J-Sei Family Festival – Coming soon!

Sunday, September 27, 12 to 3 pm

From the beat of the taiko to the intergenerational singers and hip-hop dancers, we celebrate the J-Sei Family Festival each year.  Enjoy an array of festival foods, music, and activities. Come celebrate our 15th Annual J-Sei Family Festival that is held in recognition of Keiro no Hi, respect for the aged day. 

Check back for the schedule of performances, list of activities, and to order bento.  More info to come. 

FAMILY FESTIVAL  Pre-order Bento

PRE-ORDER BENTO by Th 9/24

Choose items, select pick up time (12, 12:30, 1, 1:30), make payment.

Pick-up at J-Sei, 1285 66th Street (near Hollis St), Emeryville.  Street parking is available. Additional festival parking will be available at the Fratellanza parking lot (1/2 block away).

BENTO From Our Chef Friends

YUJI ISHIKATA

Influenced by memories of his grandmother’s cooking and inspired by the community, Chef Yuji offers inventive dishes and a fresh take on Japanese food for the soul.

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

Saturday, October 10, 2 pm

Hear from historian/writer Tamiko Nimura as she shares “A Place for What We Lose, a daughter’s return to Tule Lake”.  Joining in conversation is fellow writer Susan Ito who will serve as moderator.  Together, they will explore the writing process of their deeply personal stories and the discoveries along the way.

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 The typewritten pages of her father’s unpublished memoir—written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire—spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of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.

Susan Kiyo Ito (moderator) is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Literature, and named a best book of 2023 by the Library Journal. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult,The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere.  She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She teaches at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco.