J-Sei’s Family Festival

Sunday, September 24, 12-3 pm

J-Sei, 1285 66th Street, Emeryville (btwn Hollis St & San Pablo Av)

Each year we celebrate “Keiro no Hi” respect for the aged day, a time to honor our elders and celebrate with our multigenerational families.

Pre-0rdersare now closed.  The menu items will be available for walk-up sales at the festival.

Evergreen, A Japantown Mystery

A Book Talk & Signing with Naomi Hirahara

Sunday, September 24, 11 am (in-person & online)

With great anticipation, Evergreen, A Japantown Mystery continues the post-war resettlement story of Aki Ito who returns with her family from Manzanar to Chicago to Los Angeles. Meet dynamic mystery writer Naomi Hirahara as she shares her latest book that follows the award-winning Clark and Division.

RSVP via Eventbrite

“Hirahara humanizes the struggles of Japanese Americans rebuilding their lives from scratch. Her evocation of Little Tokyo haunts will bring a flood of memories for some Angelenos while introducing a new generation of readers to a pivotal period in L.A. history.” —Paula Woods, The Los Angeles Times

About the Book

A Japanese American nurse’s aide navigates the dangers of post-WWII and post-Manzanar life as she attempts to find justice for a broken family in this follow-up to the Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning Clark and Division.

It’s been two years since Aki Ito and her family were released from Manzanar detention center and resettled in Chicago with other Japanese Americans. Now the Itos have finally been allowed to return home to California—but nothing is as they left it. The entire Japanese American community is starting from scratch, with thousands of people living in dismal refugee camps while they struggle to find new houses and jobs in over-crowded Los Angeles.

Aki is working as a nurse’s aide at the Japanese Hospital in Boyle Heights when an elderly Issei man is admitted with suspicious injuries. When she seeks out his son, she is shocked to recognize her husband’s best friend, Babe Watanabe. Could Babe be guilty of elder abuse?

Only a few days later, Little Tokyo is rocked by a murder at the low-income hotel where the Watanabes have been staying. When the cops start sniffing around Aki’s home, she begins to worry that the violence tearing through her community might threaten her family. What secrets have the Watanabes been hiding, and can Aki protect her husband from getting tangled up in a murder investigation?

About the Author

Naomi Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winning author of multiple traditional mystery series and noir short stories. Her Mas Arai mysteries, which have been published in Japanese, Korean and French, feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes. Her first historical mystery, Clark and Division, which won a Mary Higgins Clark Award, follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago in 1944 after being released from a California wartime detention center. A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Naomi has also written numerous non-fiction history books and curated exhibitions.

Nichi Bei Review: “Murder and Emotions Unravel in Post-War Little Tokyo Mystery”

Photo by Rafu Shimpo.

Children’s Day Exhibit

May 4 – June 6

During the post-war years, Children’s Day became a national holiday of Japan.  Formerly celebrated as Boy’s Day on May 5th, the holiday was renamed and refocused in 1948 to also honor the role of Mothers, to shift away from Japan’s patriarchal past and move toward peace and equality.

Celebrate our children and mothers.  Our Children’s Day exhibit is on loan from the Berkeley Buddhist Temple on behalf of Andrew Shepherd, and from Margaret and Dennis Lee, and Mitsuko Umemoto.

 Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration

Saturday, May 6, 3 pm

Elizabeth Partridge, award-winning children’s book author, will discuss her new non-fiction book, “Seen and Unseen,” illustrated by Lauren Tamaki. “Seen and Unseen” received the most distinguished informational book for children in 2022 by the ALA, as well as the 2023 Bologna Children’s Award for Photography.  Presented by Friends of Topaz Museum.

RSVP for in-person or online to jill@j-sei.org

About the Book by author Elizabeth Partridge

Three months after Japan attached Pearl Harbor in 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Families, teachers, farm workers—all were ordered to leave behind their homes, their businesses, and everything they owned. Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced to live under hostile conditions in incarceration camps, their futures uncertain.

Three photographers set out to document life at Manzanar, an incarceration camp in the California desert: Toyo Miyatake, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams.

Growing up, I knew that my godmother, Dorothea Lange, had photographed the Japanese American incarceration during WWll, and was horrified by the suspension of civil liberties for the Japanese Americans. I also learned Ansel Adams had photographed the incarceration. Though they were good friends, Dorothea always thought he “didn’t get it.” That intrigued me. I decided to write a book on the incarceration and use both their photographs. I knew we’d also need illustrations to fill in what they were forbidden to photograph (Dorothea) and what they chose not to photograph (Ansel).

As I began researching, I quickly discovered that one of the prisoners, Toyo Miyatake, had smuggled in a camera lens and a film holder. Friends made him the camera body in the woodshop. Toyo later devised an intricate system of smuggling film into the camp. He took several photographs of conditions that Dorothea and Ansel were not able to, as well as documenting everyday life in the camp which provide an intimate, insider-view.

As Toyo told his son while they were in Manzanar, “I have to record everything. This sort of thing should never happen again.”