Judge Kerry Hada, a member of JANM’s Board of Governors, has recently been awarded the Foreign Minister’s Commendation by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Richard Clark and Judge Raymond Uno also received this prestigious commendation. All of the details are available here.
Thanks to George Yoshida, our “eyes and ears” in Colorado, for passing along this info, as well as for providing the above picture of Judge Hada and his family.
Join us for another exciting National Conference…
July 4-7, 2013 at the Sheraton Seattle
Speaking Up! Democracy, Justice, and Dignity
Don’t miss another life-changing experience for you and your family at JANM’s fourth national conference! Attendees of all ages will hear from a mixture of first-person and scholarly voices, learn more about the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, make new friends, and catch-up with old ones. We have been busy planning the conference with organizations such as the University of Washington, Department of American Ethnic Studies and the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington. Plus, the Wing Luke Asian Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, and the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial are helping organize exciting field trips and tours!
Registration details will be available in September 2012, but starting immediately you can reserve your room at Sheraton Seattle at the preferred room rates. (The conference rates are quite a deal!)
We’ll post updates on our conference Web site, so please stay tuned.
P.S. Check out the speaker bios, panel descriptions, and photos from our 2008 National Conference in Denver to get a sense of what’s in store for Seattle.
If you are:
a) knowledgeable about Japanese American sports
b) knowledgeable about sports trivia in general
c) have always wanted to be on a game show
d) good sports who would like to learn some interesting JA sports trivia
or just competitive…come participate in our JA Trivia Challenge at the free Summer Festival on the Courtyard event this Saturday! Our Discover Nikkei team is putting together a fun, highly interactive game with prizes for both contestants and audience members. It’s free to participate and attend!
All teams of 2 must check in between 12:30-12:50pm on Saturday at the Democracy Forum. In addition to winning medals, the top 3 teams will win gift certificates to our award-winning Museum Store (1st place: $100, 2nd place: $50, 3rd place: $20).
Mike Palma of Cold Tofu will be our game show host. Our judge/referee will be Brian Niiya of Densho (who also happened to be the curator for our More Than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American Community exhibition in 2000).
Date: Saturday, August 11, 2012
Location: Democracy Forum at the Japanese American National Museum
Schedule:
12:30-12:50pm: Teams check in
12:30pm: Forum doors open for teams & audience
1-2pm: Game time!
4:30pm: JA Olympics Medal Ceremony for winning teams
The Game
The JA Sports Trivia Challenge will consist of…
Round 1—Selection Round: All registered teams will participate in a single-elimination round with all multiple-choice questions. The top 3 teams advance to Round 2.
Audience Questions: Our game show host will have trivia questions for the audience to win some prizes!
Round 2: The top 3 teams will come down to the stage to answer multiple choice and a few fill-in questions for points.
Bonus Round: Identify 10 JA athletes and their sports. Audience members can play along to win more prizes!
At the end of the Bonus Round, we’ll tally all the points to see who will capture the Gold, Silver, and Bronze!
Hints: If you want to “train” for the event, we will have questions about past & present Japanese American athletes from the Olympics, and both amateur and professional sports. To be the winning team, you don’t have to answer all questions correctly, just get more points than the other teams. Questions will be a combination of mostly multiple choice and a few fill-in, so even if you don’t know all the answers, you could still do well if you’re lucky.
See you there!
Due to an overwhelming demand, we are adding one more date to our Girl Scout Patch Program. We hope you can join us…
Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Time: 1 pm – 3 pm (registration will begin at 12:45 pm)
What you will do:
– Guided visit of our exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community
– Self-guided visit of Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami
– Hands-on origami making session
– Receive a special JANM patch
Price: $10/person (for each scouts, for each adult, for each sibling)
RSVP: education@janm.org. In your rsvp, please be sure to include (a) the name of each scout; (b) the age of each scout; (c) the name of each sibling; (d) the name of each adult. Space is limited and advance registration is required.
This is a great chance for Scouts to see the Folding Paper exhibition before it closes on August 26.
Photos by Richard Watanabe and Richard M. Murakami
As I near the end of the 10 weeks here at the Museum, I revisited the job description out of curiosity – how accurately did the description match what actually transpired?
