Stalking Strangers’ DNA to Fill in the Family Tree
They swab the cheeks of strangers and pluck hairs from corpses. They travel hundreds of miles to entice their suspects with an old photograph, or sometimes a free drink. Cooperation is preferred, but not necessarily required to achieve their ends.

January 19, 2010 (Tuesday) 6:30 PM

Brian Tadashi Maeda, film director, will be speaking about his current film project: "Samurai of Gold Hill"

It is the fascinating sage of the "Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony," first Japanese colony to establish itself in California.

The last samurai group of Aizu-Wakamatsu during the Bakumatsu (the End of Tokugawa Shogunate) period, escaped from Japan with a lead of a German to settling in Gold Hill, California.

The year was 1869, the second year of the Meiji when they finally arrived at California.

Immigration files offer hidden history of America

The federal government is opening the immigration files of millions of refugees, war brides, "enemy aliens" and other foreign nationals in the USA in the first half of the 20th century.

A gold mine for historians, genealogists, scholars and descendants, the files include private details on such public figures as Spanish artist Salvador Dali as well as family heirlooms confiscated from Chinese laborers.

"Individually, these files represent the story of just one immigrant," says Gregory Smith of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, "but as a collection, they document the story of American immigration ... with its many wonders and its many blemishes."

The immigration service signed an agreement Wednesday to transfer at least 21 million files to National Archives facilities near San Francisco and Kansas City. A searchable index is at http://www.uscis.gov/genealogy.

[read more about these immigration files]

For_Immediate_Release:

United States of America (Press Release) May 5, 2009 -- Japanese artist seeks exhibitors in the U.S. to exhibit the world's longest picture scroll , which will be on exhibit for the first time to the public on June 5, 2009, at Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan as a part of 150th Anniversary of the Port of Yokohama.

The scroll, painted on specialized local "Washi (Japanese)" papers, is 34-volume, 620-meter long with 1069 frames containing 120,000 people, with scenes spanning from the 13th Century to present. [read more about the world's longest scroll]

Sansei Japanese Sword Appraiser Mike Yamasaki – Part One: Turning a Manzanar Dagger Into a Family Heirloom | DiscoverNikkei.org

Sansei Japanese Sword Appraiser Mike Yamasaki – Part One Turning a Manzanar Dagger Into a Family Heirloom
By Keiko Fukuda T
ranslated by Matthew Galgani

I met with Mike one day around 10:00 am at a Japanese café in Little Tokyo. He had an appointment with a client in the morning and more meetings again that afternoon. His job? Appraiser of Japanese swords.

Mike is a sansei (third-generation Japanese) and is married to Mayumi, who was born in Japan. While I was exchanging email with Mayumi about “Toyo’s Camera”, a documentary about internment camp experiences, she wrote that “my husband has a dagger made at the Manzanar internment camp.” I immediately wanted to see the dagger and meet Mike.

We’ll discuss how he showed me that dagger a little later, but first here’s what Mike told me about why he, as someone born in America, would become an appraiser of Japanese swords. His grandparents on his father’s side came from Wakayama Prefecture. His grandparents on his mother’s side came from Shizuoka and Fukushima Prefectures and made their way to America. During the war, his mother, grandmother and uncle were relocated to Manzanar.

Feeling a strong connection with his grandmother, Mike’s job from childhood was to repair the daggers she brought from Japan. Perhaps it was by continually polishing those daggers that the Japanese soul grew within Mike.

Soon finding himself wanting to work in a field related to Japanese traditional culture, Mike took a path that led to him becoming an appraiser of Japanese swords. Invited by an appraiser he had met at a Japanese sword exhibition in Texas, he headed for Japan. Getting a chance to work with the official Nihon Bijutsu Token Hozonkai (NBTHK, Society for the Preservation of the Japanese Art Sword), Mike went back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, developing an eye for Japanese swords. In 1998, at the NBTHK’s 40th Anniversary National Sword Convention, he took 5th place out of over 200 participants at the “kantei-kai” (sword identification challenge). And at the monthly convention in September 2001, he became the first-ever non-Japanese national to win.

Understanding Japanese swords means understanding the background of hundreds of years of samurai history. Even as a Nikkei, an American-born, Mike clearly has a more detailed knowledge of Japanese history than this writer born in Japan. Regarding second-generation Japanese Americans and Japanese people, Mike makes the following comment:

“Nikkei immigrants came to America before the war. Japanese people in Japan experienced the war and post-war period, and that dramatically changed their values. However, Japanese Americans held on to the old values from the Meiji and Taisho eras. It was a value system that said you had to be honest and hard working. For a Sansei like me, too, according to my own self-analysis, I’m more Japanese than the Japanese.  [read more]

Part Two

Reunion for iPhone
Reunion for iPhone & iPod Touch

Reunion is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It's designed to complement Reunion for Macintosh and lets you take your family with you. View, navigate, search, and edit your information on the go. You'll always be ready to add people, document new information, and make corrections to your data. Then bring the changes back to your family file on the Macintosh.

Did some minor security updates to the site.  They're was a vulnerability in messages.php and it is fixed. An exploit in submit.php was fixed.  See any problems after the update please send a message.

PHP Fusion updates v7.00.1 - 4

Not long ago some of our own family members had to endure anti-Japanese legislation in California as well as the anti-miscegenation laws. Some families still feel the effects of this kind of legislation, we should never add discrimination in California's constitution for any group or religion.

Vote NO on 8!

JACL Advacacy

The JACL has a long history of advocating for policies that protect and promote the welfare of Japanese Americans, Asian Americans and other communities. This history of advocacy includes the repeal of the Cable Act during the 1930s, which caused Americans to lose their citizenship if they married an Issei, to the Redress campaign in the 1980s, which provided remedies for the injustice of the internment during World War II.

JACL’s advocacy has included participation in transformational events in American history such as joining in an amicus brief in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and supporting the 1965 Immigration Law, which equalized immigration quotas for Asian countries, providing a pathway to America for many Asians in the years that followed.

Today, the JACL continues its rich history of civil rights advocacy by initiating action or by monitoring important issues in partnership with other major civil rights organizations.

http://www.youtube.com/v/oYljisDxj-M&rel

API Gather In Little Tokyo
“Existing law in California prohibits the government from discriminating based on race, gender or sexual orientation,” said Lieu. “At the same time, there is nothing in the law that prevents churches from continuing to maintain their own religious practices and policies. Proposition 8 would turn this fundamental distinction between the government and religion by elevating religious doctrine which would oppose same-sex marriage over governmental laws that prohibit discrimination. That is wrong. We live in a democracy, not a theocracy.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0atjv8ygiKA

“Our history as Japanese Americans has been our struggle to expand equality, to become full, whole American citizens,” Takei told The Rafu Shimpo. “To me, it is astounding that there are Asian Americans that seem unaware of that history and now are advocating for hate and discrimination. Proposition 8 must be defeated.”

Discrimination; Vote NO on 8!