Jenny Chan/Pacific Atrocities Education, Part 2 (S8E18)
Release Date: 05/21/2026
Top Chefs, Part 2 (S8E23)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, Aft joins us to chat about the band—Top Chefs. We start with the story of how TJ met Aft. A mutual friend of his and Loveberry’s, Lucas Hanson, put on a show at DNA Lounge called “Liam Berry and Friends.” TJ was just getting out of high school at the time. They asked him to join them on stage, something he’d never really done before. TJ had been playing smaller sets in restaurants, but joining a band at a bona fide venue was new for him. Loveberry (Liam) had met Aft at something called a “sound gig” for a set they would play as part of the effort to keep People’s...
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TJ, Loveberry and The Top Chefs Band, Part 1 (S8E23)
Storied: San Francisco
There’s a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can’t quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we’d stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time. Community is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like...
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Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 2 (S8E22)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we begin with Todd and me rapping about how much digital technology has changed just in our lifetimes. Even when he was in school in Colorado, San Francisco had been a goal for Todd, a destination. He got his impression of The City from skateboarding magazines and TV shows. But before moving here, Todd went to Europe, as he puts it, “chasing a girl.” He even tried living overseas. When that didn’t work out, he moved back to Grand Rapids to save money. In 2001, he made the big move west. When Todd arrived, he had a job already lined up for him. He just needed to find a place...
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Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 1 (S8E22)
Storied: San Francisco
Todd Kurnat is everywhere. In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he’s also known as for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan. Both sets of Todd’s grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so. Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done...
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The Golden Gate Park Band (S8 Bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as I chat with German Gonzalez, musical conductor and principal director of the , now in its 144th year. We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
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The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Part 3 (S8E21)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 3, we hear from Keiko and Michael about the history of the . In the late-1950s, a San Franciscan named R.G. Davis taught a class in movement—mime, dance, physical interpretation of stories … that sort of thing. A performing troupe sprang out of that class, and it was known as the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe. It was the era of the early Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, and the troupe became more and more political, basing much of their work around social issues of the day. The group started off doing silent mime work, but shifted later. Michael offers us the definition of mime at...
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Michael Gene Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (8E21)
Storied: San Francisco
Both sides of Michael Gene Sullivan’s family are from Detroit. In Part 2, we get to know Keiko’s fellow member. Michael was born in Livonia, Michigan, a small town outside of Detroit. His parents met at a summer camp, but we need to rewind a bit before we get to that. When his dad was a boy, he was kidnapped. Yes, really. He and his brothers, all Black boys, were taken from Detroit to work on a plantation in Louisiana. One day, three years later, a car pulled up to the plantation. Some people got out of the car, grabbed Michael’s dad and uncles, and threw them into the car (not minding...
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Keiko Shimosato Carreiro of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (S8E21)
Storied: San Francisco
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro was born in the Bay Area … the Boston Bay Area. In Part 1 of this episode, meet Keiko. Today, she’s a longtime member of the collective. But her story goes back to her parents’ migration to the US from Japan after World War II. Keiko’s dad got a Fulbright scholarship to come to this country. He studied medicine. Her mom came to visit the US for one year, but in that time, met Keiko’s dad at a Japan Society picnic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two weeks after they met, her dad proposed, and roughly a year later, they had their first child—Keiko, named thusly...
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Theo Ellington, Part 2 (S8E20)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. While in college at Marymount, Theo ran the Boys and Girls Club program with Phillip Redd. He liked the connections and impact he had made in SoCal, and wondered whether he could do the same at home. This was back when Barack Obama was first running for president, and there was a prevailing sense of hope and possibility pervading life for a lot of folks. And so Theo moved back home. He transferred to Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont after his sophomore year, and got a degree there three years later. Upon his arrival in The City and...
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Theo Ellington, Part 1 (S8E20)
Storied: San Francisco
Today, Theo Ellington is the secretary at the Ruth Williams Opera House. This born-and-raised San Franciscan is also running to be the next D10 supervisor. In Part 1 of this episode, meet Theo. His maternal grandfather, Clifton Weeks, came to SF because his sister, Marie Weeks (Theo's great-aunt), had come here. Clifton and his sister had grown up in rural Natchez, Mississippi, but they came out West during the Great Migration. Their first landing spot was The Fillmore. Clifton found work as a laborer, where he helped build roads and bridges. He also did a little work at the shipyard back...
info_outlineEd. note: Please be advised that there’s some very heavy subject matter discussed in this episode.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Jenny left San Francisco for college, heading east to go to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Part of it was wanting a change of scenery. As she says, she “wanted to see snow.” But all it took was a few winters before she realized how good the weather in SF is. She also wanted to return to help take care of her mom, who was getting older.
This was around the time that Jenny went to China and came back determined to spread the untold histories of what happened in her homeland during WWII. The nonprofit learning curve was steep, and it was almost certainly going to mean shifting gears lifestyle-wise, due to not having as much income.
During the first year of Pacific Atrocities Education’s life, it was fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, an SF-based arts nonprofit. Jenny enrolled in and went to as many workshops as she could. She felt generally well-respected and taken care of.
With her nascent nonprofit off and running, Jenny traveled to a part of China she had never been to before—Shanxi—to visit and talk with women who survived the war as so-called comfort women (think “sex slaves”). Jenny goes on a sidebar here to talk about some of the things the Japanese did to women during their occupation of China. It involved the Japanese not wanting their soldiers to pick up STDs while in a foreign country. If they could control the situation, i.e., enslave Chinese women to have sex with their soldiers, they could solve that “problem.” So disgusting.
Hearing these women’s stories wasn’t easy for Jenny. One story involved one of the women being pregnant after the war ended. She went back to live with her mother, who helped her along. When the baby was born, they abandoned it. Just horrible all around. We sidebar, a little, to talk about the ripple effect of wars and how it’s not just tanks and bombs and guns and soldiers fighting other soldiers. There are untold numbers of innocent folks caught up in the destruction, folks whose lives are forever upended, if they even survive.
Jenny says that the experience on that trip to China gave her perspective on her own childhood in the Tenderloin. She thought maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
It wasn’t only women in China. She went and spoke with women in California’s Central Coast area about their own experiences as “comfort women.” These were Filipinas who relocated to the US after the war. Most of their families didn’t know their stories. And it wasn’t until the Obama era that light started to be shone on them and what they’d been through. Obama’s administration was the first to recognize them, but it was complicated, to say the least.
Jenny talks about the delicacy of what she set out to do. Specifically, the difficulty of balancing the need to share these stories, but also to be respectful of the lives impacted by them. In addition to the research she was undertaking for Pacific Atrocities Education, Jenny was also writing a book on the topic. She was able to scan documents from the National Archives, documents the US has due to its occupation of Japan following World War II. One of the more alarming things she found in digging through archives was that the United States traded immunity with Japan’s Unit 731 scientists, whose work involved developing biological weapons. Yikes.
She goes on to describe other atrocious acts the Japanese undertook in China, stuff so horrible and inhumane I have trouble enumerating it here. I ask Jenny how she handles learning about such terrible stuff. She chalks it up to its being mission-driven work. We chat a little about how the people doing bad things never get held accountable, something true to this day.
That immunity mentioned above was given to the Japanese scientists in exchange for the information contained in their research of biological weapons, naturally. You read that right: The US looked the other way while essentially poaching incredibly deadly weapons from its vanquished enemy.
Please visit pacificatrocities.org to learn more and get involved. Their YouTube channel is called Pacific Front Untold. Follow them on Instagram @pacificatrocitiesedu.
We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt