by Jill Shiraki | Dec 23, 2020 | News
Happy Holidays to All!
We wish you all a very safe and cozy holiday.
J-Sei senior nutrition home delivery and online programs
will be closed from December 25th to January 3rd.
We appreciate this time of renewal as we remember all that we are grateful for. J-Sei appreciates the support over the past nine months to increase and extend essential services and programs for seniors during these challenging times. As we continue to hang in there for several more months, we anticipate a shift in the new year on many fronts.
Staying Safe
As you know, Bay Area counties have implemented further restrictions in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. All individuals are to stay at home unless they must shop, pick-up food, give care to another, or exercise outdoors. If you leave your home, please wear your mask to cover your nose and mouth and distance at least six feet from others. Individuals outside of your household are not to congregate with you. These are difficult mandates but let’s hope for brighter days soon. This is a good time to make a point of calling friends and family to maintain contact. Spread some joy and share a laugh – we all could use some good cheer right now!
A vaccine will be distributed shortly so please contact your health care provider to learn more about when you might be able to receive your vaccine.
J-Sei will continue to monitor the COVID-19 infection trends, remain vigilant, and implement precautions as needed. Check out J-Sei’s many Zoom programs as an enjoyable way to stay connected. For an update on J-Sei news, please check out our Winter 2021 newsletter.
You all have done so beautifully. Let’s keep leaning on each other for support.
Be well and take care,
Diane Wong, MSW
Executive Director
by Jill Shiraki | Dec 22, 2020 | Classes & Events
Simple Japanese Cooking
Thursday, October 22 & Thursday, Nov 19, 3 pm
Azusa Oda, author of Japanese Cookbook for Beginners, will continue to cultivate our skills to bring delicious and satisfying Japanese meals to the table. In October, the class will feature a family favorite Super Simple Ramen and Pork and Cabbage Gyoza. To prepare for family gatherings, learn to prepare a colorful Chirashi dish and delectable Chawan Mushi in the November class and you are sure to impress your guests for the holidays. Azusa Oda is an avid home cook, food blogger of HumbleBeanBlog.com and designer. RSVP for the class.
by Jill Shiraki | Dec 22, 2020 | Classes & Events
J-Sei At the Movies: An Evening with Kimi Takesue
95 and 6 To Go, a film documentary
Friday, January 15
In “95 and 6 To Go” filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i in the 1910’s. Amidst the solitude of his home routines – coupon clipping, rigging an improvised barbecue, lighting firecrackers on the New Year – we glimpse an unexpectedly rich inner life. As his granddaughter queries his history of love and loss, a stalled film project becomes a collaborative inquiry into mortality and how one constructs a personal narrative with memories that span almost a century.
Shot over six years in Honolulu, this intimate meditation on absence and family expands the vernacular of the “home movie” to consider how history is accumulated in the everyday and how sparks of humor and creativity can animate an ordinary life.
Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Film. Takesue’s documentary 95 AND 6 TO GO (2016) was nominated for the prestigious 2017 European Doc Alliance Award. The film screened at over twenty-five international festivals.
RSVP with “At The Movies Jan 15” in memo line to receive the link to view the film and join the discussion.
J-Sei At the Movies
Congratulations on the third anniversary of J-Sei At the Movies! We look forward to more creative programming with educational and inspiring Japanese and Japanese American films. We are especially grateful for the up close and personal chats with filmmakers as we learn so much from the exchange.
We love to have a growing and captive audience. You are the best! We welcome any donations to help us offset costs for Movie Night. Thanks for considering this.
by Jill Shiraki | Dec 9, 2020 | Classes & Events
Thursday, December 10th – 6:30 pm
In Conversation with Nina Revoyr
Author of six novels including Southland
Join us for this special honor to meet with Nina Revoyr, notable author. While the dialogue will begin with a focus on Southland, J-Sei’s Book Club recent pick, the conversation will expand to touch on Japanese American community, race relations, neighborhood, and family dynamics through an expanse of time. It’s really a rare opportunity for us to speak with Nina directly. And it turns out that we are ahead of the curve, as Nina and SOUTHLAND are receiving renewed attention in the current context of racial justice and allyship. The online literary journal Alta has just announced SOUTHLAND as one of its California Book Club selections in early 2021.
Though Southland has some of the characteristics of a detective novel, Revoyr said: “I didn’t really conceive of it as a mystery, although I’m delighted that people are embracing that aspect of it…. But this situation … was the mechanism through which [the female character] was going to go back and discover all of these things about her and her family’s past. What I was very intrigued by was … what were the dynamics of the Crenshaw district, and interracial relations, and economics in Los Angeles that could have caused the riots to have happened in the first place…. The real revelation … has to do with some of the relationships between the people in the past; that was always where I was trying to get to.” [Excerpt from Book Sense “Nina Revoyr’s Southland Stakes Out A Different Los Angeles”}
Southland explores the fragile understandings and sometimes painful misunderstandings that occur across the lines of race and culture. It is also the story of an ever-changing city. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.
NINA REVOYR is the author of six novels, including A Student of History; Lost Canyon; The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Southland, a Los Angeles Times best seller and “Best Book” of 2003; The Necessary Hunger; and Wingshooters, which won an Indie Booksellers Choice Award and was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.” Revoyr lives and works in Los Angeles.
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