J-Sei At the Movies – Meet filmmaker Rea Tajiri

Special Guests: Audee Kochiyama-Holman and Eddie Kochiyama

Friday, June 11, 5:30 pm

With a multitude of films and a mastery of layering images and fragments of memories, award-winning filmmaker and media artist Rea Tajiri continues to push the edges of her craft to capture the stories, often unspoken and forgotten. To begin our evening program, we will chat with Rea to hear about her journey as a filmmaker and take a peek at some of her latest work. Then we will hear from the Kochiyama family on the legacy of their mother Yuri Kochiyama and the passion for justice that lives on.  After the talk, we will have a chance to see the film, Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice.

RSVP with “June Movie Night” in the subject line.
You’ll receive Zoom information prior to the event.

Featured films

• Wataridori – Birds of Passage (2018) was a multi-site installation project in Philadelphia mapped and enlivened forgotten traces of local Japanese American history linked in a series of locations around the city.
• Wisdom Gone Wild is Tajiri’s current documentary-in-progress that chronicles her sixteen year journey of elder care for her mother who had dementia, and illuminates their lifelong passion for the arts and the language of the elders.
• Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice (1993) is a biography in political and social context of Yuri Kochiyama, an Asian American woman and humanitarian civil rights activist who first became aware of social injustice in the United States during her time in a Japanese-American interment camp during World War II. She stresses the need for members of all races and ethnicities to work together for common goals, and for a fundamental change in political power structures. Through interviews, writings, music and archival footage, this film captures the extraordinary vitality and compassion of Yuri Kochiyama as a Harlem-based activist, wife, mother of six children, educator and humanitarian.

About the Filmmaker

REA TAJIRI is a filmmaker and visual artist who was born in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Her ground-breaking, award-winning film, digital video and installation work, has been supported by numerous grants, fellowships and artistic residencies, has been exhibited widely in museums, on television and in international film festivals. Poetic, subtly layered and politically engaged, her work advances the exploration of forgotten histories, multi-generational memory, landscape and the Japanese American experience.

Her experimental documentary History and Memory for Akiko & Takashige, and feature film Strawberry Fields have influenced a generation of filmmakers, leading to their inclusion in Asian American, Cinema Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies curricula in the US. Her recent multi-site installation project Wataridori-birds of Passage (2018) in Philadelphia mapped and enlivened forgotten traces of local Japanese American history linked in a series of locations around the city. Her feature documentary Lordville (2014) probed the material and immaterial traces of an upstate New York town’s history. Her current documentary-in-progress is Wisdom Gone Wild. The film chronicles her sixteen year journey of elder care for her mother who had dementia, and illuminates their lifelong passion for the arts and the language of the elders.

As an advocate of emerging artists and directors, Rea co-founded The Workshop, an incubator for Asian American film directors in New York City. She has taught extensively throughout the U.S. as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University where she teaches documentary production.

Support J-Sei At the Movies

Thanks to you, J-Sei At the Movies recently celebrated its third anniversary! 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 having a growing and enthusiastic audience. You are the best! We welcome any donations to help us offset costs for Movie Night. Thanks for considering this.

Not Yo’ Butterfly, a book launch celebration with Nobuko Miyamoto

Saturday, June 26th, 3 pm

Join Nobuko Miyamoto and friends for a special book launch celebration of  Not Yo’ Butterfly – My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love and Revolution. The free event is co-sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley and J-Sei.  RSVP on Eventbrite.

In the 1970’s , the song “We Are the Children” by Chris Iijima and Nobuko Miyamoto helped unite the Asian American movement nationwide. Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.

Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand—considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots—and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation.

Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, often provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.

Preorder books at Eastwind Books.