Example of the assignment include:
Public Programs by Dr. Cherstin M. Lyon and Dr. Diane C. Fujino? Scholars. Check.
Interviews with Ako Castuera, Sean Chao, and Rob Sato? Artists. Check.
Public Program by Anabel Stenzel and Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and combing through Gidra footage with Mike Murase and Evelyn Yoshimura for Discover Nikkei? Community Activists. Check.
Interviews with Justice Kathryn Doi Todd, Director Jimmy Murakami and Professor Lloyd Inui? Check.
Making a public service announcement video for the Japanese American Olympics on August 11th from 11 AM – 5 PM? Check.
Japanese American History Classes, tour of Common Ground, and Little Tokyo Walking Tour? Check.
The only thing not listed above: Time Traveling.
One of my greatest joys of being here at the Museum has been sitting in on the Life History Interviews. This past week, John Esaki, Akira Boch, and Chris Aihara and I had the opportunity to interview Professor Lloyd Inui [Professor Emeritus at CSULB in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and a senior adviser at the Japanese American National Museum]. In a way, each of the Life History Interviews is but a single time capsule that saves and preserves one’s individual experiences up until that moment in video form.
Over the course of about 3 hours, we traveled from before 1930 to the present day as Lloyd told stories of his childhood, incarceration, post-war employment, time in the military service and the beginnings of Asian and Asian American Studies at CSULB. Not only was it was amazing to hear eyewitness experiences of the effects of war and living through the incarceration camps, it was impoartant to realize how the major that will be written on my diploma next year was formed – through struggle, perseverance and a desire for remembrance, a passion for critical thinking, as well as progression forward.
Lloyd’s vivid recollections of warfare, the meetings of some of the first Asian American Studies classes, and perspective into his journey to the present day were truly insightful, stark and honest – treasures that I hope future generations will learn from and appreciate. Each person has a story to tell. Lloyd’s unique experiences, the seemingly insignificant details, every friendship he formed over the years, added to the person he is today and the ideas that he calls his own. It’s striking to realize that someday, maybe in the far future, the next generation will be asking us to tell our life story.
What histories are being written right now? What is your story only you can tell?
Our 14th Annual Summer Festival on the Courtyard is this weekend!
Summer Festival is our BIGGEST event of the year. We’re preparing a full day of FREE family fun. If you couldn’t make it to London for the Summer Olympics, come out to JANM for the JA Olympics!
LOTS of free activities and crafts to keep kids of all ages busy all day, or just stop by in between checking out the various Nisei Week and Tanabata Festival festivities going on throughout Little Tokyo.
We’re especially excited about our Jan Ken Po Tournament, JA Trivia Challenge, and Origami Design Contest! Compete for your chances to win a special JA Olympics medal & prizes!
P.S. This month is also your last chance to come check out our very popular Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami and Xploration Lab 2012 exhibitions before they close on August 26th!
There’s now just 2 months left to submit your Nikkei food story for our Itadakimasu! A Taste of Nikkei Culture project!
Our Discover Nikkei website is collecting and sharing stories about Nikkei food culture and its impact on identity and communities. We want to collect together as many diverse stories from around the world as we can, so we invite you to submit personal stories and essays, memoirs, academic papers, book reviews, and other prose genre.
All stories that meet the guidelines will be published on Discover Nikkei as part of this special series. In addition, our Editorial Committee will select their favorite articles per language to be featured and translated into our site languages! Some of the submitted stories will be selected to be published in various Nikkei newspapers and partnering organization newsletters around the world (including The Rafu Shimpo in Los Angeles, Peru Shimpo in Lima, and Nikkeiy Shimbun in São Paulo, Brazil) after the conclusion of the project.
Since our last update, we’ve published 4 more Itadakimasu stories online. There are also more that we’ll be posting soon. The deadline to submit stories to be included in Itadakimasu! is September 30, 2012 at 6pm (PST). That’s just 2 months away from today!
Please join us and share your favorite food stories on Discover Nikkei!
See submission guidelines & check out the stories published so far: http://5dn.org/itadakimasu
Itadakimasu stories published since our last blog post:
There are no tantalizing photos to accompany this story, but it’s well worth the read! “Look’it” Food by Rachel Yamaguchi is a humorous story of how the “hoarding” of treats for company isn’t a tradition that works well when you don’t entertain guests often.
