Week 1

After getting back from the LA Retreat, it was time to start the internship! First, I came to the Issei Memorial Building (IMB), host of the San Jose JACL office, the Contemporary Asian Theater Scene (CATS) office, the Filipino American National Historical Society office, and the San Jose Taiko. I was given the CATS office as my designated office space during this internship, which is quite nice of them.

I got introduced to the coordinators of the NCI program in San Jose, Roy Hirabayashi, Ellen Kamei, and Andrew Knaack. Roy Hirabayashi, one of the founders of San Jose Taiko and is also on the board for the Japantown Community Congress (JCC) of San Jose, gave me a tour of Japantown. He pointed out some of the community's important buildings and organizations along the way, including the San Jose Buddhist Church, the Wesley Methodist Church, the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, and Yu-Ai-Kai. I also got to meet the head coordinator of the San Jose NCI program, Ellen, at a potluck with some of the other JCC members. I also got to meet Andrew, along with Janice Doi of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin, who is on the Board of Directors as VP of Research and planning, and also Kathy Sakamoto, who is part of the Japantown Business Association (JBA). In addition, I also got to meet with some of the members of San Jose Taiko, and have lunch with them. It certainly is an opportunity to be able to meet so many esteemed members of the Japanese American community, and I look forward to meeting more people in the coming weeks!

Little Tokyo Retreat

From June 16th-17th, LA hosted the opening retreat for the NCI program. First off, I would like to thank those who helped organize and lead the retreat, especially Paul Matsushima, Debbie Ching, and Amy Phillips. I had a wonderful time with all the other NCI interns from San Francisco and LA.

Throughout the retreat, I had the opportunity to meet many different people. There are twenty two interns in the program, with some just graduated and some had only finished one year of college, from UC Berkeley to UCLA to USC to USF. But no matter where we came from, we were all able to form bonds with each other. We also got to meet with supervisors from some of the LA NCI programs, including Kizuna, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), and the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council (CJACLC).

We also got to participate in many activities. We did a video scavenger hunt, in which we broke up into teams and ran around Little Tokyo to either bring back items, take pictures, or take videos of different things in order to win points. This included eating natto (and having the aftertaste stick around for an hour), sticking chopsticks up our noses, and finding important artifacts to Japanese American culture. We spent time in the JACCC as we did workshops with Amy Phillips, who led the scavenger hunt and told us the history of NCI and keeping the JA community together into the 21st Century, and Debbie Ching, who taught us networking skills. We stayed the night at the Miyako Hotel, which I found interesting primarily because it had the fancy Japanese toilets and mint shampoo. The next morning we got an exclusive tour of the Japanese American National Museum to see the history of the Japanese American community. 

I look forward to seeing all the NCI people again during the mid-season retreat at San Jose!

Nikkei Community Internship 2014

Hello! My name is Michael Handa and I am the 2014 intern for NCI! I will be a third year student at UC Berkeley next year with a major in Public Health and a minor in History. In high school I was active with the San Jose Jr. Young Buddhist Association, and was on cabinet three years there. I was also a fourth grade Dharma School teacher my junior and senior years of high school. Then in college I joined Berkeley's Nikkei Student Union and will be the Internal Vice President next year. San Jose Japantown has been a second home to me for as long as I can remember, so I am excited not only to learn more about the community I was raised in, but to give back to it in whatever ways I can.