Mia Nakaji Monnier

miam

Mia Nakaji Monnier is a writer in Los Angeles. Her journalism and essays have appeared in BuzzFeed News, Shondaland, The Washington Post, and more. She started her career in Little Tokyo at Discover Nikkei and The Rafu Shimpo. You can find her on Twitter @miagabb and read more of her work at mianakajimonnier.com.

Updated May 2021

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Eagles of Heart Mountain, Bradford Pearson Uses Football As a ‘Trojan Horse’

By Mia Nakaji Monnier
5 Nov 2021

In Eagles of Heart Mountain, football is all but pretext. The book, journalist Bradford Pearson’s debut, follows the high-school football team that formed at the Heart Mountain concentration camp during World War II. Despite being made up mostly of boys who had never played football before their arrival at Heart Mountain, the Eagles competed against local high school teams and finished their first season undefeated. After two chapters closely following the team’s main players and their families, though, the book opens outward, becoming a broader story about the racist and econom…

food en

Interview with a Nikkei forager: mushroom hunting with Sayuri Shinya

By Mia Nakaji Monnier
16 Jul 2019

On still-damp, foggy mornings after the rain has cleared, Sayuri Shinya and her husband drive from their home in the San Francisco Bay Area and into the woods, looking for mushrooms. Shinya began forging five years ago, when she met her husband, who grew up in Germany and has hunted for mushrooms since childhood. “At first, I thought it was weird,” she told me. “I was like, mushrooms, really? Foraging is not something you hear about all the time. Mushrooms sound like, you could buy that in the store, right? But the kinds we pick, they're not like button mushrooms; they're n…

war en

“Thirty Minutes Over Oregon” Introduces Children to the Complexity of War and Friendship

By Mia Nakaji Monnier
26 Mar 2019

When we talk about World War II, it’s often in terms of major milestones: the racist incarceration of Japanese Americans; the bombings of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. But there are infinite smaller-scale stories that many of us will never hear, like that of Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot sent on a mission to bomb Oregon. Because nobody was injured during the bombings, they didn’t become major news in either the U.S. or Japan. Twenty years later, the town of Brookings, Oregon invited Fujita to their Memorial Day festival, sparking a lifelong friendship and a mini cultural…

culture en

Author Andrea Tsurumi on kindness and the role of uncertainty in art and cultural identity - Part 2

By Mia Nakaji Monnier
12 Feb 2019

Read Part 1 >> Monnier: How do you describe your identity when you describe yourself? What words do you like? Tsurumi: Well, it depends on who I'm talking to or why I'm describing it. If it's with a friend or somebody I'm close with or in the context of this interview, it's a longer conversation, right? If it's somebody who's like, 'Well, what are you?" which is the common thing, I think, if you're mixed-race in America, then it's like, "Well, my dad's Japanese and my mom's Jewish. I'm from New York. I'm a person..." So I'm not either—I am Jewish, but also I am Asian American.…

culture en

Author Andrea Tsurumi on kindness and the role of uncertainty in art and cultural identity - Part 1

By Mia Nakaji Monnier
11 Feb 2019

In the undersea world of Andrea Tsurumi’s new picture book, Crab Cake, the community has a steady rhythm: “ Seahorse pretends to be seaweed…Parrotfish crunches coral and poops sand…Pufferfish puffs up…And crab bakes cakes.” When a (human-caused) disaster brings this routine to a halt and all the animals into hiding, Crab takes action. What results is a warm-hearted affirmation of individual effort, art, and caretaking, with joyful, richly textured illustrations sure to inspire curiosity about ocean ecology, environmental responsibility, and the taste of …

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Discover Nikkei

Japanese migrants and their descendants

Mia Nakaji Monnier

Series this author contributes to

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