Experience Japanese culture at an Irvine festival

No need to book a flight to Japan. It's culture and food are making their way to Irvine this weekend. Yes, all part of an annual festival bringing community and family history. CBS Carpenter shows us why the event is much more than just a good time. These are the frames of what will soon be colorful floats carried on shoulders. As we have what they're calling the coach, it's an old Shinto tradition back in Japan at these festivals. It's refreshing because it's cold. This is one of the Japanese dishes about to be cooked for thousands. They call it hockey coat and we're told this is the equivalent. Of a festival T shirt. These little overcoats are usually labeled. It's a, you know, camaraderie cut type of thing. This weekend, Tanaka Farms will help host the 5th annual Natsu Matsuri or Summer Festival. With beloved experiences like traditional drumming and dancing, an origami lessons, organizers say the joyful event was created to celebrate community and culture. But this year proceeds will also help illuminate a dark chapter of the Japanese American experience. To teach about the camp experience that it even happened, people don't even aren't even aware of it. Nancy Hayata has helped lead the call for the nation's first monument, remembering all Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and sent to internment camps during World War Two. These renderings show with the city of Torrance plans to build in Columbia Park walls with permanent etchings of their roughly 125,000 names. Hayata says for decades, families didn't talk about dehumanizing and painful wartime experiences. She says their names were replaced with numbers. Many people lost all belongings and were separated from loved ones. It's personal. My parents were all in camp. My two grandfathers died in camp, so I never got to meet them. So this is my mother. She's probably about 20 years old there. I believe it's also personal for farmer Glenn Tanaka. He says before World War Two, about half the people emigrating from Japan were from poor agrarian areas and became farmers. Those farms were seized and he says after the war most families changed course they took about over 6,000 7000 farms were lost. It's not just Japanese American history. It's American history. We sell in California, Oregon, Tanaka Farms now proudly shares that early immigration history as it carries forward farming traditions. Plug it should just come right off. Part of that celebrating the changing of seasons. So this weekend they're inviting everyone to join in their Natsu Matsuri to see that smile on the face. It's really rewarding. Kara Finstrum, CBS LA.