‘Bridging the Gap’: In Conversation with Sansei Musician/Producer/Songwriter Michael Sasaki & Nisei Educator/Writer/Performer George Yoshida

Part 1: Michael Sasaki I’m sitting in the frigid cold of an air that has been conditioned to make the arms on your hair stand on end. While awaiting the arrival of my two interviewees, I am in familiar territory. The Peet’s Coffee & Tea location in which I find myself, employed me not but […]

The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great: ISSEI WOMEN: Shio Sakanishi, a pioneering figure in education

In April 1939, the writer Edward Larocque Tinker offered a laudatory account in his New York Times column of a new book “The Spirit of the Brush,” an anthology of commentaries on art by Chinese classical painters between 367 A.D. and 960 A.D. Tinker noted that the editor of the collection, Dr. Shio Sakanishi, was […]

THE GREAT UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN GREAT: Issei Women,Giving birth to a community

This overview article starts off a series of portraits from a whole class of “unknown greats”: Issei women. Of all the ethnic Japanese in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, the lives and experiences of immigrant women have been arguably the least studied by family and community historians, despite notable […]

JANM features Issei clothing from Hawaiian plantations

LOS ANGELES — An exhibit featuring textiles and clothing used by Japanese immigrants to Hawai‘i from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, collected and documented by Barbara Kawakami, is on display at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Little Tokyo through Aug. 22. The exhibit, “Textured Lives: Japanese Immigrant Clothing from […]

BOOK REVIEW: The culture of Issei Buddhism

ISSEI BUDDHISM IN THE AMERICAS Edited By Duncan Ryuken Williams and Tomoe Moriya (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2010, 216 pp., $25, paperback) For academics and others interested in religious, Asian American, and/or Japanese American studies, editors Duncan Ryuken Williams and Tomoe Moriya have assembled a wide-ranging collection of articles on Buddhism in the […]