WACT SPEAKER SERIES | Becoming Nisei: Tacoma's Prewar Japanese Community

Tacoma’s prewar Nihonmachi (Japan Town) was a vibrant and close-knit community of first- generation Japanese immigrants and their second-generation American children with businesses, homes, hotels, churches and the Tacoma Japanese Language School located in Tacoma’s current downtown core in addition to other locations around the city.  Influenced both by the transnational connections to Japan and by the spatial components of the city itself, the world they built was destroyed by incarceration and erased in the years that followed. Join Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman for a presentation on their recently published book Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma, with special focus on what was unique about Tacoma’s prewar Japanese community, including its single, secular language school, prominent school leadership, and the size and spatial layout of the community.  

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

Lisa M. Hoffman if professor of urban studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author ofPatriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent,  and co-editor of Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday. 

Mary L. Hanneman is professor of Asian studies and history at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Japan Faces the World, 1925-1952 and Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan. 

Event will be held at: 

Bellarmine Preparatory School

in the Connelly Campus Center Building

2300 S Washington St, Tacoma, WA 98405
This event will be an in-person program. Masks are recommended, but not required.

This event is free and open to the public, but your donations help us keep our mission of fostering global engagement alive. Please consider donating what you can today. If you like our mission and would like to play a more active role, you should also consider becoming a member!