For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with fitting my identity into the complex puzzle of race and ethnicity in this country. My mother is from Japan, and I was also born there, though my family moved to the U.S. when I…
Doan Nguyen was sufficiently “worked up,” as she put it, by the time we reached Nihonmachi (Japantown) Alley, a history-filled thoroughfare in Seattle on the north side of Jackson Street, between Sixth and Maynard avenues. We were stopped in front of a cutout developed by…
On an air-conditioned bus to Tule Lake, we fold shimmering sheets of colored paper into delicate, mystical birds. The weight of the shared ritual makes my fingers fumble. It’s been decades since I made origami with my immigrant mother, and I feel pressure to reprise…
After a sometimes rousing, mostly solemn, and often tear-filled memorial ceremony brimming with Japanese and Japanese American influences, a scene unfurled that, to common understanding, may have seemed very un-Japanese. It happened beside an old jail nested in a much larger prison, the Tule Lake…
