(Jewish Group) Growing 'Jewpanese' identity comes through in new oral history project

Carmel Tanaka doesn’t like fractions. She eschews calling herself “half Jewish” or “half Japanese.” Rather, she uses the term “Jewpanese,” a word she first came across about 10 years ago.

Born and raised in Canada, Tanaka, 34, is the daughter of an Ashkenazi mother raised in Israel whose parents were Holocaust survivors, and a Japanese father whose parents and grandparents, prior to his birth, were interned by the Canadian government in the 1940s. (Canada sent some 22,000 people, more than 90 percent of its population with Japanese roots, to internment camps in the years during and after World War II.)

Growing up in Vancouver, Tanaka didn’t know anyone — other than her sister — who had both Jewish and Japanese ancestry.

This month, Tanaka arrived in the Bay Area with a tripod, a digital camera and a photographer’s ring light in her luggage. She’s been traveling across the United States and Canada this summer, meeting people of mixed Jewish and Japanese heritage and recording video interviews with them for what she calls a “project of a lifetime” — a Jewpanese oral history project.

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