by Jill Shiraki | Jan 24, 2025 | Classes & Events, Featured, Other News
Gambatte! Legacy
of an Enduring Spirit
Exhibit Dates: February 10- May 2, 2025
Gallery Hours: Mondays & Thursdays 10 am – 4 pm, and by appointment.
Presented by J-Sei &Friends of Topaz Museum, with support by Topaz Museum
SPECIAL EVENT
Meet Photographer Paul Kitagaki, Jr.
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Gallery Open: 1 to 4 pm
Artist Talk: 2 pm
Book signing and reception to follow.
RSVP for free event.
Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit explores the legacy of an enduring spirit as Japanese Americans triumphed over adversity in the WWII incarceration camps.
As he was searching through photos at the National Archives in 1984, Kitagaki found a photo taken by famed documentary photographer Dorothea Lange of his grandparents and father preparing to board a bus in Oakland, Calif., enroute to a World War II incarceration camp. Through slow and painstaking research, Kitagaki has spent 15 years locating and winning the trust of the families who lived through the incarceration, documenting their stories of survival and inner strength to overcome injustice, racism, and wartime hysteria.
Many of the Issei and Nisei never shared their stories with their own families. As some of the subjects recounted their experiences, they were overcome with tears and emotion as long-forgotten memories returned. For many, this was the first time for them to publicly speak about what they endured. – Paul Kitagaki, Jr.
Photographer and videographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. has traveled the world covering natural and human-caused disasters and international athletes competing for gold at ten different Olympic Games. Kitagaki’s work has been honored with dozens of photo awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and Emmy nominations. He’s been published in news outlets worldwide, including National Geographic, Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Stern, People, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, as well as in his home paper, The Sacramento Bee.
BEHIND BARBED WIRE, The Search for Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII
The book Behind Barbed Wire is based on the nationally traveling exhibition “Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit.”
Hardcover 152 pages and 137 Illustrations
Published by CityPress Files
Retail Price: $55
by Jill Shiraki | Jan 24, 2025 | Classes & Events, Other News
Flavors of Spring
Friday, March 28
5:30 to 8:30 pm
BLOC 15, Jack London Square
Join us for a festive evening of food, wine, brew and live music
by Bay Area’s favorite R&B band: PRIVATE PRACTICE.
Don’t miss the Early Bird Special
Tickets for $125 until Feb 21st
Regular ticket price is $150, from February 22nd.
Purchase tickets online or send checks payable to:
J-Sei, 1285 66th Street, Emeryville, CA 94608.
Must be postmarked by March 24, 2025.
For more info, contact Tiffany Nguyen, tiffany@j-sei.org
by Jill Shiraki | Jan 15, 2025 | Classes & Events, News
J-Sei’s 34th Annual Crab Feed
We received such a warm welcome at The Fratellanza Club that we decided to host J-Sei’s Annual Crab Feed there again! They are located one block east of J-Sei and have on-site parking.
Feast on fresh Dungeness crab, Asian salad, garlic noodles, rolls, desserts, and beverages with your family and friends at J-Sei’s in-person, sit-down, family-style crab feed! (Menu subject to change depending on availability of crab.)
Enjoy music, no host bar, and time to greet friends, socialize and mingle from 5 pm. Dinner begins at 6 pm There will be one seating time for this family-style event.
Live band, no host bar, and raffle drawing: 5:00 to 6:00 pm
Doors to dining room and seating open: 6:00 pm
Dinner : 6:00 to 7:30 pm
Dinner tickets: adults $75, children 12 & under $30
Sorry, no To-Go meals available.
RSVP by Sunday, January 26, 2025. – SALES NOW CLOSED!
Two Options for RESERVATIONS
Sign up Online
(1) To pay online use the donorbox (in next column). For custom amount, calculate your total amount and type the amount. Check box to add the number of tickets in the comment box.
– OR –
Send by Mail
(1) Download and complete the form on the Crab Feed flyer. (2) Send the form with a check and mail to: J-Sei, 1285 66th Street, Emeryville, CA 94608
TICKET SALES ARE NOW CLOSED!
