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…
Note: This piece was part of winning entries in Best of the West (2nd Place) and SPJ Northwest Excellence in Journalist (1st Place). Doan Nguyen was sufficiently “worked up,” as she put it, by the time we reached Nihonmachi (Japantown) Alley, a history-filled thoroughfare in…
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…
