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.