Thank you for your support!
by Jill Shiraki | Jan 15, 2025 | American Harvest, Classes & Events, Featured, Lament in the Night, Minor Feelings, Phone Booth at the Edge
Mizuko: True Sprit – Meet Artist and Writer Art Nomura
Saturday, February 8, 2024, 2 pm
Mizuko: True Spirit is an epic American-immigrant tale of hardship, assimilation, and the eventual triumph that ensued. When the Takahashi’s, one of the wealthiest families in western Japan lost their great fortune in 1900, five-year old Mizuko Takahashi went from riches to rags. Mizuko’s lifetime in Japan and America offers the reader an intimate look into the world of an Asian immigrant. This book is the story of one woman’s efforts to surmount racism, sexism, and poverty in the 20th century. Featured is a riveting accounting of the matriarch’s life in Manzanar Concentration Camp for three years beginning in 1942.
Art Nomura will share his book, the creative process of memoir writing, and inspiration for his work.
Art Nomura has worked as a painter, sculptor, potter, filmmaker, writer, and New Media artist since 1968. Several of his works have themes directly connected to the Asian American experience. His work has screened on PBS, cable, and in festivals, galleries, museums, and universities worldwide. Nomura has taught media production and writing since 1981.He is Professor Emeritus in Film/TV Production at the School of Film and Television, Loyola Marymount University.
RSVP for this free event.
by Jill Shiraki | Jan 15, 2025 | Classes & Events
COURTING A MAN WHO DOESN’T TALK
Writer Shizue Seigel, in conversation with Alameda Poet Laureate Kimi Sugioka
Saturday, February 15th, 2 pm
Courting A Man Who Doesn’t Talk began thirty years ago as midnight journaling to puzzle out a budding romance between a fortyish, Asian American single mother and a twenty-something white man. The personal experiment has stood the test of time, but the larger social battle for equality and respect between women and men is still being waged, one day at a time, one person at a time.
Many men don’t have words to express what’s deepest in their hearts. Lover or husband, father or son, employer or co-worker—each has different styles of wordlessness and different reasons for it. In today’s polarized world, breaking through the silence is essential, especially across divisions of race, class, generation, culture, or religion.
Shizue Seigel is a Japanese American writer, visual artist and arts activist who has supported 500+ writers and artists of color with workshops, events and publications since 2015 through her arts organization Write Now! SF Bay.
Shizue Seigel, founder/director of Write Now! SF Bay, is a third-generation Japanese American writer, visual artist and community activist who explores complex intersections of history, culture and spirituality through prose, poetry and visual art.
Born just after her family’s release from WWII incarceration camps, Shizue grew up as an Army brat in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps and skid-row Stockton, before finding home in San Francisco in 1956. She’s a college dropout who learned from experience in the Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, Indian ashrams and the counterculture in the 1970s, corporate advertising in the 1980s, and HIV prevention in the 1990s.
She has helped tell community stories for 25 years. She’s written, co-written or edited nine books, Including In Good Conscience, My First Hundred Years, and five Write Now! anthologies. Her poetry and prose have been widely published, most recently in Ginsoko Journal, Porter Gulch Review, and Colossus: Body. Her work was recognized with a KPIX Jefferson Award in 2021, and her literary and visual art papers are archived at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kimi Sugioka is a mother, educator, songwriter and poet. She earned an MFA from Naropa University and has published two books of poetry; the newest of which is Wile & Wing on Manic D Press. She has been published in numerous anthologies and is the Poet Laureate of Alameda, California. As an active board member for literary arts organizations, she curates and hosts readings for the Alameda Island Poets and the San Francisco International Arts Festival, among others. She believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act.
Born to a Japanese American father and Scots Irish American mother in North Carolina, Kimi Sugioka grew up in Chapel Hill and Berkeley, California. Constantly moving between the two starkly different cultures and not blending into either, Kimi often found herself in liminal circumstances that squarely placed her in the category of other. Family divisions and trauma contributed to her feeling a lack of home and identity. Consequently, she was always trying to fit in and please whoever she was with.
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RSVP for this free event.
