If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa’s Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal …
When Saori Kawano arrived in New York City in 1978 from Yokohama, most Americans’ ideas of Japanese food ended at instant ramen and onion volcanoes. Since then, if you’ve enjoyed hand-cut soba noodles or an omakase dinner, or admired the graceful curves of a rice bowl or the flash of …
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, whose memoir about living as a child in an internment camp during World War II put a personal stamp on the hysteria that led the United States government to imprison some 120,000 Japanese Americans, died on Dec. 21 at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was …