By PHYLLIS HAYSHIBARA
The Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Committee and the Manzanar Committee congratulate the two recipients of the sixth annual Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant for 2026: Dan Bui Kubota of Stanford University and Dianne Chevez Hernandez of East Los Angeles College.
Each will receive $1,000 to cover the costs of participating in the 57th annual Manzanar Pilgrimage the weekend of Friday, April 24, to Sunday, April 26, at the Manzanar National Historic Site in Independence; and to help the Manzanar Committee plan and organize the pilgrimage.
Dan Bui Kubota studies mechanical engineering at Stanford and plans to add a minor in Earth systems. She hopes to combine her passion for design with her interest in environmental service policy. While attending Stanford, Dan has enjoyed performing with Stanford Taiko, the university’s Japanese American drumming ensemble.
Taiko has given Dan an opportunity to connect with her Japanese American heritage and to work with core members of Stanford’s Nikkei Student Union. In 2013, they changed their name from Stanford University Nikkei to Japanese Student Union, and in 2024 to their present name, with the more inclusive term “Nikkei” better reflecting the diversity of the Japanese American diaspora.
Dan wrote about this history of the Nikkei organization in one of her many columns for “The Grind,” a section of The Stanford Daily, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper. Her article titled “On Being a Banana: Japanese American Students on the Farm, 1940 to the Present” ran in June 2024.
Dan refers to herself as Yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese American; half-Japanese, not at all proficient in the Japanese language, and feeling very far removed from Japanese culture.
In 2025, the Stanford FLIP (First-generation/Low-Income Partnership), a student-run organization since 2004, successfully endorsed Dan for the Undergraduate Senate, seeking “leaders who will protect our queer community, our mixed-status and undocumented peers, and all students who continue to be criminalized, attacked, and erased under policies like those of the [current] administration.”
Dan serves as the ASSU (Associated Students of Stanford University) chair of administration and rules in the 27th ASSU Undergraduate Senate. “Being involved in student government,” Dan wrote, “has helped me realize the importance of student input in informing university policy and the way that I can use my voice to amplify that of others.”
Dan feels a “responsibility to set a good example to her may em (Vietnamese for younger siblings) in terms of academics and character,” but she also realizes the importance of being “honest and open with them about [her] personal struggles to lessen the perceived distance between” them and her.
Dan feels “incredibly grateful for the opportunity to help plan the annual Pilgrimage to Manzanar” and to be granted the space to reflect on her parents’ generation’s “feeling pressure to assimilate into white American society, inheriting the weight of silence,” but knowing she herself has “the privilege to call the United States home through citizenship, and with this protection and power” to “call for social change in a way that our elders were not able to.”
Dan discovered the Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant one day while she found herself down an Instagram “rabbit hole.” “The way Maeda continued to persevere in the face of darkness, having been incarcerated at such a formative time in his life.” got Dan thinking, “While Japanese Americans are not being explicitly targeted now as they were during incarceration, other groups are. How can our community come together and stand in solidarity with undocumented people, given our history of discrimination by the U.S. government?”
Dan expressed excitement at attending the Manzanar Pilgrimage for the first time. “I hope to embody Maeda’s legacy of activism long after the pilgrimage has passed.”
Dianne Chevez Hernandez studies psychology and will switch to psychological science as her major at East Los Angeles College. She plans to do research in the field of forensic psychology, hoping “to learn more about what drives people to act the way they do,” and envisions herself as a teacher or professor in order to “share what [she’s] learned” with others.
Currently Dianne conducts research as part of ELAC’s Psi Beta Honors Club. She also volunteers at CultivaLA, making “organic produce accessible to the community.” She also cooks for her family while she takes care of her younger siblings.
Dianne credits her parents as “the biggest inspiration in [her] life.” She wrote that “my dad passed away ten years ago, but he would always encourage me to keep going and do my best to not only be a good student, but also a person with good values and ideals.”
After his passing, Dianne wrote that her mom “did everything she could to take care of my two siblings and me, so we could continue to go to school. My brother and sister are the reason I keep going. Spending time with them makes me feel like that is why I am here…to support them.”
Dianne heard about the Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant from her friend and colleague, Terumi Tanisha Garcia Sandoval, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona. Terumi and Charlene Tonai Din, a graduate of UCLA, both received the second annual Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant in 2022. Terumi has joined the Manzanar Committee and will also be volunteering at this year’s pilgrimage.
Dianne writes, “Participating in the Manzanar Pilgrimage would be an eye-opening experience that would help me embrace my own culture, honor the past, reflect on the present… while trying to contribute to a better future for those around me. I would be able to learn more and get a better understanding of Maeda’s life from the perspective of those who got to meet him. Maeda never lost hope; he was able to maintain a positive attitude…and continued to share his wisdom and values with others.”
Above all, Dianne advises, “Do not lose hope. Life might feel heavy at times, but it is to make us more resilient. Bad times do not last forever, and we must keep going to see them get better. Everyone [has the capacity] to shine, thrive, and make change in their own lives and in the lives of others.”
The grant encourages college students to research the activism and legacy of Arnold Maeda. In April 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed 15-year-old Arnold and his parents from their home and nursery business in Santa Monica, to report to the northwest corner of Venice and Lincoln boulevards with only what they could carry. Arnold bitterly resented this removal and incarceration of persons of Japanese ancestry, including natural-born U.S. citizens, without due process supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution.
Arnold became a charter member of the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Committee in 2010, determined to build a reminder of what had happened at that corner, and to warn that such an unconstitutional injustice should never again be perpetrated by the government “against any group, solely on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion” (from the VJAMM text).
For more information about the seventh annual Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant for 2027, visit www.venicejamm.org, Facebook.com/VeniceJAMM, or manzanarcommittee.org.
Grant recipients are invited to speak at the ninth annual Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Commemoration on Thursday, April 16, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the northwest corner of Venice and Lincoln. That evening, the VJAMM Committee will hold its 14th annual VJAMM Fundraiser at Hama Sushi Restaurant, 213 Windward Ave. “On the Circle” in Venice. Proprietor Esther Chaing will donate 10% of dinner sales to the VJAMM Committee for ongoing maintenance, educational outreach, and the grant. Call (310) 396-8783 for dinner reservations (5 to 9 p.m.) or order take-out online at www.hamasushi.com/order for pick-up or delivery.
The VJAMM Committee works in partnership with the Venice Arts Council (VAC). The VJAMM Committee’s and VAC’s fiscal sponsor is Venice Community Housing Corp., a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, EIN #95-4200761. Tax-deductible donations to VJAMM may be made payable to Venice Community Housing Corp. with VJAMM in the memo line and may be mailed to Venice Arts Council, P.O. Box 993, Venice, CA 90294.