JANM Book Club Hosts Conversation on Tritia Toyota’s New Book about Shin Issei Women

LOS ANGELES, CA – The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) and UCLA will present a conversation with Tritia Toyota and Valerie Matsumoto about Toyota’s new book, Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020, at JANM on Sunday, June 23, 2024 from 2 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Tickets are $16 ($9 for seniors and students, free for JANM Members) and are available at janm.org/events. Tickets include admission to JANM on June 23.

Toyota is an adjunct associate professor in Anthropology and a research scholar at the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.The author of Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging, she also wrote and produced the documentary Asian America. Matsumoto is a professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. In July 2017 she was appointed to the George and Sakaye Aratani Endowed Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community. 

Together they will discuss how Intimate Strangers explores the lives of Japanese women migrating to the US and the specific challenges and trials they faced as both women and recent immigrants. These womens’ stories highlight the precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality that they faced in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and in the US, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship and tension around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and belonging. Published by Temple University Press, the book is available at the JANM Store for $32.95.

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About the Japanese American National Museum (JANM)

Established in 1985, JANM promotes understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. Located in the historic Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles, JANM is a center for civil rights, ensuring that the hard-fought lessons of the World War II incarceration are not forgotten. A Smithsonian Affiliate and one of America’s Cultural Treasures, JANM is a hybrid institution that straddles traditional museum categories. JANM is a center for the arts as well as history. It provides a voice for Japanese Americans and a forum that enables all people to explore their own heritage and culture. Since opening to the public in 1992, JANM has presented over 100 exhibitions onsite while traveling 40 exhibits to venues such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Ellis Island Museum in the United States, and to several leading cultural museums in Japan and South America. JANM is open on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday–Sunday from 11 a.m.–5 p.m. and on Thursday from 12 p.m.–8 p.m. JANM is free every third Thursday of the month. On all other Thursdays, JANM is free from 5 p.m.–8 p.m. For more information, visit janm.org or follow us on social media @jamuseum.