I remember that day perfectly. It was a colder day in September. It began snowing lightly far earlier into the season than usual. I remember feeling the breeze through a crack in my bedroom wall Mother didn't have the money to fix for another few months. The doorbell rang out. I was expecting Ren, my best friend, to come over so we could practice our dance moves. Instead, it was one of my father's superior officers in the Japanese Maritime Naval Force to relay the worst news

I idolized my father. He excelled at the skills I wanted to be naturally gifted at and wasn't. He noticed I asked for repeats of words and sentences often when I was a toddler. He noticed that my eyes wandered quickly from a person's face to the next, to the most fascinating artifact nearby. I was not good at being present, focusing, or listening. So he taught me the value of meditation. "I was only 5, so he promised to bring me a lychee Calpis drink if I sat with him 5 minut

Hana Mizuki met Reiji Matsui in 1994 when she saved enough money from her eclectic business ideas and projects to tour Japan for a year. She grew up in Jamestown, California - a suburban city determined to defy the wheel of time and be a living testament to colonial, vintage townscapes. It was a small town with not much to do besides reminisce and live like she was still in in the 1950's era. For a blooming, beautiful, and aspiring Japanese-American young adult woman - that w

"Tsukasa! Wait for me!" I yelled out after my older brother. Growing up with the popular, 3 years my senior sibling that outshone me in everything. Grades. Girls. Sports. He obviously inherited my father's height. I did not. "I felt like I was always trying to catch up to him, but never succeeded to." He was the basketball star, I was the class jester. I wanted to be just like him: popular, asked out on dates by pretty girls, teacher swooning over him. I was the angry one - a