In the classroom this week we read Bay Area author Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s book Love in the Library about her maternal grandparents and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. We learned that the Japanese and Japanese American community created the Japantown neighborhood after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, that the Japanese and Japanese American population in San Francisco was approximately 11,000 in 1940 and approximately 0 after the executive order establishing the internment program was fully executed in 1942.
In the kitchen we celebrated Japanese Americans’ enormous contributions to the California produce economy in the 20th century and Japanese food culture by learning how to make temaki. Our second and third grade chefs were encouraged to try at least one filling they had never tasted before or weren’t sure about, and they rose to the challenge, filling their sushi hand rolls with pickled daikon, pickled ginger, green onion, daikon sprouts, shiso, braised tofu, carrots, and Japanese cucumber.
