened Imanishi Japanese Kitchen, his izakaya at Dundas West and Lisgar in 2015, his goal was to create the perfect amalgam of Japanese food, music, and Tokyo street culture. “I wanted to give it that Tokyo vibe,” the chef-owner says. “It wasn’t just about the …
Challenging Times at British Columbia's YK3 Brewery
May 7, 2021 • Nancy Matsumoto
In February of 2018, I visited YK3, a small sake brewery in Victoria, British Columbia headed by veteran toji (master brewer) Yoshiaki Kasugai. He is the creator of a line of sake called Yu (悠), a dreamy name that can mean “quiet” or “calm,” but also “far off,” or “boundless.” The brewery is in fact far off the beaten path, due south of downtown Vancouver, close to where the Fraser River empties into the Strait of Georgia. Housed in a …
Pictures and Poetry: Deepening the Connection to my Japanese Roots
Oct. 26, 2018 • Nancy Matsumoto
Growing up Sansei in my part of California’s San Gabriel Valley meant you didn’t have to work very hard to stay connected to your Nikkei roots—they were all around you. Every family that lived on our South San Gabriel street was Japanese American. We shared Japanese food, holidays, and a mania for gift giving. Our most exotic neighbors were from Okinawa, which as a child I took to be a country separate from Japan. Our local Issei “fish man” would …
