Patricia Wakida

wasabipress

Patricia Wakida is the editor of two publications on the Japanese American experience, Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, and Unfinished Message: the collected works of Toshio Mori. For the past fifteen years, she has worked as a literary and community historian, including Associate Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum, Contributing Editor for Discover Nikkei website, and as an Associate Editor of the Densho Encyclopedia project. She serves on various non-profit boards including Poets & Writers California, Kaya Press, and the California Studies Association. Patricia has worked as an apprentice papermaker in Gifu, Japan and as an apprentice letterpress printer and hand bookbinder in California; she maintains her own linoleum block and letterpress business under the Wasabi Press imprint. She is a Yonsei, whose parents were incarcerated as children in the Jerome (Arkansas) and Gila River (Arizona) American concentration camps. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband Sam and Gosei, Hapa (Japanese Mexican) son, Takumi.

Updated August 2017

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How a Japanese-American Owned Real Estate Firm Broke up Racist Covenants in Southern California - Part 2

Por Patricia Wakida
24 May 2022

Read Part 1 >> Since 1910, Los Angeles has boasted the largest population of Japanese Americans in mainland U.S. This first-generation immigrant workforce vastly contributed to the city’s fishing, agricultural and produce marketing, and gardening industries. Early Japanese residents rented rooms in the segregated neighborhood downtown known as “Little Tokyo” until they married and began families. Thus began an expansion into small enclaves that welcomed non-whites, such as Boyle Heights, Sawtelle, Uptown, or near the fishing and cannery operations on Terminal Island. …

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How a Japanese-American Owned Real Estate Firm Broke up Racist Covenants in Southern California - Part 1

Por Patricia Wakida
23 May 2022

Back in the mid-1940s, a Mrs. Lopez called up Kashu Realty in L.A.’s Crenshaw district and asked to speak with real estate agent Kazuo K. Inouye. Lopez lived on Rimpau Blvd in Mid-City and told Inouye that she wanted to sell her house, but insisted that she would only sell it to a non-white homebuyer because, when she purchased the house years before, she suffered the wrath of her neighbors, who took her to court in an attempt to prove that a Mexican American was not legally “white.” (She won the case.) Inouye gladly found a Japanese American family to buy her home, put up a…

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Erica Kaminishi: Presenting a Brazilian Nikkei Identity through Art - Part 2

Por Patricia Wakida
20 Feb 2018

Read Part 1 >> Later, you returned to Japan as a graduate student and stayed for many years, working, exhibiting, and studying both traditional forms (pottery) and contemporary forms (film and visual arts). What were some of the big lessons you took away from studying in Japan, both artistically and personally? Going back to Japan as a graduate student made me see the country and its culture with different eyes. I experienced two situations in “two” different countries: first as an immigrant worker and then as a foreign student. The way that you’re treated in th…

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Erica Kaminishi: Presenting a Brazilian Nikkei Identity through Art - Part 1

Por Patricia Wakida
19 Feb 2018

Artist Erica Kaminishi, born and raised in Mato Gross, Brazil, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Nikkei Brazilian dekasegi who have migrated to Japan to work or study, a hundred years after their ancestors immigrated. Over a span of ten years, she worked, studied pottery, and attended a PhD program in Japan. She now lives and works full-time as an artist in Paris, France, but her roots as a Nikkei Brazilian and her time in Japan have clearly had an impact on the way she sees and thinks. Kaminishi is one of thirteen artists selected to participate in Transpacific Borderlands: The Art o…

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Albert Saijo: Karmic Heart

Por Patricia Wakida
5 Jul 2013

When the phone rang unexpectedly early one morning in 2009, I couldn’t believe it, but it was Albert Saijo on the line, calling me from the rainforests of Hawai‘i. It seemed serendipitious. His book, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, not only lay on the kitchen table, but I had engaged in conversation that very morning about his poems, which were insistent and dense, full of remembrance yet muscular in its intellectual content and tone. In an attempt to emulate Saijo’s block handwritten style, Outspeaks was typeset in ALL CAPS, which I interpreted as a prophet incanting at a feveris…