The Crumbles

On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.

As L.A.'s punk rock scene exploded in the late 1970s, an unlikely family-owned restaurant in Little Tokyo became one of its most popular hang-outs.

Ricky and Bobby Okamura wrestle with closing their beloved family-owned manju shop after serving the San Francisco Japantown community for 115 years.

From the hand-drawn typeface on the book cover of The Godfather to Herman Miller’s biomorphic coffee table, the work of Japanese American artists/designers including Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita, and Gyo Obata permeated American postwar culture. While these second generation Japanese American artists have been celebrated, less-discussed is the powerful effect their World War II incarceration—a period of intense hardship and discrimination—had on their lives and art.