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A Vanished Dream: Wartime Story of My Japanese Grandfather—A Conversation with Regina Boone
Date/Time: Thursday, April 21, 2022, 6:00-7:00PM (CDT)
REGISTER (VIRTUAL)
The award-winning photojournalist Regina Boone takes on an assignment from her dying father: to find out what happened to his Japanese father, who disappeared when he was only three years old. Having long been curious about her grandfather, Regina courageously faces the pain and trauma that her family endured in the segregated South during and after World War II. A part of her journey is captured in the poignant NHK World documentary film A Vanished Dream: Wartime Story of My Japanese Grandfather.
Please join us in talking with Regina Boone at 6PM (CDT) on Thursday, April 21, 2022, to hear more about her ongoing quest. Attendees are asked to watch the film in advance, on their own time (available for free on the NHK World YouTube channel), and submit comments and questions through the online form (which will remain open through Sunday, April 17, 2022). Regina will respond to the submitted questions LIVE during the event. Accompanying Regina will be Emma Ito (Director of Education at Virginia Humanities), who specializes in Japanese and Japanese American history in Virginia. The event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, and is free and open to the public.
SPEAKERS:
Regina H. Boone is an award-winning photojournalist who has spent more than twenty years documenting human resilience, from her hometown of Richmond, Virginia (working for her family’s weekly newspaper, the Richmond Free Press) to Detroit (where she spent nearly fourteen years at the Detroit Free Press).
In 2016 Time magazine chose a portrait of hers as its cover image documenting the Flint water crisis. This same photograph, showing a toddler afflicted by the contaminated water, made CNN’s 2020 list of “100 Photos that Defined the Decade.”
Following graduation from Roland Park Country School in Baltimore in 1988, she attended Spelman College. After receiving a BA in Political Science in 1992, Regina taught English on the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program while living in Osaka for three years. Once her stay in Japan had ended, Regina backpacked solo through Thailand, Indonesia, India, Nepal, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt, and Holland. Later she studied photojournalism as a graduate student at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication.
In 2018 she completed the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she began researching her paternal grandfather, Tsuruju Miyazaki, and his unjust arrest on December 7, 1941, in Suffolk, Virginia, along with other Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent across the country. Her father, Raymond H. Boone (who was just three years old in 1941), gave her one last assignment during the final days of his fight with pancreatic cancer: to find out more about the father that he had never known.
Emma Ito (she/her) is the director of education at Virginia Humanities where she is responsible for the development, coordination, and implementation of educational resources for teachers, students, and lifelong learners. Prior to working at Virginia Humanities, Emma worked at the Library of Virginia, where she spearheaded an initiative to research Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) history in the library’s collections and engaged with community members both across the state and nationally to highlight APIDA experiences through programming and outreach.
Emma has also been a professor in the Virginia Commonwealth University Global Education department (VCU Globe) and received her B.A. and M.A. in History at Virginia Commonwealth University, where her Master’s thesis was on the experiences of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in Virginia, with a focus on the time periods of Jim Crow and World War II. In her free time, Emma is an avid reader and podcast contributor for Feminist Book Club.
FOR QUESTIONS RELATED TO THIS EVENT, PLEASE CONTACT AYAKO YOSHIMURA.
This event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.
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