Sometimes, when I visit museums, the exhibits tend to lack substance and are most of the time, very similar. After walking through and reflecting on the material, I don’t feel like I’ve gained anything. It feels as if something is lacking. Xploration Lab 2012 (XLAB) fulfills every need and want in an exhibit and more. XLAB is an innovative museum experience where participants are fully immersed in each aspect of the display, and through their participation, aid in the creation of future engaging exhibitions for the Japanese American National Museum (JANM).
XLAB’s main focus is to educate visitors on the importance of culture and identity, and how sometimes, those two concepts are one in the same. In modern America, the teenage demographic, while seemingly hard to understand, is actually not so much of an enigma as many people are led to believe. They are on the precipice of adulthood and are beginning to stray away from their normal routine to engage in new experiences. XLAB is the perfect exhibit for any teenager because the subject matter is broad enough to entice them, yet specific enough to be relatable. In addition, teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and that is essentially what XLAB is all about. The interactive aspect of this exhibit adds a whole new dimension to the clichéd museum experience and makes it more effective in delivering its message.
As I walked into XLAB, I instantly realized that this exhibit would be unlike any other museum experience I had previously encountered. Since I’m a half Caucasian and half Japanese teenager, the first section that really caught my eye was What Are You? Each person who participated in Kip Fulbeck’s project had words to say that I could relate to as a teenager and as a person of multiple cultural backgrounds. Although the rest of the first room was wonderful and educational, the placement of My Voice is a Microphone made the activity somewhat easy to miss for people who weren’t paying attention to the layout.
The next room contained a lot more interaction and each section had content that would attract teenagers. One of XLAB’s more popular portions is Ways to Tell if You’re Japanese American. Even though the list was written from a Southern California Sansei and Yonsei perspective, almost every local Japanese American teenager can relate to at least a few numbers on the list. A common high school student would certainly enjoy two of the last activities: Pidgin and Express Yourself. Pidgin is a dialect that is the unofficial language of Hawaii. XLAB has taken this idea and added modern internet slang such as LOL, FTW, and ROFL, which has made it much more relatable for teenagers, while still infusing the cultural Hawaiian roots into the activity.
Express Yourself is another ingenious portion that focuses on how expression through what people wear is becoming more and more prominent. The section is composed of a large whiteboard where visitors could design their own shirts using dry erase markers, and magnets. Surrounding the white board are completed t-shirts that aid in the expression of ones culture and identity. The interaction involved in this activity helped make it one the most popular activities that XLAB had to offer.
Each and every activity had a successful way of delivering the overall message of culture and identity. People of all ages would enjoy this exhibit because of everything it has to offer. The interaction of each activity sets XLAB apart from the plethora of boring and formulaic exhibits that most teenagers are accustomed to. In essence, this exhibit is not one to miss, and everyone should take some time out of his or her day to experience what XLAB has to offer, before it closes on August 26th.
Writer Jeremy Parks, a summer intern at JANM, will be in 11th grade this coming fall at Campbell Hall High School located in Studio City. He will be a news editor on his school paper and is an offensive lineman on the football team.
I was going through JANM’s on-line collections and came across this image of baseball in camp. Look closely and you can see the iconic Heart Mountain looming in the background, behind the barracks. And in the foreground, did you notice the hats worn by the spectators? With this photo, I can just about hear, smell, and feel summer…
You can browse through the Mori Shimada Collection to see other pictures of life in Heart Mountain. And, in case you haven’t heard, if you want a chance to “feel” summer, there will be a multi-generational pilgrimage to Heart Mountain this August 10-11. Check Heart Mountain’s Web site for details!
Our next Target Free Family Saturday is just around the corner! We hope to see all our friends on Saturday, July 14th for a day filled with activities and crafts. Our theme is Faces and Places so we will be exploring adventure and travel with a full schedule of programming.
Here’s a sneak peak at our craft activities for the day. Using pieces of fabric, customize a bag to take with you when you’re on the go.
You’ll also have a chance to decorate a travel journal so you’ll have a place to capture fun memories by writing and drawing about your summertime adventures.
Hope to see you there!