Pictured (from left) are Matthew Clingerman (GLA scholarship chair), Seia Watanabe, River Vu, Elena Miyamoto, Ashley Mori, Keerstin Baltazar, Hikaru Nakasone, H. Miles Dodson and Mitchell Matsumura. (Photos: George Toshio Johnston)
Guest speaker Seia Watanabe urges recipients to remain committed to community.
By P.C. Staff
The Greater Los Angeles JACL chapter held its 2026 scholarship luncheon on June 7 in the meeting room of the Torrance Municipal Airport-Zamperini Field in Torrance, Calif., to recognize six former high school students headed to college.
Receiving awards from the chapter were Keerstin Baltazar, H. Miles Dodson, Elena Miyamoto, Ashley Mori, Hikaru Nakasone and River Vu.
Greater Los Angeles JACL Chapter President Mitchell Matsumura
Chapter President Mitchell Matsumura introduced the event’s speaker, National JACL VP of Public Affairs Seia Watanabe. “This lady here, she’s not just involved in one organization, she’s involved in multiple organizations,” he said, noting her community involvement, past and present, including having served as the Pacific Southwest District’s youth representative to JACL’s National Youth/Student Council; as a board fellow at the Little Tokyo Service Center; representing the Japanese Restaurant Association of America for Nisei Week in 2024 as first princess; serving as the social media coordinator for the Little Tokyo Community Council’s Go Little Tokyo initiative; and as an organizer with the Manzanar Committee. “She’s going to tell us about her experiences with JACL.”
Watanabe began with a message to both chapter members and the scholarship recipients. “Scholarship programs like this do more than help students pay for school,” she said. “They send a message that our community believes in its future, and that’s something worth celebrating.”
Keynote speaker Seia Watanabe
In another comment, aimed more at the youth, Watanabe began by giving a brief overview of JACL’s history, then added her own take on the organization. “If someone asks me what the JACL really is, I give a much simpler answer. The JACL is people. It’s people who care enough about their communities to show up. It’s people who volunteer their evenings and their weekends because they believe that the future is worth investing in.
“And, it is people who understand that the opportunities we enjoy today did not simply happen on their own,” Watanabe continued. “The rights we have, the communities we belong to and the spaces that we occupy today exist because of previous generations that chose to organize, advocate and invest in those who came after them, and that investment is why we’re gathered here today.”
Watanabe also mentioned that the organization is holding its national convention (jacl.org/2026-national-convention) next month.
Following Watanabe’s speech, Matsumura later introduced to the gathering two of the chapter’s founding members from 1982, Louise Sakamoto and Miyako Kadogawa, and current scholarship chair Matthew Clingerman. He also acknowledged guests Ron Ikejiri, who served previously as JACL’s Washington, D.C., representative and is a current candidate for JACL national president, and a reporter from Pacific Citizen.
Matsumura then called up each scholarship recipient to speak a bit about themselves.
Baltazar noted that she had attended Palos Verdes Peninsula High School in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., and will be attending the University of California, Santa Barbara, to major in pre-economics. Dodson, who had just graduated from Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, Calif., said he was headed to Cleveland, Ohio, to attend Case Western Reserve University for “for neurology or premed” and also to play basketball.
Miyamoto said, “I’m probably going to UC San Diego for cognitive sciences.” Mori revealed that she will be moving to New York to attend Syracuse University to major in forensic science.
Nakasone said he would be attending the University of California, Riverside, to major in prebusiness, and Vu said he had just graduated from Marina High School in Huntington Beach, Calif., and was headed to the University of California, Berkeley, to study computer science.
The scholarship presentations were followed by a silent auction.