About

Wayne K. Yamamoto

Second Son Rising is the story of Kanekichi Yamamoto.  This website (www.secondsonrising.com) is the "early access" distribution of this story in process. Our goal is to tell this story in the form of a book and a movie. It's the early stages of a long process. Sign up below to get updates on our progress!

Wayne Yamamoto wrote Second Son Rising after years of hearing stories about his grandfather, Kanekichi Yamamoto. It is a labor of love. Wayne is not a writer by professional training. Rather, he spent most of his career in tech, both as an entrepreneur (starting a few companies -- BroadVision, MerchantCircle, Sakura Media) and as a researcher (Bell Labs, University of Washington). This story is his first foray into writing  a biography/historical fiction.

As he investigated this story, details became more and more interesting and seemingly outrageous. Early visits to the Library of Congress, Seattle Public Library, and University of Washington libraries yielded little on this story. The Internet, in the 20th Century, was not fertile ground for finding information. However, by the 21st Century, more information on Kanekichi Yamamoto was uncovered. The National Archives in Seattle also turned up a cornucopia of information. Further, FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence records were unclassified and available for public consumption.  Finally, Wayne found a stash of family photos and records revealing much during the past 10 years.

With this information, Wayne has been able to pull together many pieces of information to form a coherent story. In 2018, he has taken a position in the American Ethnic Studies department at the University of Washington in Seattle to further his research on the story of his grandfather. In this position, he is applying newly available techniques in artificial intelligence and machine learning to compute on the information he has uncovered. As a side effect, he is exploring new techniques to understand history from a perspective he has coined Computational History.

Wayne is doing this on his own, with few resources. As an amateur writer and a complete novice to film making, it is indeed a labor of love.  As such, he is funding is effort through donations. If you are interested in supporting his work, you can do so here.

Further, a portion of each purchase will be made to organizations supporting Japanese Americans.

Get updates on Second Son Rising. Be the first to get access to new content.

Subscribe via Email