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Open Letter to Donald Trump: To “Make America Great Again,” We Must Learn from the Mistakes of our Past
Mr. Trump: Your call to put a moratorium on all Muslim immigration to the United States made it all too clear that a dark part of the American past is haunting us…
Sumi Asaba, Seattle 1942
In this guest post, Densho intern Alaria Sacco reflects on the photograph of a young girl with her kitten taken in April 1942, shortly before the child and her family were incarcerated for…
Winter Appeal 2015
This past summer we hosted Kyle Tanemura as an intern at Densho. Kyle is a bright and affable young man–a computer science major at Cal Poly. He made important contributions…
Camp Livingston, Louisiana
On this day in 1942, the World War II detention facility Camp Livingston opened its doors in Alexandria, Louisiana. At its peak, it held 1,123 internees of Japanese ancestry sent…
New Articles in the Densho Encyclopedia
The Densho Encyclopedia continues to expand with more newly written articles about the Japanese American experience during World War II. In the last month, 36 articles were added to this…
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…
Real Friends: Standing by the Japanese Americans
“Everywhere there is community feeling to be mended, vicious legislation to be defeated, many urgent jobs calling for attention from real friends of the real America.”—Letter from Friends of the…
Papa San: Pat Morita’s Daughter Remembers
In the Hyphen online magazine about Asian American culture, we came across a candid blog article that Pat Morita’s daughter Aly wrote about her famous father. She talks about her…
C-SPAN American History Broadcasts Densho Interviews
This weekend C-SPAN 3 will broadcast Densho’s interview with Medal of Honor veteran George “Joe” Sakato. The C-SPAN American History channel has broadcast a half dozen full-length video oral histories…
International Internees: The Family Camp at Crystal City
“The bitterness of the incarceration was there, but they were able to circumvent it somehow and live a pretty decent community family life.” — Mako Nakagawa
A visit to Tokyo by Tom Ikeda
Below are my daily notes from a whirlwind visit to Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. The purpose of the visit was to see some of the people I met…
Exceptions That Prove the Rule: Interracial Nisei Marriages
“The first generation was, you might say, narrow-minded…The second generation didn’t marry out. But when it came to third generation and fourth, they had more freedom.” –Takashi Matsui
Sports Illustrated & ESPN Take a Look at the Japanese American Incarceration
There is a good feature story in Sports Illustrated about the Champion Utah basketball team during World War II. It features Wat Misaka, one of the stars of the team…
International Lives: The Horiuchi Interviews
“The Nikkei I knew that were involved in the occupation…they were able to work more closely with the Japanese because the Japanese looked upon them as someone that could understand…
Incarceration and Reservations: Japanese and Native Americans Intersect
“This country has had a history of forced evacuation and detention of non-white Americans.” –Bernie Whitebear, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation Politically oppressed people of color share storylines in…
Asian names are so difficult!
A recent news item from Texas is getting lots of attention from Asian Americans. In a hearing on voter registration legislation, Republican state representative Betty Brown asked Ramey Ko of…
Teachers on Board
On Saturday we held the first of two meetings with a dozen (plus a few) teachers who will help Densho test our civil liberties curriculum units in their classrooms this…
40 years ago: Vice President Inouye?
Audio tapes from President Johnson’s last months in office were released yesterday. These tapes confirm conversations I’ve had with Senator Inouye about the serious discussions that were taking place to…
First day of interviews
We conducted our first Watsonville interviews today, which went very well. We were lucky to be able to shoot our interviews in Kizuka Hall, home to the Watsonville-Santa Cruz JACL…
Watsonville Pre-interview Presentation
On the day we arrived at Watsonville I gave a short presentation about what we do at Densho and to also describe what was going to happen over the next…
Watsonville: Arrival and Potluck Dinner
Tom, Megan and I arrived in Watsonville today after a short flight into San Jose. We hit a long stretch of traffic on the drive into Watsonville, so it took…
Salt Lake City – JACL national convention
Last weekend I was in Salt Lake City attending the JACL national convention. This was a great opportunity for Densho to share some video interview segments from the interviews we…
Off to Watsonville & Berkeley
Tom, Dana and I will be traveling to California next week to conduct interviews with Japanese Americans from Watsonville and Berkeley. It will be my last interviewing trip before I…
Satirical video
For those of you who appreciate this type of satire, we’re posting a video from “The Onion” that a friend brought to our attention. U.S. Finally Gets Around To Closing…