A Place for What We Lose, a memoir by Tamiko Nimura

Saturday, October 10, 2 pm

Join us for a conversation with historian/writer Tamiko Nimura as she shares “A Place for What We Lose, a daughter’s return to Tule Lake”.

A deeply affecting memoir of reckoning with a father’s death and the Japanese American incarceration

In a moving conversation with the past, Tamiko Nimura explores her late father’s life and her family’s wartime history at Tule Lake. The typewritten pages of her father’s unpublished memoir—written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire—spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration.

Following an innovative structure, Nimura interlaces her father’s vivid recollections with her own: scenes of camp life, family separation, and resistance alongside her present-day journey as a mother, writer, and descendant. Joining a community pilgrimage to Tule Lake transforms inherited pain into collective remembrance.

With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience.

Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American (Sansei/Pinay) writer and community historian. She grew up near Sacramento, went to college in the Bay Area, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published in many places including Discover Nikkei and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is co-author of We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. Her most recent book is a memoir called A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake.