Tacoma Japantown: Credits

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Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American creative nonfiction writer and public historian living in Tacoma, Washington. She is a third-generation Japanese American and a descendant of wartime incarcerees at Tule Lake, California. Her training in literature and American ethnic studies (MA, PhD, University of Washington) prepared her to research, document, and tell the stories of people of color. 

Tamiko’s first book is Rosa Franklin: A Life in Health Care, Public Service, and Social Justice (Washington State Legislature Oral History Program, 2020). Her second book is a co-written graphic novel with Frank Abe, is titled We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press/Wing Luke Asian Museum, 2021). 

In 2014, Tamiko began to research the history of Japanese Americans in Tacoma. Since 2016, she has organized an annual Day of Remembrance commemorating the eviction of Japanese Americans from Tacoma. Together with her husband Josh Parmenter and historian Michael Sullivan, she created a an app with a self-guided walking tour of Tacoma’s historic Japantown. In 2020, her family history and its connections to her public history work were featured on public television (KBTC Profiles).  

Tamiko contributes frequently to HistoryLink.org, the Washington State online encyclopedia, as a member of the Pierce County Editorial Committee. She has published articles on Tacoma’s Nihonmachi (Japantown), Robert Mizukami, and Dr. George and Kimi Tanbara.

She is the 2021 recipient of the Tacoma Historical Society’s Murray Morgan Award for notable achievements in researching and preserving local history.

She is currently an Acting Affiliate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. 

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Chris Beyer is a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound, majoring in History with a minor in education studies. His fields of interest are histories of immigration, labor, and studying Japanese American incarceration camps. Chris’s passion for teaching has combined with his passion for history to motivate him towards work in public history, making history accessible and interesting to the wider public while encouraging thoughtful discussion towards the meaning of the past. 

Chris is half Japanese, a member of two distinct Japanese American diasporas. On his paternal side, his family came to Hawai’i in the early 1900s and worked on a sugar plantation, not experiencing any form of incarceration. On the maternal side, his grandmother was born and raised in San Francisco, California until being sent to Tanforan assembly center and then Topaz when she was still an orphaned teenager. After incarceration, his grandmother would spend time in the Midwest, relaying minimal but positive memories. Piecing together her life and story, and understanding his grandmother’s life through a history of Japanese American incarceration has been a huge motivator for Chris’s study of this subject and broader Nikkei diaspora history. 

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Jody Sanchez is a third year student studying communications at The University of Washington Tacoma. During spring of 2023, he worked as a website assistant for the Tacoma Japantown website, contacting descendants for digital artifacts as well as the permission to utilize the materials. He is a Filipino-American and works closely with the AAPI Thrive community as an avid scholar.