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 Four: Thursday, February 22, 2024

Dear Community,

Today, we tune into stories from a place we call home.

Like many Japanese Americans spread across the country, the core team of Yonsei Memory Project has roots in California’s Central Valley, a vast agricultural region fed by the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Kings rivers, that we have farmed for generations. 

Our offering today features articles, archives, and documentaries of first-person Japanese American oral histories and other stories from the Central Valley. We hope these stories remind you of the places and people you call home in some way.

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.

may wisdom light our path,

Nikiko + Patricia

Day Five: Friday, February 23, 2024

Dear Community,

Yonsei Memory Project was born out of a deep internal inquiry: How can we, as Yonsei, utilize our particular backgrounds as artists, poets, writers and organizers to awaken the archives of memory? What does this moment ask of us?

It's no secret that the United States still has work to do to achieve true racial equality. The marginalization of people of color, including Japanese Americans, stretches back centuries and the fight is still going— with many writers, artists, musicians, and other creative folks at the forefront, speaking their truth and telling their ancestor’s stories.

For our final observance in honor of Day of Remembrance 2024, we've noticed that in just the past few years, there has been a surge of dynamic teaching resources and podcasts from and about our community history. Today's attachment contains some that inspire us.

We are so grateful for your presence throughout the week, and in closing, ask you these questions to close out this week's memory work.

• What is needed in the JA community to carry forward the stories and legacies through the generations?

• Do you feel like there has been healing in our community and if so, how can it continue?

• How can we link our stories of struggle with current civil liberties struggles?

• What Day of Remembrance rituals or practices would you like to see?

If you feel so inclined to send some thoughts back to us, we'd love it, but no pressure. We know how full days can be, we are just grateful to get to do this work together.

warmly,

Patricia + Nikiko

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.

We hope you enjoy,

Nikiko + Patricia