How does a public trauma become a family secret?
Sometime in the 1960s, a librarian named Taku Frank Nimura wrote a book, “Daruma: The Indomitable Spirit,” about being incarcerated in US concentration camps as a child. When he was twelve, the government took his father, Junichi, away from his family at Tule Lake to a separate camp in Santa Fe.
Taku lost Junichi for good in 1960, then became a father himself as he was finishing his manuscript. Or so it seems—the timeline is hazy, because his book went unpublished, and Taku passed away when his eldest daughter, Tamiko, was only ten. His “Daruma” waited quietly for decades, in copies in a university archive and a desk drawer. Then Tamiko, a literature professor, found her own life upended by a tenure denial, and decided it was time to return to her father’s story.
A Place for What We Lose is a record of Tamiko’s long conversation with Taku’s book, over a period in which she reconstructed her career as a writer and public historian. Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, her memoir navigates the intersections of adult crises and the deeper losses of childhood, in her father’s story and her own. Along the way, she is guided by a community of survivors and descendants that materializes most vividly in the organized pilgrimages to Tule Lake.
Tamiko is an old friend, but you can know someone for decades and never ask them about the losses that shape your lives. There’s something archetypal about a child’s loss of a parent, which captures the imagination while obscuring the specificity of any actual, non-metaphorical loss. A tenure denial, by contrast, feels impossible to explain, as those of us who’ve experienced it know: it’s not just a job loss, but a kind of banishment.
Nikkei incarceration presents a third problem, one Taku wouldn’t recognize. We’ve told the story so many times, forever breaking a silence or unearthing a buried past, hoping the truth will set us free, and it’s as if the narrative requires us to pretend each time is new. Inevitably someone gets up to say no one told them their country did such a thing, and they are very sorry.
Sometimes you wake up from the dream but you are still in the dream.
“The camp grief was easier to write about,” Tamiko told me. Yes, people have heard about it. “Camp grief,” she explains, involves more than forced removal and detention in wartime, encompassing the coercive assimilation and cultural erasure of subsequent decades. Yet this grief gave her a way to begin—to face loss with life-giving anger, manifested as a collective purpose shared with a multigenerational community of organizers.
If you are familiar with camp stories, this is both unexpected and long overdue. Rather than narrating incarceration as a repressed secret, she recounts camp resistance as an intergenerational legacy of strength, a guide through difficult times.
Grief is a figure of movement. It will direct you toward others, if you let it.
I’d known Tamiko was a life-changing teacher, so I wondered how she managed the loss of a calling, and rebuilt a career that realizes the ideals of the ethnic studies movement more fully than ethnic studies itself.
At what point did it turn into a plan, I asked. “What plan?” she laughed.
She’d always wanted to be a writer, so her husband, Josh, told her to go be a writer, and she opened herself up to what community had to offer. Her account of becoming an essayist and public historian is a list of friends and mentors: Alan Lau, Justin Wadland, Michael Sullivan, and others. She developed a beat, Nikkei in the PNW and in the arts, and became an expert on local history. She wanted her artist sister, Teruko, to move up from Austin, so she made herself a key figure in the Tacoma arts community.
So, you do make plans, I pointed out. But the plans were about people.
“It was like, who do I want to talk to?” she explained. “That’s still a goal for me, as a writer.”
“I really feel like the book built its own community along the way,” she added. “The book literally rewrote me into the writer it needed me to be, which was more connected, less introverted, more vulnerable, and more open to talking to people.”
But there were always people to lift her up. As an undergrad, she studied with Gary Soto and the great Ishmael Reed, whose simple words of encouragement on one of her poems never left her, even when she drifted away from writing. “He said, “I think you could succeed as a writer. You have the talent and the skills and the imagination,’” she recalled.
Shawn Wong, another legend, recruited Tamiko to grad school. Decades earlier, he’d met her uncle, the poet and playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi, whose work he anthologized. Now her new memoir is included in Wong’s series with UW Press, which recommended it to him after committing to publication.
Within an Asian American literary tradition, her book stands out against post-assimilationist narratives portraying cultural identity as a source of shame or lack to be overcome, or depicting Asian parenting as inevitably repressive. The father Tamiko writes about was generous and demonstrative with his love. After he died, she was surrounded by a caring extended family, and cultural trappings of ethnic identity—food, ritual, heirlooms—were always a source of belonging.
I’m reminded of Nikki Giovanni’s line that “Black love is Black wealth”: for Tamiko, cultural identity is collective abundance, even extravagance. And it is inherently coalitional. “I owe a lot to Black feminism,” she said, recalling her professors Johnnella Butler and Joycelyn Moody. “I felt that Asian Americans owed so much to that intellectual tradition.”
In the book, Tamiko recounts how leading a discussion at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage allowed her to reclaim her calling as a teacher. Later, encounters with groups like Tsuru for Solidarity led her towards prison abolition—a topic, she told me, that makes her feel like a curious student. I’m convinced that abolition is where our community is headed, consciously or not; taking the position of a student can be the most powerful way to teach.
As Ishmael Reed’s student, Tamiko told me, laughing, she once wrote an uncharacteristically dark poem about Spiderman attempting suicide, but failing: what comes out of his slashed wrists is not blood but web. Her memoir may be a more elegant variation on that metaphor: abundant connection overwhelming despair.
Grief is the promise of connection that survives a great loss. Grief saves parting from isolation, in the same way reading rescues solitude from loneliness. As a reader’s memoir, Tamiko’s book is organized like a library, a tribute to Taku, with small chapters gathered under headings like “Reference,” “Card Catalog,” or “Children’s Room.” What better figure could there be for the ways a community comes together, and for the collective wealth it draws upon in moments of great need?
Author Tamiko Nimura will appear at the Tacoma Public Library Main Branch on April 28 for a free event including book sales and signings through King’s Books, light refreshments, a community remembrance altar, and a commemorative make-and-take letterpress print produced by Write253 (available by donation to its Remann Hall program). Nimura will also appear at Browser’s Books in Olympia on April 30 for a reading and signing. On May 5, she will appear at the Seattle Public Library in conversation with Caitlin Oiye Coon and Shawn Wong (registration requested), in an event co-sponsored by Densho, and books for sale with mam’s books. On May 21, Nimura is curating the 9th Annual South Sound Day of Remembrance: A Gathering of Japanese American Stories (free) at the Washington State History Museum, including a book fair, author chats, and a panel discussion exploring Japanese American stories. On June 6, she will appear at Blaine Memorial UMC, Seattle, in conversation with Vince Schleitwiler, an event co-sponsored by Seattle Tsuru for Solidarity, and books for sale with Madison Books.
Vince Schleitwiler, a fourth-generation Japanese American from Chicago, currently teaches ethnic studies at the University of Washington, and lives in Beacon Hill with his family. His book, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific, was published in 2017 by NYU Press.
