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Surviving Racism, Toxic Masculinity, and Some Gruesome Medical Ordeals
There’s a tendency during women’s history month to focus our celebrations on the women who accomplished great things as activists, artists, and thinkers. And indeed these women should be celebrated!…
How We Remember
Y’all killed it this Day of Remembrance. We were so moved to see all the DOR posts, pictures, and family stories you shared on social media. This is the work…
SANSEI: On Being Japanese American in a Time of Crisis
This guest post is adapted from a speech delivered by Stanley N. Shikuma at the 2019 Day of Remembrance Taiko Fundraiser organized by the Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee and co-sponsored…
My Kimono is Not Your Couture
Items called “kimono” are having a moment in the fashion world. But as guest blogger Emi Ito points out, this trend revolves around appropriation and erasure of histories that are…
The First Day of Remembrance, Thanksgiving Weekend 1978
Guest post by Frank Abe This week marks the 40th anniversary of the very first Day of Remembrance. It was invented here in Seattle, at a pivotal moment when the…
Densho’s Artist-in-Residence Program
Densho is first and foremost a history organization but as we have gotten more vocal about today’s political climate, we’ve become more acutely aware of the fact that art can…
The WWII Politics of Farms and Labor
This #NationalFarmersDay, let’s talk about how during World War II Japanese Americans were forced to give up lucrative farming endeavors before being forced into concentration camps where they were made…
Photo Essay: Early Nikkei Excursions to Mt. Rainier
On a clear day, the 14,411-foot peak of Mt. Rainier looms large on Seattle’s southern horizon. The glacial mountain has played a major role in the lives of people living…
8 Lessons in Resistance from Tule Lake
“Kodomo no tame ni. They’re our children, set them free.” In a protest at the site of the old Tule Lake jail earlier this month, survivors of WWII incarceration pounded…
The (Ongoing) Ruins of Japanese American Incarceration: Thirty Years After the Civil Liberties Act of 1988
By guest author Brandon Shimoda This year marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Liberties Act, with which the United States closed the book on Japanese American…
The Supreme Court Got It Wrong, Again
In today’s ruling upholding the Muslim Ban, the Supreme Court is repeating the mistakes it made in defending the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
The Suitcase Project: What would YOU bring?
If Japanese American/Canadian incarceration happened today, what would you bring with you? That’s the question at the heart of Kayla Isomura’s new Suitcase Project. This year she has been photographing…
Yamamoto is an American Name Too
A middle school renaming process in Palo Alto, California has kicked up some of the same xenophobic dust that clouded public understandings about Japanese American complicity in the attack on…
Happy 100th Birthday, Gordon Hirabayashi!
April 23, 2018 marks what would have been Gordon Hirabayashi’s 100th birthday. As a young man, Gordon learned the hard way that without a vigilant and engaged citizenry, our Constitution…
Wordsmith and Renaissance Woman Guyo Tajiri
In honor of National Women’s History Month we are excited to introduce the Guyo Tajiri Collection, new to the Densho Digital Repository. Guyo Tajiri was a journalist and writer at…
What We Can All Learn from One Family’s Century of Solidarity
Michael Ishii is a New York based activist and organizer whose deep ties to interracial solidarity began decades before he was even born. In remarks made to a crowd gathered…
Day of Remembrance 2018: Our History, Our Responsibility
Join us this February 19th for a Day of Remembrance event to honor Japanese Americans of World War II and stand in solidarity with American Muslims today. During World War II,120,000…
8 Times Japanese Americans Really Weren’t Having It In 2017
Let’s face it, 2017 has been a real kick in the teeth for woke folks everywhere. Whether you’re suffering from bad news blues or worn out from the seemingly endless…
Remembering the Manzanar Riot
December 6, 2017 marks the 75th anniversary of the best known instance of mass unrest in the one of the WWII concentration camps. The Manzanar Riot, as it was called,…
Photo Essay: Hikaru Iwasaki’s Sunny Views of Resettlement Americana
While the photographs of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange have helped shape visual understandings of World War II incarceration, there are many lesser known photographers who documented the Japanese American…
Tule Lake Pilgrimage, 1974
In this American Archives Month guest post, Densho Digital Archivist Caitlin Oiye Coon looks at a recently published collection of photos by Gerald Kajitani. The photos document the second pilgrimage…
This is What We Talk About When We Talk About Community Archives
Stereotypes of archivists as bespectacled introverts navigating unending caverns of file cabinets and stacks are largely exaggerated. But it’s true that, as a lot, we generally enjoy our quiet time…
So How Many Assembly Centers Were There Anyway?
Relative to what we know about the concentration camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), we know little about their predecessors, the so-called “assembly centers” run by the Wartime…
Photo Essay: Fairground Detention Facilities
Fairgrounds in Fresno, Merced, Pomona, Puyallup, Salinas, Stockton, Tulare, and Turlock have a dark common history. Seventy five years ago, they served as sites for the temporary detention of Japanese…