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Nikkei Style (film)

Films and Video
Grades 9-12, Adult
Documentary
Change versus tradition, Importance of community, Power of tradition, Quest for discovery
Limited availability

Personal essay on being Japanese American by Sansei filmmaker Steven Okazaki , narrated in his first person voice. Beginning his journey at a family mochizuki event in Oxnard, California, he explores his family history, taking us to the house he grew up in in Venice, California, and telling us what he knows of his mother's and father's families, including their World War II incarceration (his mother went to Santa Anita , then Amache , his father to Heart Mountain ) and featuring a brief interview with his mother. In search of more information about his father's side, he goes to Japan to visit a distant cousin and to Hawai'i to visit one of his father's old army buddies, from whom he learns much. The film ends with footage from various bon dances in Hawai'i and the continental U.S, which Okazaki cites as a living symbol of being Japanese American. Along …

Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story (film)

Films and Video
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Documentary
Injustice, Rights - individual or societal
Available

Documentary film by Eric Paul Fournier that chronicles the story of American civil rights hero, Fred Korematsu , whose refusal to obey orders prohibiting Japanese Americans from remaining on the West Coast led to a landmark Supreme Court case .

Private Life (book)

Books
Historical Fiction
Facing reality, Identity crisis, Female roles, Disillusionment and dreams
Available

A middle-aged white woman recounts her friendship with a Japanese American family she first meets through personal tragedy; the injustice they experience, partly as a result of her own husband, leads her to a personal awakening.

Return to the Valley: Japanese American Experience After WWII (film)

Films and Video
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Documentary
Injustice, Rebirth, Power of the past
Widely available

Documentary film that tells the story of Japanese Americans returning to the Santa Clara, Salinas and Pajaro Valleys and the Central Coast after World War II. Produced by KTEH, a San Jose public television station, Return to the Valley was the first episode of an anthology series titled Voices of the Valley and debuted in 2003. It received a region Emmy Award in 2004 for "Outstanding Community Program."

Sanga moyu (film)

Films and Video
Grades 9-12, Adult
Drama
Family - blessing or curse, Patriotism - positive side or complications
Limited availability

Japanese television series that dramatized the Japanese American experience. Sanga moyu (Burning Mountains and Rivers) was a 1984 series produced by NHK, Japan's national broadcasting network. Consisting of 51 episodes that ran 45 minutes each, the series debuted on January 8, 1984, and ran through December 23, 1984. The story was based on the novel Futatsu no sokoku (Two Homelands) by Toyoko Yamasaki and focused on the Amo family of Los Angeles whose three Nisei sons chose different paths during World War II while the family was incarcerated at Manzanar : one who volunteers for the U.S. Army and fights in Europe, another who serves in the Military Intelligence Service during the war crimes trials and American occupation, and a third who is trapped in Japan at the outbreak of war and drafted into the Japanese army. Japanese American organizations in the continental United States objected to the portrayal of …

Stand Up For Justice: The Ralph Lazo Story (film)

Films and Video
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Drama
Injustice, Coming of age
Available

Short film that dramatizes the story of Ralph Lazo , a Los Angeles high school student of Mexican and Irish descent, who voluntarily chose to go to Manzanar to support his Nisei friends and protest the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Streams of Light: Shin Buddhism in America (film)

Films and Video
Adult
Documentary
Change versus tradition, Power of tradition, Role of Religion – virtue or hypocrisy
Widely available

Documentary film on shin Buddhism in the United States focuses on the Japanese American temples of the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) from 1898 to the present. The sixty-four minute film was directed by Brazil-based Buddhist priest Rev. Kentaro Sugao with the cooperation of the BCA and the Institute of Buddhist Studies.

Tadaima (film)

Films and Video
Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Drama
Companionship as salvation, Darkness and light, Disillusionment and dreams, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice
Widely available

Short dramatic film by Robin Takao D'Oench that chronicles the return of a Japanese American family to their West Coast home after being released from an American concentration camp. The family—two presumably Issei parents and two presumably Nisei kids, an older teenage boy and younger teenage girl—arrive at a home that is unkempt and dirty and also marred by anti-Japanese graffiti both inside and out. As they set about making the house livable again, the two kids go out into the woods and dig up a box filled with Japanese objects—family photographs, documents, and precious objects such as Japanese dolls and clothing—they had presumably buried in the period prior to their forced removal. As they slowly settle back into their home, each family member finds some degree of hope by the end of the first day. The title is a Japanese expression generally uttered by someone who is announcing his …

Unfinished Message (short story)

Short Stories
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Motherhood
Available

Seemingly autobiographical story by Toshio Mori about his mother and brother. The story begins in 1945 in Topaz , where the author's mother can't sleep one night because of anxiety about her son, who is serving in Europe. She later finds out that he was wounded in battle that night. Later, they arrange for his transfer to a hospital in the U.S, deciding on one near the family home in California. When they leave camp and return home, she is able to visit him at the hospital. However, she later dies in her sleep before her son is released. After her death, the author and his brother hear tapping on the window of the room in which she died, which they interpret as her message to them. Written by Mori in 1947, the story was first published in his 1979 short story collection, The Chauvinist and Other Stories and reprinted …

City in the Sun (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Displacement, Evils of racism
Limited availability

1946 novel by Karon Kehoe that represented the first full-length work of adult fiction to dramatize Japanese American confinement.

Days of Waiting (film)

Films and Video
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Documentary
Expression through art, love and sacrifice, injustice
Limited availability

An award-winning 1990 documentary film by Steven Okazaki about the life and work of artist Estelle Peck Ishigo , a Caucasian woman who voluntarily entered the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming during World War II with her Japanese American husband. The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1991 and The George Foster Peabody Award.

They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Patriotism – positive side or complications, Quest for power, Rights - individual or societal
Available

Nisei known primarily for his role as executive secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) during World War II reflects on his life experiences, and declares with confidence that he would make the same choices if he could do it over again.

Farewell to Manzanar (book)

Books
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Memoir
Coming of age, Displacement, Evils of racism, Family – blessing or curse, Working class struggles
Widely available

Popular memoir that tells the story of one family's forced removal and confinement at Manzanar through the eyes of a young girl. First published in 1973, Farewell to Manzanar has sold over one million copies and is one of the most widely read accounts of Japanese American incarceration and its aftermath.

A Grain of Sand (album)

Albums
Grades 9-12, Adult
Contemporary Folk
Evils of racism, Immigrant experience, Injustice
Widely available

Originally produced and released in 1973 by Paredon Records, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America by folk trio Chris Kando Iijima , Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto , and William "Charlie" Chin is widely recognized to be the first album of Asian American music. The record is a combination of folk songs, political ballads and protest songs. The music was written, performed and recorded at the height of the Asian American, black, and anti-war movements in the early '70s by New York musicians and activists Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin, who were then in their twenties and early thirties. The original album includes artwork by Arlan Huang/Artist Resource Basement Workshop on the album jacket and liner notes with a political statement by the musicians, lyrics, and a list of Asian American publications from the era. One of the songs, "We Are the Children," is likely the first …

Home Again (book)

Books
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Character - destruction and building up, Displacement, Evils of racism
Available

A 1955 novel authored by a former War Relocation Authority (WRA) official that tells the epic story of one Japanese American family from California, covering their prewar travails, their wartime incarceration, and their return to California after the war. The book was heavily promoted particularly within the Japanese American community and widely reviewed.

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