Grappling with her father's unpublished narrative of Tule Lake incarceration, Tamiko Nimura constructs her own memoir of

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Grappling with her father's unpublished narrative of Tule Lake incarceration, Tamiko Nimura constructs her own memoir of

https://iexaminer.org/grappling-with-her-fathers-unpublished-narrative-of-tule-lake-incarceration-tamiko-nimura-constructs-her-own-memoir-of-connection/

Grappling with her father’s unpublished narrative of Tule Lake incarceration, Tamiko Nimura constructs her own memoir of connection

By Vince Schleitwiler - April 3, 2026

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 Or so it seems—the timeline is hazy, because his book went unpublished, and Taku passed away when his eldest daughter, Tamiko, was only ten.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.

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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.”

… more … also current ice incarcerations … Camp grief … shame of the no no camp …