Fiona Potter

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Fiona Potter grew up in La Canada, California. She is a former Discover Nikkei intern currently living and working in the Bay Area, California.

Updated January 2013

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Cultivating remembrance: An interview with filmmaker Kenneth Kokka

By Fiona Potter
29 Jan 2013

The phrase “Richmond, California, 1942” might call to mind the patriotic bustle of naval shipyards and the stoic biceps of Rosie the Riveter, but this would obscure another story: that of the Japanese American residents who were forcibly removed from their homes and businesses in this coastal town and sent to concentration camps for the duration of the war. The documentary film Blossoms and Thorns: A Community Uprooted (Kokka 2012) reveals the contradictions between these two experiences of wartime Richmond by bringing Japanese Americans into the frame to tell their stories. With …

media en

Japanese American National Museum Store Online

Blossoms and Thorns: A Community Uprooted: New documentary portrays a vanishing industry

By Fiona Potter
28 Jan 2013

Richmond, California, in the year 1942 calls to mind the bustle of naval shipyards and a whirlwind of housing construction. A semi-rural town before World War II, the city was forever changed by the war and the thousands of defense workers who migrated there to work in various wartime industries. Another story, that of Richmond’s Japanese American residents and their cut-flower nursery businesses, is less well-known. An early twentieth-century immigrant success story, many of these families lost their homes, farms, and businesses when they were forcibly relocated and incarcerated by th…

community en

Reflections of a Summer Intern

By Fiona Potter
9 Sep 2008

When I first applied to the Nikkei Community Internship, I don’t think I really knew what I was getting myself into. The idea of connecting with my family’s culture in a way that also benefited the community was appealing to me, but I didn’t really think into it much more than that. NCI is organized and supported by the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council and facilitated by the Little Tokyo Service Center in Southern California and the Japanese Community Youth Council in Northern California. For eight weeks throughout the summer, interns in Southern Ca…

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Japanese migrants and their descendants

Fiona Potter

Cultivating remembrance: An interview with filmmaker Kenneth Kokka

Japanese American National Museum Store Online

Blossoms and Thorns: A Community Uprooted: New documentary portrays a vanishing industry

Reflections of a Summer Intern

Series this author contributes to

Japanese American National Museum Store Online

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