WEEK 4 

October 22 - 28

sunday - october 22

Family History Workshop with Densho

Join Densho’s archives director, Caitlin Oiye Coon for a virtual workshop on Japanese American genealogy/family history. We will start with the basics of researching and writing your family history, then move into researching your family's experiences during the decade of 1940-1950. Topics to be explored in greater depth include federal arrests, exclusion, incarceration, and relocation. You’ll leave this one-hour workshop with tools and resources that will help you gain a fuller picture of your family’s WWII incarceration experience and more.

Cozy Chat: Authoring a Family Story

Family stories are an essential part of our heritage and personal identity. Writing a family story creates a lasting record, provides a unique perspective on history, and helps us understand our roots.

Join Constance Hays Matsumoto, co-author of the historical novel, OF WHITE ASHES via an interactive Zoom session for an inspiring and engaging cozy chat to discuss her writing and publishing journey, the state of the publishing industry, and various paths for preserving your own short and long-form family stories.

Can We Talk About "Wisdom Gone Wild"?- An Evocative Film About Caregiving, Dementia, Loss and Love

Join us for an insightful conversation about Rea Tajiri’s film, Wisdom Gone Wild, reflecting on the challenges of caregiving for a parent experiencing dementia and the unexpected transformation of a parent/child relationship. Tajiri will reflect on her process of acclimating to her mother's dementia and on her experiences caring for her mother for 16 years—all the way making the film that has been called "a portrait of love." Tajiri will be joined by notable speakers on aging in the community: Daphne Kwok, VP of Asian American and Pacific Islander Audience Strategy at AARP, and Dr. Jason Karlawish, a Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Penn Memory Center. The conversation will be moderated by Richard Lui, award-winning news anchor for MSNBC and NBC News and Director and Producer of the recent film, When Minds Hurt, Love Heals - Unconditional. You won't want to miss this one!

Tulare Assembly Center Monument Project

High School students in Tulare, CA are determined to construct a monument at the Tulare County Fairgrounds to memorialize the 4,978 Japanese Americans imprisoned there in 1942. Last April, the Tulare County Fair Board unanimously approved the construction of a monument. Learn about their inspiring work and ongoing project directly from their teacher and the students themselves.

monday - october 23

Assembly Centers-historical significance then and now

Courtesy of Japanese American Museum of Oregon

A panel of representatives from the Hayward Heritage Plaza, Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial, Puyallup Assembly Center, Stockton Assembly Center, and Portland Assembly Center will discuss the history and the importance of preserving these sites of conscience. This session will include a brief update on each site, their historical significance and the work that has been done to memorialize these sites.

Participants: Moderator, Chisao Hata, Director of the Living Arts program at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon; Eileen Lamphere; Puyallup Assembly Center, Doug Yamamoto; Tanforan Assembly Center and Memorial Site, Hayward Heritage Plaza; Robbin Kawabata and Stockton Assembly Center, Steve Sue.

Artist Talk with Shinpei Takeda

Born in Osaka, Japan Shinpei Takeda is a visual artist and filmmaker who has lived and worked in Tijuana, Mexico and Düsseldorf, Germany. His works involve a wide range of themes regarding memories and history. He uses multi-media installations, sound interventions, documentary films (Hiroshima Nagasaki Download is being shown in the 2023 Tadaima Film Festival), large-scale photography installations, and collaborative community projects in various public contexts. Shinpei is also a Founder and a former creative director of The AJA Project, an art nonprofit in San Diego. As a filmmaker he works on documentaries and doc-fiction hybrid films (Atopus Studio). As a performance artist, he directs Ghost Magnet Roach Motel, a noise performance unit from Tijuana, Mexico. Shinpei’s recent anti-monument project makes use of different technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and mix reality to visualize invisible memories in sites such as Ground Zero Park in Nagasaki and a Holocaust memorial site in Düsseldorf.

Tadaima film festival curator Rob Buscher will join Shinpei Takeda in a pre-recorded conversation about his recent works, which center on remembrance and public monuments.

Explore Shinpei’s work further at the links below:

Antimonument Extended Project - regarding the sculpture by god-gifted artist of Nazi

Memory Undertow at ground zero in Nagasaki

Float for Reclamation: Limit of Your Safe Space Iteration II- A project of multi-user VR project between Japanese American and Japanese Mexican researcher and scholars. Article by Ceria Viramontes.

WWII Camp WAll Monument

Courtesy of Faith’s Social Action Committee and Greater Los Angeles Chapter of JACL

Nancy K. Hayata gives a presentation on the WWII Camp Wall project, a National Monument that is being built by the City of Torrance. The Memorial will be located at Columbia Park on the corner of Prairie Avenue and 190 Street in the City of Torrance, California.

