By KENJI G. TAGUMA
Nichi Bei Times

She was a diminutive lady, yet a passionate and emotional force who became the grassroots face of the Japanese American Redress Movement.

Tsuyako “Sox” Kitashima, a community icon who helped countless numbers of Japanese Americans gain redress from the U.S. government for their wartime incarceration in concentration camps, passed away on Dec. 29, 2005 of an apparent heart attack at a San Francisco care home.

The Tule Lake Committee was awarded a $200,000 grant from the Save America’s Treasures program. The grant, which is contingent on the Tule Lake Committee raising an additional $200,000, will be used to preserve the historic structures at Tule Lake that are in danger of collapse.

James Lick High and San Jose State University graduate Daryl Ishizaki kicked off the New Year with an early bang.

By BEN HAMAMOTO
Nichi Bei Times

The Berkeley Pacific Film Archive will be showing the films of overlooked director Mikio Naruse starting this Thursday and continuing through Feb. 18. His bleak melodramas address issues of class, gender and modernization. Kurosawa described his work as being “like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.”

By SAYAKA MATSUMOTO
Nichi Bei Times Contributor

On December 21, with Christmas only a few short days away, a group of young children got an early present when pro basketball player Lindsey Yamasaki conducted a basketball clinic at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC), a nonprofit organization located in San Francisco’s Japantown.