2024 Day of Remembrance
Yonsei Memory Project’s Favorite ResourcES
Day One: Monday, February 19, 2024
Dear community,
We hope this finds you well. For the past 6 years (!!), we have offered live Day of Remembrance programming.
These include in-person “memory bus tours,” a meditation walk in Chinatown, and art installation at the Fresno Fairgrounds. We have created different arts-based and humanities-inspired ways to honor our ancestors and their stories through a collective mandala one year, and another via inter-generational storytelling in partnership with StoryCorps.
During the height of the pandemic, we hosted virtual Day of Remembrance programs illuminating how artists engage in memory keeping. This is just a handful of things we’ve done (attached is a more comprehensive list of Yonsei Memory Project's history).
We’ve done all of this with just a few grants, community support, and a lot of heart-and-hard-work. We are proud of what we’ve done together.
This year the “we” of Yonsei Memory Project is in a transition. Our hearts are full of gratitude for our forever co-founder, Brynn Saito! Brynn has been one of our guiding lights. She has been generous to Yonsei Memory Project with her many super powers. She is a kind and thoughtful leader, she offers poignant questions and powerful observations that point us toward wisdom. Brynn reminds us that tenderness and compassion are part of strength and community resilience. As Brynn transitions to focus energies on her MANY other amazing endeavors like teaching, leadership, and writing - we just wanted to pause and lift up our gratitudes. Thank you, Brynn, for all the heart and soul you’ve given to Yonsei Memory Project.
For our 2024 Day of Remembrance, we’ve developed a series for you! Over the next four days we’ll send out one e-mail per day with a compilation of some of our favorites resources. Yonsei Memory Project invites you to browse a selection of books (for all ages!), songs, archives and collections that resonate deeply with us. Think of them as doorways into Japanese American community history, with an emphasis on the World War II incarceration experience and California’s Central Valley.
In the 82 years since Executive Order 9066 was first ratified, putting the mass exile of over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry into American wartime concentration camps, there has been an outpouring of films, plays, books, songs, dances, visual art, and so many other media dedicating to telling hundreds of thousands of stories of that history.
We encourage you to share them with your favorite family members, educators, and librarians. These lists of favorites are not meant to be comprehensive or totalizing, they are more like entry points that we love. We also welcome your thoughts and sharing of special resources you turn to remember, inspire, and honor Japanese American history and culture.
Yonsei Memory Project will continue to offer different examples of memory keeping. We hope you, and everyone, has the chance to feel connected to ancestors and healing.
Warmly,
Nikiko + Patricia
Day Two: Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Dear community,
Yesterday, we launched our Day of Remembrance 2024 program with a letter looking back at Yonsei Memory Project's history and uplifting gratitudes. If you're just tuning in, this year, we’ve developed a series for you! (And if you didn't receive February 19th's e-mail, please let us know and we will forward it.)
Over the next four days we’ll send out one email per day with a compilation of some of our favorites resources. Today's medium is BOOKS! Yonsei Memory Project invites you to browse a selection of books (for all ages!) that resonate deeply with us. Think of them as doorways into Japanese American community history, with an emphasis on the World War II incarceration experience.
We invite you to check these books out from the library, order them, borrow them, share them and commune with them. Each of these titles has brought us closer to ancestors and grounded us in deeper understanding of our community histories.
Our favorite books are attached as a PDF for your perusal.
may wisdom light our path,
Nikiko + Patricia
Day Three: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Dear community,
Sometimes 'memory keeping' is intimidating. It can feel like we have to be experts in all things about our family histories and American histories or like we have to memorize all the rituals and traditions anyone ever created to honor ancestors. We like a different approach, one that is grounded in compassion for ourselves. Memory keeping can be simple. Any door into memory keeping is a beautiful one. We believe anytime we think about our ancestors, that does something to our hearts and consciousness. Memory keeping can be as simple as thoughtfully listening to a song.
Songwriters have used historical events and storytelling as inspiration for the music they create for generations. From America’s early battles for independence to the people’s struggle for racial equality, music has helped us remember our stories, bonded us as community, and freed our spirits to sing and dance.
For today, we've created a short playlist for the moments when we dream about our ancestors. Open the attached PDF and click on the artists/title links on each slide to be taken to a digital space where you can listen to a song.
We hope you enjoy,
Nikiko + Patricia