For more information: https://www.wwiicampwall.org

Confinement in the Land of Enchantment

Courtesy of New Mexico JACL

CLOE (Confinement in the Land of Enchantment) is a multi-faceted project that offers the little-known stories of the Issei men who were rounded up by the FBI immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor and incarcerated in DOJ camps in New Mexico.For many survivors of the WRA camps and their descendants, these were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who suddenly vanished from our lives and reappeared years later, as one grandson put it, “a changed man.” Project CLOE is honored to be included in Tadaima’s fourth annual virtual pilgrimage. In this session, Victor Yamada, CLOE project lead, will present a historic overview of the camps as well as a portrayal of New Mexico’s Japanese American community before and during WWII. Playwright Nikki Nojima Louis and JACL Players, New Mexico JACL’s readers’ theater touring group, will dramatize stories of camp guards, townspeople, and Nikkei from both inside and outside the barbed wire. Finally, Claudia Katayanagi will screen a trailer of her film, “A Community in Conflict,” on the fraught history of attempts by the City Council to memorialize the Santa Fe Camp with a marker and the opposition of others who felt that it would be “a slap in the face of WWII veterans.” It records both sides of an issue that brought back painful memories of the Bataan Death March as well as the injustices of Japanese American incarceration. It pays tribute to the courage of those who refused to avert their eyes from history.

tuesday - october 24

Nikkei Write Now!

Are you all set to start your writing journey? It can help having a writing group to lend support, advice and share experiences. Join the members of Nikkei Write Now as they describe how they began meeting after Alden Hayashi's workshops in 2021. Learn what it took to get started and also how they have maintained the group over the years.

Sacramento Japantown: The Demolition that Became a National Mode

The presentation by Reclaim Sacramento Japantown provides an overview of the condemnation and demolition of Sacramento's Nihonmachi, and the community's fight to save their Japantown from destruction. Built on a foundation of racism that started with a resolution that supported the permanent exclusion of Japanese Americans, the Sacramento City Council pursued the destruction of Japantown as its first redevelopment project. Despite community opposition, the City Council approved the condemnation of Japantown in 1954.

The 30-minute presentation will be followed by a 30-minute question and answer session presented by members of the advisory committee of Reclaim Sacramento Japantown, an organization formed to preserve the story of Japantown in Sacramento.

What is the future of Anzen Hardware?

A community discussion about the preservation, sustainability and future of legacy businesses

Anzen Hardware is a 77-year-old legacy small business whose most recent owner retired at 84 years old. Committed to sustaining the legacy small business Philip Hirose and his mother Jo Ann committed to the purchase of Anzen Hardware despite the uncertainty of its future, and if it could succeed in a new location under new ownership. Chat with Philip Hirose and small business consultant Mariko Lochridge about the challenges that face new owners of legacy small businesses committed to their preservation and growth within the community.

wednesday - october 25

Writing What Haunts Us: New Works by Yonsei Authors

Join us as we launch new books by Yonsei authors Brynn Saito, Brandon Shimoda, and Jami Nakamura Lin. Their work spans multiple genres but all orbits around intersecting themes of hauntings, inheritance, dreamworlds, collective pasts, and imagined futures. Each author will read from their new works, then come together for a conversation moderated by poet Troy Osaki.

Nikkei Rising Book Club

Join the Nikkei Rising Book Club as we explore Ken Mochizuki's graphic novel, Those Who Helped Us.

The Untold Story of Wayne M. Collins: A Conversation with Writer and Filmmaker Sharon Yamato

Sharon Yamato discusses the motivation and research behind her films about the Japanese American incarceration with artist and activist Erin Shigaki. Yamato’s latest film tells the story of attorney Wayne M. Collins, a man who dedicated his life to defending wartime cases no one else would take, including those of Fred Korematsu and Iva Toguri. Also at the center of his work is the case that consumed his life for 23 years: defending more than 5,000 people who renounced their U.S. citizenship while at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Yamato will discuss her other projects, including MOVING WALLS, a book and film on the barracks at the Heart Mountain Concentration Camp, OUT OF INFAMY, a film on pioneering activist/author Michi Nishiura Weglyn and A FLICKER IN ETERNITY, a film on artist/writer/442nd RCT soldier Stanley Hayami. A preview of the Collins film, narrated by George Takei and set to premiere on October 28, 2023 at the Japanese American National Museum, will be featured. The session will also include free giveaways of OUT OF INFAMY and MOVING WALLS for those who attend.

The Enemy Alien Files: Hidden Stories of World War II

Courtesy of National Japanese American Historical Society

In the hours after December 7, 1941 the first people of Japanese ancestry to be confined were not spies or saboteurs, they were Issei, first generation immigrants legally barred from becoming US citizens because of racism. The men were not spies nor foreign agents, no criminal charges related to aiding Japan would ever be laid. Rather the men rounded up in the hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor were lawyers, doctors, businessman, newspaper editors, ministers, and even judo masters detained not because of evidence of a specific threat, but in an attempt to forestall any organized movements within the Japanese American community. This is the hidden story of nearly 30,000 Japanese, German and Italian immigrants who were detained throughout the war, the hidden story of Japanese Latin Americans deported from their home countries and detained as 'enemy aliens' in a country they never chose to enter. Lilith Benjamin, Collection Manager of the National Japanese American Historical Society, brings together Grace Shimizu of the Campaign for Justice: Redress Now! For Japanese Latin Americans, Stacey Camp, Ph.D. Professor of Archeology at Michigan State University, and Collection Manager of the National Japanese American Historical Society to present on the history of non-citizen internment during the second world war, and the paradox of fighting a global war on facism and tyranny abroad while interning civilians at home.

