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Minidoka Concentration Camp: Looking Back 70 Years Later
The Minidoka concentration camp was located in a remote portion of South Central Idaho’s Snake River Plain and housed approximately 13,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. It closed seventy years…
Photography, Family History, and the Search for Missing Incarcerees: A Q&A with Paul Kitagaki, Jr.
Photographer Paul Kitagaki, Jr.first learned about his family’s World War II-era incarceration in a high school history class in 1970. Later, as a young photojournalist in San Francisco he discovered that one of…
Student Uncovers Family History during Densho Internship
Over the summer, we welcomed Kyle Tanemura as an intern at Densho. Kyle, a junior at California Polytechnic State University majoring in computer sciences, made important contributions to Densho, particularly in…
Segregated Swimming: Oral Histories of Japanese Americans and Public Pools
With the end of summer looming on the horizon, people everywhere are savoring the season’s final days of poolside leisure: seeking the refuge of cool water on a hot afternoon,…
New Partner Collection: Frank C. Hirahara Photographs from the Oregon Nikkei Endowment
Photo Caption: O.N.E. volunteer Betty Jean Harry working with Portland area Nisei at the Oregon Buddhist Temple as they help identify photos from the Frank C. Hirahara Collection. Photo Courtesy…
Loni Ding Collection
We are very pleased to have recently received a collection from the family of acclaimed filmmaker Loni Ding of the raw materials used to make her influential documentaries Nisei Soldier: Standard…
Records about Japanese Americans relocated during World War II
There is an enormous amount of information on the Japanese American removal and incarceration available online even beyond the resources that Densho provides. This abundance is both a blessing and…
Nisei Vue and Scene Collection Added
Nisei Vue and Scene were resettlement era Nisei pictorial magazines based in Chicago that reflected the hopes and dreams of at least a segment of the Nisei population in the…
Free Press behind Barbed Wire? Newspapers Published in the Concentration Camps
“A battalion of American troops of the 7th Army was cut off for a week near St. Die in France. All its attempts to break out were stopped by superior…
Controlling the Historical Record: Photographs of the Japanese American Incarceration
Clandestine photographs from war in Iraq prove a long-known fact: images of soldiers in battle, prisoners of war, and civilians caught in the conflict have the power to provoke outrage,…
Terrorism, 1945 Style
One of the articles I’ve been working on for the Densho Encyclopedia on and off is a piece on the terroristic incidents that greeted the first Nisei to return to…
Imposing the Alien Land Laws: New Documents Discovered
A friend sent us this noteworthy article in a February 2010 issue of the Pacific Citizen. “Japanese American residents in San Joaquin County, Calif. had no idea that they were…
History, Memory, and the Japanese American Citizens League
Why does the issue of loyalty remain so divisive in the Japanese American community even today? This month’s “From the Archive” article looks at a painful and contentious aspect of…
Beyond the Divide: Japanese American Responses to the “Loyalty Questionnaire”
“The government is asking… a father and a son who have different situations, the same question, and on the basis of your answer your family might be broken up.” —…
All About the Women
Densho is dedicating resources to record interviews with Nikkei women, whose stories are often less documented in oral history collections. This month Densho staff travels to L.A. to conduct new…
Summer Days
On a warm August afternoon, in the time-honored tradition of the summer rerun, we thought we’d share some of our favorite “From the Archive” articles that are available on our…
New Content in the Densho Archive
We recently added 33 visual history interviews and 4 photo and document collections to the Densho Digital Archive. The archive now contains over 700 hours of video and over 10,000…
A New Resource
A few months ago the creator of a personal website asked for permission to use excerpts from the Camp Newspaper Collections. The camp papers have been a popular item ever…
Information for Freedom
Among the first executive orders signed by Barack Obama were two that require greater compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests. Now, there’s an executive order Densho likes. We are…
Newly Added to the Densho Archive
Just added to the Densho Digital Archive, ten visual history interviews and three photograph collections (listed below). The interviews were conducted during our travels over the summer to Salt Lake…