This project will bring Yu Miri, one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists and playwrights, to campus as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. During this stay she will work with local faculty to develop an archive of oral history interviews she will conduct with members of the local Japanese American community on their memories of daily life in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, which along with Hyde Park became a magnet for thousands of new Japanese American residents after their release from wartime concentration camps. That archive will in turn form the basis for a new theatrical performance piece that we hope to bring to a local stage at the conclusion of the project. Yu, herself born and raised in Japan’s Zainichi (ethnically Korean) immigrant community, brings a transnational perspective to this collaborative attempt to create a new vehicle for remembering a now largely dispersed local neighborhood community. This project grows out of Yu’s activism in Japan following the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disasters: Yu moved to the Fukushima area and conducted hundreds of interviews with displaced residents about memories of their lost hometowns. She used these stories to craft a performance piece in which her interview subjects appeared together with actors portraying them in an experimental theatrical ritual of remembrance; the piece has been staged to acclaim in both Fukushima and Tokyo, including a documentary aired nationally on the NHK network.