This is one of the hardest things I’ve had to contemplate writing. These In Memoriam posts have mostly been devoted to celebrating the lives and marking the passage of Nisei wartime resisters and those whose lives they’ve touched. I know I’m not alone in still being in a state of shock at having to memorialize the life of someone so young and vital as Martha Nakagawa of Los Angeles.

In the late 1980s the Nisei old guard was still in charge of JACL, the Pacific Citizen newspaper, and the public discourse. But cracks emerged in the dam of history with the emergence of the Sansei generation of journalists in the Nikkei vernacular press, writers like Kenji Taguma at the Nichi Bei Times, Martha and Naomi Hirahara at the Rafu Shimpo, and Martha, Bob Shimabukuro and George Toshio Johnston at the Pacific Citizen. These were the writers I could count on to take my freelance stories on the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and the JACL Lim Report, and whom I could count on to report on the stories of the draft resisters, military resisters, the Block 42 protesters at Tule Lake, renunciants, and others the JACL branded in confidential WW2 memoes as “agitators and troublemakers.” My kind of people. She had enough material collected to someday write the biography of Fair Play Committee leader Frank Emi, once she had the time.  Kenji and Martha in particular had a personal interest, he as the son of an Amache draft resister and she as the daughter of a Kibei Nisei at Tule Lake.

Martha had a sly and wicked sense of humor. Her charm lay in her brutal honesty. She never hesitated to goad me with how much she hated the novel No-No Boy for its portrayal of the self-loathing titular character. She would never pass up an opportunity to remind me that the real resisters never hated themselves for what they did, which of course was true. Yet I had to work hard to persuade her to share her thoughts for a chapter in our 2018 anthology on the life and work of John Okada. I encouraged her to someday collect all her stories of camp resistance into a book and said I would be happy to write an introduction to frame her work.

Martha continued to report on the lives of the resisters while working in recent years to help process the massive Jack and Aiko Herzig Collection at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and the UCLA AASC Eji Suyama Endowment Project to preserve the history of Japanese American protest during World War II. She also devoted her recent years to caring for her elderly mother, and when her mother passed, I offered my condolences while selfishly hoping this would open a window for her to continue her writing.

I find it so unfair that that window has now closed. Martha died on the morning of July 28 from cancers that had spread throughout her body but were only discovered on her birthday eleven days earlier. Much will deservedly be said about her at the celebration of her life on Sunday, August 27, 2023, 11:00 am, at Fukui Mortuary, 707 E. Temple Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. I wish I were free to attend.

Martha’s work was far from done. She will be deeply missed but her work will be long remembered. And we have this Nichi Bei Foundation interview with her conducted by our mutual friend, Kenji Taguma: