Nikkei Australia’s Elysha Rei and Timothy Kazuo Steains presented a paper about Nikkei Australia project When You Call My Name at the 20th Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN) conference on 28 May 2025, hosted by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) on Gadigal lands. This year’s AASRN conference theme was ‘Solidarities’.
Elysha and Tim spoke about the processes and some of the outcomes of the memorial art project When You Call My Name (WYCMN). This project was begun by Nikkei Australia founding member Mayu Kanamori, and many members have participated, some playing key roles running workshops, recruiting, and facilitating artists/non-artists from around Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and other locations in Oceania and the South Pacific to contribute artworks to this collaborative project.
The biennial conference held on 28 and 29 May 2025 explored current topics such as the direction and scope of Asian Australian Studies, what fields the discipline would benefit by drawing from or being in conversation with, and with whom the field should think about being in solidarity. Currently AASRN pursues a decolonising vision, as well as nurturing intergenerational, diasporic and transnational solidarities. It was particularly interesting to consider the importance of mother tongue acknowledgements of country, with Tim including Okinawa language into the mix.
Tim also presented a separate paper at the conference – Mixed race softboys on Tik Tok.
Nikkei Australia members have been closely involved and participated in every biennial conference since AASRN was formed in 1999. This year’s conference also provided a forum to catch up with Nikkei Australia members and participants in the WYCMN project, including Shoko Ono and Grace Gassin. After the presentations, eight Nikkei Australia members enjoyed dinner at Nakano Darling amongst Darling Harbour’s Vivid Sydney installations, underlining everyone’s appreciation for face to face over zoom meet ups whever possible.
Abstract:
Title: When You Call My Name: Naming, Belonging, and the Politics of Asian Australian Diasporic Identities
Naming is both deeply personal and political, reflecting histories of migration, identity negotiation, and belonging. When You Call My Name is a community-driven storytelling and contemporary art project initiated by Japanese Australian artist Mayu Kanamori and supported by Nikkei Australia, honouring the civilians interned as ‘Japanese enemy aliens’ in Australia and New Zealand during WWII. The people memorialised in this project were uprooted from Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and across Australia and New Zealand, and died while incarcerated or en route to internment camps. Through community-generated creative responses, the aim is to memorialise, providing a platform to uncover and share personal histories and stories.
This paper presents When You Call My Name as a case study of solidarity-building through art and storytelling. We share our findings about the creative processes of uncovering intergenerational silences, the impact of colonialism, forced assimilation, and migration on naming practices, as well as insights into the experiences of project participants encountering these internment histories for the first time. Professional and non-professional artists participated in this project, and researching and learning these histories became an act of self-discovery, transnational/diasporic connection, and resistance against erasure.
Through personal testimonies and creative works, this paper discusses the role of contemporary art-making in challenging dominant narratives and fostering new solidarities. By centering lived experiences through artistic and narrative forms, When You Call My Name demonstrates that re-discovering, reclaiming, and sharing one’s name is a collective affirmation of Asian Australian identity, memory, and solidarity.
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