By Yuki Kawakami My parents met in Osaka when Mum was in her final year of school and Dad was a university student. Mum was an occasional backup singer on TV and graduated with a degree in nihongo (Japanese), while Dad worked as a sales representative for a kimono dress and fabric com

明けておめでとございます！ Happy New Year! After my eldest son Kairo just finished his year of the Ox, and I am entering the year of the Tiger for 2022, the both of us decided to make our best version of Osechi Ryori. We researched the various dishes online, and sourced as many authentic ingredien

SETSUTARO HASEGAWA When Setsutaro died on October 4th, 1952, the Hasegawa family’s relationship with Japan became paper-thin. At the height of the northern hemisphere summer, in August, when Japanese pay homage to their ancestors, no one gathers at his grave. Japanese tradition was lo

Nikkei Australia’s Timothy Kazuo Steains interviewed Nikkei performance artist, writer and researcher Reina Takeuchi.  Reina’s practice spans across visual arts, choreography, curatorial projects, written publications and creative facilitation, including her work with Asia

My Life Story by Iseko Williams                               Background to this story Iseko Jenny Williams kept an occasional memoir of her life in Japan and Australia. Iseko’s interviewer and biographer, Hiromi Ogata, who interviewed her from August to September 2018, published the

My name is Pearl Hamaguchi. I was born in Broome in 1940. I live in Broome. I’ve lived nowhere else. My grandmother on my father’s side, Yae Yamamoto, was Japanese. Yae was from Ichoda-mura (now part of Amakusa city), a village on Shimoshima Island, the largest of the Amakusa Islands

by Akane Kanai My mother, Yumiko, and my father, Masakazu, met in Sydney in the early 1980s. My dad had dreams of trying something different, separate from his large family in Nagoya; my mother had previously moved to Australia from Tokyo, with her first husband, a clever man named Jo