Visible and Invisible Hapa Exhibit at Japanese American Museum San Jose

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2016-06-15 20:06Z by Steven

Visible and Invisible Hapa Exhibit at Japanese American Museum San Jose

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2016-05-20

Grace Hwang Lynch

Bay Area people… there’s an exhibit about the history of hapa Japanese Americans at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose.

Titled Visible and Invisible, it’s similar to the exhibit of the same name at LA’s Japanese American National Museum, but this collection is unique and has many ties to the local area.

Curated by historical sociologist Cindy Nakashima and art professor Fred Liang, the small but significant collection shows the history of mixed-race Japanese Americans from the 1860s to the current day, when the majority of Japanese Americans are projected to be mixed-race by 2020. “The first Nisei was a hapa, for heaven’s sake!” says Nakashima, who also curated the 2013 Los Angeles exhibit with Lily Anne Yumi Welty and Duncan Ryuken Williams.

Read the entire article here.

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Hapas Soon to Be the Majority in the Japanese American Community

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, United States on 2016-04-08 14:40Z by Steven

Hapas Soon to Be the Majority in the Japanese American Community

AsAmNews: Where the conversation about Asian America Begins
2016-04-16

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

The future is now in the Japanese American community.

By 2020, just four years away, demographers says the majority of Japanese Americans will be multiracial/multiethnic.

A new exhibition now at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose in California runs through the end of the year. It is curated by Fred Liang and Cindy Nakashima who also co-curated an earlier version of the exhibition in 2013 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

“My parents married in 1965, when it was still illegal in sixteen states, but they married in Ohio, where there were no anti-miscegenation laws,” Nakashima told AsAmNews. My dad is a Nisei, my mom is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP). They met in graduate school.”

The interracial marriage rate in the Japanese American community is estimated at 66 percent. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967, (Loving v. Virginia) that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, each state had control over who could and could not get legally married…

Read the entire article here.

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