J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

by | May 27, 2021 | Classes & Events, JSei Book Club, Minor Feelings

Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today. Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer

 

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

As Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month comes to a close, J-Sei’s Book Club summer selection is MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING by poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. After its debut in Spring 2020, this collection of seven essays became an instant classic, presenting a blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history to examine racialized consciousness and truth in America today. Unifying these essays is Hong’s evocation of “minor feelings,” that disturbing yet familiar experience of having one’s own perception of reality discredited or marginalized by others. In this time of social change and racial justice, Hong’s timely, candid, and subversive book challenges all of us to reconsider notions and assumptions that we grew up with as well as thinking about what we can do, as individuals and as a community, moving forward.

Join the Club, Buy the Book

Sign up for J-Sei’s Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list. Please encourage anyone interested to join! Our book discussion will be even further enriched by a diverse range of perspectives, for instance of different ages, races, and gender identities.

Copies of the newly issued paperback edition are available for purchase from Eastwind Books, which Eastwind is very generously offering to Book Club members at a discounted price. Order the book online through Eastwind and type JSEI in the coupon field at cart checkout to get your 10% discount. Also, you can choose to pick up your copy at the store or arrange for shipping, or you can designate J-Sei for delivery/pick-up by typing your request into the Note to Seller comment box at cart checkout.

Book Club Format: Read the book at your own pace. As you’re reading, you can comment online about whatever strikes you and share with fellow Book Club members on the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage. In addition, once a week for seven weeks, I’ll update the Book Club webpage to focus on one of Hong’s essays. At the end of July we’ll schedule a live Zoom meeting so members can get together to discuss the book.

— Kathy Hashimoto, moderator

 

About the Author

Cathy Park Hong was raised in Los Angeles. She graduated from Oberlin College and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, Engine Empire (2012), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Translating Mo’um (2002). Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and is a full professor at Rutgers University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passion for Justice – The Films of Rea Tajiri

Passion for Justice – The Films of Rea Tajiri

by | May 27, 2021 | Classes & Events

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.

J-Sei Movie Night Bento

June 11th Movie Night

Zangi (Hokkaido fried chicken) Yuba and roasted Mushroom salad and ginger/garlic rice with fresh peas

Click on the button below to place your order. The price is $18 for the bento.

You can pick up your meal at the selected pick up time at J-Sei on Friday, June 11th. Please remember to wear a mask and observe social distance protocol. Thank you!

MY FRIEND YUJI

To order: When you click on the button above, it will take you directly to a pop-up order form on the My Friend Yuji webpage, where you first select a pickup time. In the next window, click anywhere inside the box frame to open another pop-up and select the number of bento you want to order, then click on “Add item” to close the pop-up. Click the “View order” bar at the bottom to confirm your order and click “Continue to payment” to sign in and pay for your order.

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.

Planting the Seeds: A Grassroots Approach to JA Community in the East Bay

Planting the Seeds: A Grassroots Approach to JA Community in the East Bay

by | May 25, 2021 | 50th Anniversary, News

Planting the Seeds: A Grassroots Approach to JA Community in the East Bay 

Friday, June 18, 6:30 pm

A conversation with founders of the East Bay Japanese for Action and Eden Issei Housing – Robert Sakai, Dennis Yotsuya, and Dr. Reiko Homma True, with moderator Lauren Kawana.  This panel is part of J-Sei’s 50th Anniversary celebration programs.

Over 50 years ago, a community grassroots effort by college student activists initiated two non-profits, East Bay Japanese for Action and East Bay Issei Housing. Join us for a trip down memory lane to hear from the people integral to the social movement that led to the eventual formation of J-Sei. Seeking resources for Japanese American seniors, our invited guests will share their memories and experiences on why and how East Bay Japanese for Action and East Bay Issei Housing began. What was the vision and how was it cultivated? What has evolved and changed as we look forward to the next 50 years?

RSVP to jill@j-sei.org with “Founders 6/18” in subject.

Community planning included both students and Nisei community leaders.  Pictured: Murayo Sawai, Tad Hirota (Berkeley JACL), Dennis Yotsuya, Peter Horikoshi, and Jan Nakao. Photo courtesy of Thomas Okamoto.

Special Founder’s Bento

A special bento will be offered for this J-Sei 50th Anniversary program. Order and pick up a bento.  Then, join us for the talk.

Founder’s Meal

Mixed Fish Nanbanzuke (fried fish with picketed vegetables) Buta Shabu Salad (shaved pork) nori onigiri

The price is $20 for the bento.

You can pick up your meal at the selected pick up time at J-Sei on Friday, June 18th. Please remember to wear a mask and observe social distance protocol. Thank you!

To order: When you click on the button below, it will take you directly to a pop-up order form on the My Friend Yuji webpage, where you first select a pickup time. In the next window, click anywhere inside the box frame to open another pop-up and select the number of bento you want to order, then click on “Add item” to close the pop-up. Click the “View order” bar at the bottom to confirm your order and click “Continue to payment” to sign in and pay for your order.

MY FRIEND YUJI on TOCK
Not Yo’ Butterfly, a book launch celebration with Nobuko Miyamoto

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

by | May 25, 2021 | Classes & Events

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.