2023: Discover Nikkei Project brings Japanese American National Museum’s digital presence to national & international audience

LOS ANGELES, – A project of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Discover Nikkei is a community website and international network that celebrates cultural diversity, explores global and local identities, connects generations and communities, and shares stories and perspectives of the Nikkei, people of Japanese descent who have migrated and settled throughout the world.

Discover Nikkei brings JANM’s digital presence to a national and international audience by providing content that celebrates cultural diversity and explores global and local identities.

Published in English, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese, Discover Nikkei’s content includes contributions from hundreds of community members from more than fifty countries, including significant resources in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, and Peru.

Founded in 1998 as the International Nikkei Research Project (INRP), Discover Nikkei involved a multidisciplinary and multinational research team of over 100 scholars from ten countries and fourteen participating institutions. It was coordinated by JANM and supported by The Nippon Foundation.

The research and relationships developed through that program, which ran until 2001, created an important global network and led to the publication of the books New Worlds, New Lives: lobalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2002) and Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas (AltaMira Press, 2002).

In 2003 the Nikkei Legacy Project was established to build on the work of the INRP and was also funded by The Nippon Foundation. DiscoverNikkei.org launched in March 2005. With more than 40,000 unique users every month, Discover Nikkei has continued to expand in content the rich relationships and connections that the project has fostered.

In 2023–2024, under the leadership of Project Manager Yoko Nishimura, Discover Nikkei is embarking on an ambitious major redesign and growth initiative to become a truly interactive site and an indispensable resource—and platform—for the future global Nikkei community.