On 4 April 2024, I had a chance to interview award-winning author and public historian Tamiko
Nimura, who is an Asian American (Japanese American/Filipina American) writer from Tacoma,
Washington. She has degrees in English from UC Berkeley (BA) and the University of
Washington, Seattle (MA, PhD). I first discovered her work when I read her brilliant historical
graphic narrative, WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime
Incarceration, a collaboration with Frank Abe, Ross Ishikawa, and Matt Sasaki. Her first book for
younger readers, it uncovers the history of Japanese American resistance to their racialized
internment during WWII. Everyone who cares about US history should read this book! Nimura
has published numerous poems, essays, and interviews in literary magazines and anthologies;
among her many awards is a 2022 AMOCAT Community Engagement Award for her artistic and
community work. 2020. She is also the author of Rosa Franklin: A Life in Health Care, Public
Service, and Social Justice (Washington State Legislature Oral History Program, 2020). She is
currently working on her memoir, A PLACE FOR WHAT WE LOSE. She lives with her husband,
two daughters, a guinea pig, and a dog. She likes to bake, especially banana bread and
brownies. Read below to hear her thoughts on the creative process, collaboration, and politics.

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Riya: Thank you so much for doing this interview. It’s wonderful to meet you, especially
because I loved your book WE HEREBY REFUSE! It is such a powerful and inspiring work! So the first question I have for you is, how did you approach representing the resistance efforts of
Japanese Americans during their wartime incarceration in a visual format?

‍Tamiko: Well, thank you! The way that the team approached it was through a graphic novel
approach. And my co-author and I had not written a graphic novel before. So we had a lot of
studying to do. We read a lot of other graphic novels…ones that we liked, we read comic books,
we read past historical graphic novels. George Takei’s novel They Called Us Enemy had already
come out. One of our artists [Matt Sasaki] is an illustrator, and the other one [Ross Ishikawa] is
more used to that visual storytelling approach. So we had a lot of things to work with—a lot of
factors, a lot of different kinds of experiences. We then moved to select which people we
thought would be the most appropriate for storylines, and we started to sketch those out. And
then with words, we wrote a sort of story outline for the characters. Then my co-author Frank
took on a good amount of the work of doing this by putting the script into panels. After this, we
passed those panels on to the artists, and they started to sketch things out for us. And then
there was a whole long conversation back and forth about how those would work.
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Riya: Were there any particular challenges or surprises that you encountered while researching
or writing for this book?
Tamiko: Many, many challenges, many, many surprises, even though I knew a lot about this
history already, given my family's incarceration during the war. My uncle Hiroshi is one of the
three main people that we featured, and I knew a lot about his story. But still, there were lots
of things that were interesting to discover.

One of the things that I was really happy to discover was the existence of Mitsuye Endo’s
words. We had only known about one interview really before starting this process of
researching the graphic novel, we found another one in archives at Cal State University,
Fullerton. However I was able to request from the California State Archives correspondence
between Endo and her lawyer, James Purcell. And that was a really lovely surprise. I just
remember seeing those scans as PDFs come in over the computer going, “Wow, we get to hear
a little bit of what she was thinking, a little bit about what she was trying to say to her lawyer.”
One of my favorite things that came across in that discovery was Endo’s resolve to go forward
with the case. She seemed very scared to make her decision to stay in camp. But it was also
really exciting to note that, you know, she wanted to do it for the good of everybody else. And
so there was some sense of justice and collective good in her, and I really appreciate that about
her.
Challenges! There were so many, two authors, two artists, and the pandemic. We were also
trying to figure out how to make this large storyline going forward. We weren't sure how to
visually distinguish the three main storylines. So we had a lot of discussions about how that
would work. And honestly, the storyline of Tule Lake in particular was really contentious and
really thorny. And we had a lot of discussions and a lot of research trying to figure out what
truly happened - there are all these different sources, and they have their different biases and
their different ways of conveying what they thought of as the truth. So it was a really big
challenge. Nobody's written a comprehensive history of what happened at Tule Lake, and so we
had a lot of challenges trying to figure out which part of the story we needed to tell.

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Riya: What inspired you to write your book?
Tamiko: Oh, gosh, you know that there were four of us. And I imagined that each of us would
have different answers, right? And I say the four of us because the artists also played such a big
part in bringing the story to life. For me, personally, it was the history of my own family. My
grandfather was the first Issei - first-generation Japanese American - to be arrested from
Tulelake. And so I had that particular history in mind, as I wrote. I also had worked with my
uncle Hiroshi on his life story and had edited a couple of his books, so I knew just what the cost
of resistance was for him. And I wanted to try and do that story of resistance and justice.

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Riya: I love your reminder about the importance of recognizing the experiences of the older
generations in our families. What lessons about resistance and resilience do you hope readers
will take away from your book?
Tamiko: There’s a lot, but I think one of the main ones for me is to convey to readers that
resistance is an important part of Japanese American history and an important part of Japanese
American wartime incarceration history. It's sort of hidden sometimes. For some people, it's a
shameful part of that history. But it's a history that I think should be known. And really, that it
was more widespread than we might have thought. Some people point to the Supreme Court
cases, you know, Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu. And sometimes they remember that Mitsuye Endo has that history of resistance, and sometimes they talk about the
Heart Mountain resisters.

But, for me, one of the big takeaways I want people to think about is that there are many paths
to resistance and that resistance can look like many kinds of things many kinds of actions. And
therefore, resistance is something that's accessible for a lot more people than we might
originally think.

Riya: That is such an important point: that resistance can take many different forms. What
drew you to make We Hereby Refuse into particularly a graphic novel format?
Tamiko: Yeah, well, the short answer is that the four of us were hired by the Wing Luke
Museum. They had already set that format for us as a graphic novel. And I don't know if you
know, but the Wing Luke Museum is committed to telling the stories of Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders in a vibrant and accessible format. They had already decided that the graphic
novel would be one of the formats that they would choose to tell that story. So it wasn't like we
had a story already.
But I will say, I'm really glad that we were able to put that story into a graphic novel because it
made it so much more accessible for a wider range of people. People will pick up a graphic
novel when they might not pick up a history book. Right? Our readers have come from middle
schoolers up through survivors of incarceration in their 70s 80s even 90s. So, that format I
think, is especially exciting for a lot of people and accessible.

Riya: So this is a really big question: what or who do you think is your biggest inspiration?
Tamiko: That’s a really good question. There are people in my own family who I'm inspired
bymy parents, my grandparents, my aunts, and uncles. So many of them have come through
so much in their own personal histories. But I also have to point to Japanese American activists
like Yuri Kochiyama. And let's see, also the Asian American activist Grace Lee Boggs. I also think about the educators in my life who have had a really big impact on me, my graduate school advisors, Johnnella Butler, and Steve Sumida. And a lot of great African American writers and activists. So Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. A lot of educators, writers, creatives, and activists, are all people who are very inspiring to me.

Riya: This is my last question. What advice would you give to graphic novelists or just anyone
interested in tackling complex historical subjects and storytelling?
Tamiko: Okay, the first piece of advice is to go with something that truly inspires you and that
you're passionate about it because writing a graphic novel can be quite a complex task. You need that passion to see you all the way through to the end. Also, to read as much as you can, not only the history but also other graphic novels so that you know a bit more about how these
stories can be told. I love, for example, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. That's one of my
favorite graphic novels. 

And to learn, if you don't know already, a bit about comics or graphic novel theory. So the work
of Scott McCloud, for example, was very helpful to us in thinking about what goes into a panel,
and what kind of magic happens between panels as the reader is connecting one thing to the
next. Those are also really helpful. But yeah, I think passion first, reading a lot, second.

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Riya: Thank you so much for sharing this with me. Hearing your insights about the artistic process and the inspiration helped me to better understand everything that went into your art.  I look forward to reading your memoir when it comes