Darcy Fukunaga has deep family ties to Little Tokyo, and has won awards at prestigious national speech and debate competitions.
By DARCY FUKUNAGA
Hi! My name is Darcy Takeko Fukunaga. I am a Yonsei Gen-Zer.
This is my new monthly column, “Just Your Typical Nikkei.” I’ll be taking you along with me as I explore the Little Tokyo community — from the foods I am trying to the community events I attend that celebrate our culture. We’ll travel throughout the city of Los Angeles and beyond.
But I’ll also be sharing my thoughts on what it means to be Gen-Zer and a Japanese American living in our beautiful and chaotic world.
As for my background, I just completed my senior year of high school. My brothers and I have been homeschooled by my mother, Lorraine, since elementary school. In a future column, I’ll share what a typical homeschooling day used to look like for me. (And no, I was not in my pajamas in bed all day or just reading picture books either!)
For college, I’ll be attending USC as I pursue a major in journalism at the Annenberg School of Communication with a minor in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.
My family has a long history in Little Tokyo. My relatives on my grandmother’s side run Fugetsu-Do, the Japanese confectionery shop on First Street that’s been making mochi since 1903. My grandmother, father and I have all worked there. I proudly bring my friends to Fugetsu-Do and have conducted several tours of Little Tokyo for my church, where I highlight its storied history.
Seeing people from different parts of L.A. — as well as others I know from the South and the Midwest — trying mochi for the first time is always fun! At first, they make funny faces when they taste the mushy texture. But they soon end up gobbling an entire package of uguisu or strawberry peanut butter mochi.
During the Nisei Week festival, I’ve also performed children’s skits and run the “Save Little Tokyo” game at my church’s booth at JACCC’s Isamu Noguchi Plaza. Last year, my brother Keene and I were semifinalists at a national speech competition in our interpretive performance of “Farewell to Manzanar,” based on Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s book about the Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
My great-grandparents and grandparents were incarcerated at Poston in Arizona. The past suffering of our people both saddens and reminds me that remembering history matters when it comes to preserving our freedoms today.
In my spare time, I go thrift shopping with friends and sew dresses on my Bernette B33 sewing machine. I bake cakes, macarons and pavlova desserts for my family. I rowed this past year for my local crew team to build up some muscle!
I like exploring our national parks and have traveled to eight different countries. I hope to visit Portugal and Spain this summer. (If so, look out for my reflections on tapas, hand-painted tiles and ancient castle ruins!) For fun, my brothers, our friends and I recently wrote and published a teen coming-of-age fiction novel called “Just Your Typical Girl.”
I’ve also spent the past few years competing in the Stoa Speech and Debate league. It’s a nationwide Christian homeschooling circuit of tournaments where you get to meet many wonderful teens and families from all over the country. Last month, my brothers and I competed in the National Invitation of Tournament Champions (NITOC) in Jackson, Tennessee.
I was fortunate to be a back-to-back national speech champion in an event called Mars Hill, a competition where you analyze movies, music, books and podcasts and comment on how it relates to Christianity. I had to prepare 72 different six-minute cultural talks!
When you go to compete, you have to blindly pick one of those prompts. The clock starts, and you have four minutes of prep time before you give your speech before up to nine different adult judges. In the finals, I analyzed the movie “Wicked” from a Christian point of view. In a future column, I hope to do some Mars Hill-like commentary on current events and pop culture media.
But the most important area of my life is my faith. Today, many young people are turning back to organized religion or some other form of personal spirituality. I am proud to say that I am a Christian. My father is a pastor at City Bible Church, a church that meets in the Little Tokyo area every Sunday morning. We pray for the city and help people find God, follow Jesus Christ and do good to others.
My hope is that I can take you along with me as we explore what is fun, interesting, important and relevant to our community today. I want my column to bring us together. But I also want to say what I believe is true and thought-provoking (not just what is popular and trendy)!
So, I’m glad we’ll be on this journey together. I’m just a typical Nikkei at heart, and I hope the adventures we go on will be a blessing to you. See you soon!
Darcy T. Fukunaga will begin her studies at the University of Southern California next spring, focusing on journalism and biology. She currently writes from Long Beach. Opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.