thursday - october 26

The Role of Photography in the Pilgrimage Experience

A panel and discussion on the role of photography — past, present, and future — in the camp pilgrimage experience — how historical images and contemporary photos of the camps and their survivors/descendants help us navigate and process our understanding (including all the things we will never know) of the World War II Japanese American incarceration experience. Documentary photographer Haruka Sakaguchi will discuss her in-progress project Campu: An American Story, which showcases portraits and testimonies of survivors and their descendants at their respective camps. Photographers Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia-Kilroy will present their recently published photography book Show Me the Way To Go To Home, which features photographs of the 10 incarceration camps as they stand today. And author Jeffrey Yamaguchi will share an in-progress project about the photography of his Grandfather, Fred Yamaguchi, who ran the Rohwer Photo Studio at the Rohwer concentration camp.

The Roots of Solidarity: From Japanese American Redress to Black Reparations

In 2020, Nikkei Progressives (NP) and Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR) formed a joint Reparations Committee to organize Japanese American community members and others to support Black reparations (for slavery and its violent legacies). Formed in 2016, NP is a grassroots, all-volunteer, multi-generational community organization based in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles that supports the rights of people facing marginalization and discrimination. Founded in 1980 during the struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations, NCRR educates the public about the state-sanctioned violence against Japanese Americans during WW2 and supports campaigns against injustice today. Over the last two years, the NP/NCRR Reparations Committee has: created educational workshops; testified at the 2021 H.R.40 House Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington D.C.; mailed over 300 Japanese Americans’ testimonies in support of reparations to congressional leaders; and planned a national ‘week of action’ with other organizations.

This roundtable will feature a conversation between NP/NCRR Reparations Committee organizers and NCOBRA chairperson, Kenniss Henry, on how Japanese Americans’ direct experience with incarceration and reparations can help support the demands of Black Americans and on the experiences of working in coalition with Black-led and legacy reparations organizations amidst the push for H.R.40 and the ongoing work of the California Reparations Task Force. Ultimately, the Committee believes that reparations are owed, long overdue, and possible. Our work demonstrates the transformative potential of cross-racial solidarity for achieving justice, repair, and healing in the form of reparations as defined by Black Americans for Black Americans.

Meet Kathy Masaoka descendant, educator, activist

Courtesy of Tuna Canyon Detention Station

You will learn about who was at Tuna Canyon through a personal interview and talk by Kathy Masaoka. She continues her work with reparations for African Americans through various initiatives like HR 40.

friday - october 27

The Politics of Translating Incarceration Literature

Translation is a political act that comes with ethical responsibilities and considerations, especially when dealing with texts that carry the weight of historical trauma for marginalized communities. This panel will gather together translators and community members who have been involved in translating TESSAKU, a Japanese-language literary journal written, edited, and compiled by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at Tule Lake, California, during World War II. We will discuss some of the ethical considerations that have arisen in the course of translating this material, including our obligations to descendants of Tule Lake incarcerees.

Breathing Life into our Civil Rights Leaders: From Films, Designations, Books, and Graphic Novels

Before Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, a Japanese American established farmers' unions, led Race Relation Campaigns, fought to protect illegal immigrants, won two major supreme court cases, and is the reason why all immigrants can own land in California. His name was Sei Fujii. Filmmaker / Publisher Jeffrey Gee Chin and his team discuss their ongoing work honoring Fujii's legacy with Little Tokyo Historical Society from films, historic designations, to publications.

Japanese and Nikkei Perspectives on the Atomic Bomb

As part of the virtual film festival this livestream panel discussion will further explore the perspectives of Japanese and the Nikkei diaspora related to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Featuring filmmaker Steven Okazaki and photographer Haruka Sakaguchi, whose respective works present the lived experiences of hibakusha – atomic bomb survivors and their descendants – the discussion will be moderated by film festival curator Rob Buscher, whose relatives also lived through the bombing of Hiroshima.

saturday - october 28

Scary Stories with Alton Chung

In Japan, ghost stories are often told in the summer to get that delightful shiver during the hot, humid nights. There is a tradition that if you tell 100 true ghost stories in an evening and blow out a lantern or candle at the end of each story, that after putting out the last light at the end of the 100th story, you will see a ghost. Join storyteller Alton Takiyama-Chung (altonchung.com) for an hour of Japanese ghost stories to close Tadaima 2023. The stories will get spookier and scarier as the hour progresses. We will start with a tame folktale about a dancing skeleton, move on to a faceless ghost, and then to a gruesome counting ghost with no hands. The hour closes with tales of a town haunted by a frightening monster, a wife who comes back after death, and a true story of a faceless ghost in Hawaii. Join us for a spooky time, as a prelude to Samhaim, All Hallow’s Eve, and the thinning of the boundaries between the worlds.