By Madisen Moss

On Wednesday, July 1st, Japan in DC paid a visit to Martin Luther King Jr. Library located near Gallery Place metro stop. The MLK Library hosts many activities and clubs, such as the anime club. For our program, we went to the Teen Center located on the second floor. We first looked around their huge manga collection and I was pretty impressed by the size of the collection. Near the shelves filled with manga, they also had cool artwork showing snippets of different mangas that were created by one of the staff at MLK.

At the Teen Center, we also had a workshop about the process of making zines with Brandy, one of the staff members there. While Brandy was explaining how to make zines to us, she mentioned that she actually had a Japan connection as well.

To learn about her Japan connection, we conducted a mini-interview with her. We learned that she is a 4th generation Japanese. In the 1920s, her great-grandparents migrated from Japan to Hawaii to work on the sugarcane plantations. She explained that many Japanese people decided to migrate to Hawaii during that time period to work on the sugarcane and pineapple plantations because it was a pretty profitable job opportunity. Additionally, her grandmother was a grade schooler during the Pearl Harbor attack and she mentioned that after the attack, her grandmother had to wear a gas mask to school due to the toxic environment left by the destruction. The windows of the school also were painted black after the attack to obscure artificial light in case of more surprise bombings.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 that ordered Japanese-Americans to be placed in internment camps. As for Brandy’s family in Hawaii, they were not sent to the internment camps because it was far too expensive to send all of the Japanese people in Hawaii to the mainland. Lastly, Brandy shared that she tries to connect with her Japanese heritage by cooking Japanese foods and watching anime. I enjoyed hearing about her heritage and how she still connects with Japanese culture.