Sharon Yamato

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Sharon Yamato is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. She has produced and directed two documentary films, Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn, and A Flicker in Eternity. She also wrote Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps. She has written articles for the Los Angeles Times, and is currently a columnist for The Rafu Shimpo. She has served as a consultant for the Japanese American National Museum, Go For Broke National Education Center, and has conducted oral history interviews for Densho in Seattle.

Updated June 2014

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The Power of Irei

Digging up Ways to Honor Her Ancestors—Kyoko Oda and Ireichō

By Sharon Yamato
27 Jan 2023

Sometimes it takes a soft-spoken woman like Kyoko Oda to use her charm to make sure the lives of 125,284 incarcerated Japanese American are not forgotten. Someone gentle on the outside but no less mighty on the inside as she works in multiple capacities calling attention to the lives forever changed by the mass detention. It can be seen in her work publishing her father’s Tule Lake Stockade Diary; working tirelessly on behalf of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition or the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Community Center; supporting ongoing projects like the World War I…

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The Power of Irei

Ireichō, Kintsugi, and the Transformation of Karma: A Conversation with Project Founder Duncan Ryuken Williams

By Sharon Yamato
27 Nov 2022

To craft into a sacred book listing the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated at 75 World War II detention sites, it took inspired thought and meticulous research from its brilliant creative team. Led by Buddhist priest Duncan Ryuken Williams of the University of Southern California Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, and book publisher Sunyoung Lee of Kaya Press, it was a book meant to be a living monument with Japanese spiritual elements among its essential building blocks. In his seminal book on Buddhism in the camps, American Sutra author Willia…

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Moving Farewell to Beloved Heart Mountain Farmer

By Sharon Yamato
5 May 2022

As far as the eye could see along Road 90 where it meets Lane 9, stretching along the vast dusty farmland of Powell, Wyoming, and extending for miles in the shadow of Heart Mountain, 60 tractors paraded by the homestead farm that Tak Ogawa tended and nurtured for more than 70 years. The procession of farmers came to pay tribute to the man they knew as a pioneer, neighbor, co-worker, helper and friend. On March 31, Ogawa passed away quietly at the age of 96, just as the sun was rising and most likely around the time he was usually heading out to plow the fields. The oldest working homesteader…

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Behind the Art of Miné Okubo

By Sharon Yamato
26 Aug 2021

How appropriate that on the 75th Anniversary of Miné Okubo’s pioneering graphic memoir, Citizen 13660, hailed for its groundbreaking account of the WWII incarceration by a Nisei held in camp, the Japanese American National Museum would present an exhibition drawn from its own impressive collection of Okubo masterworks. When the Museum was developing its reputation as the repository for notable Japanese American art more than twenty years ago, its innovative senior curator and art mastermind, Karin Higa, convinced Okubo and her estate to donate the massive body of work that includ…

The Radicalization of a Poet and a Pastor: Diane C. Fujino on Nisei Radicals Mitsuye Yamada and S. Michael Yasutake

By Sharon Yamato
21 May 2021

It took an engaged scholar like Diane C. Fujino to tell the story of the lives of two extraordinary siblings—poet Mitsuye Yamada and Reverend S. Michael Yasutake—with a deep dive into turbulent Nisei waters. Fujino’s previous work has included books on such audacious Japanese Americans as civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama and prominent Black Panther member Richard Aoki. Always managing to cast a new light on Japanese American history, Fujino’s latest book, Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake, agai…

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Japanese migrants and their descendants

Sharon Yamato

The Power of Irei

The Power of Irei

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