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Washington State Grant Opportunity
Last week, the state of Washington announced the opening of a competitive grant cycle under the restored and renamed Kip Tokuda Memorial Washington Civil Liberties Public Education Program. This is…
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…
Scheduled Maintenance on Densho Sites
**Update, 12/15/15, 4:10 PST: The Densho Repository and Encyclopedia are up and running. The site is now fully operational. **Update, 12/15/15, 12:51 PST: The Densho Archive is now up and…
Mae Kanazawa Hara and the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair
In this guest post, Sara Beckman demonstrates how pairing oral history with archival materials can lead to rich discoveries about the past. This is the first of three reflections from interns working…
“Uprooting Community”: New Book Examines the WWII Mass Incarceration of Japanese Mexicans
In her new book, Uprooting Community, Selfa A. Chew examines the lived experience of Japanese Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during World War II. Chew illuminates U.S.-backed efforts of the Mexican government to…
Anti-Refugee Rhetoric and Justifications for WWII-Era Mass Incarceration: Is History Repeating Itself?
In the aftermath of last week’s tragic events in Paris, we have been saddened to watch as leaders across the world have turned to vitriolic xenophobia in their discussions of the Syrian…
A Response to Mayor David A. Bowers
Today, David A. Bowers, mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, issued a statement that favorably invoked World War II incarceration as justification for his city’s opposition to accepting Syrian refugees.
Gila River Concentration Camp: Intersecting Japanese American and Indigenous Histories
Until his death earlier this year, Mas Inoshita made it his duty to regularly travel to a remote part of the Arizona desert to tend to a stark monument, a…
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…
Allegiance: A Message from Densho Executive Director Tom Ikeda
Japanese American history gained a new national audience this past weekend: Allegiance, a dramatic reenactment of World War II incarceration set at the Heart Mountain concentration camp, opened on Broadway.
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…
Book Review: Allegiance
Allegiance: A Novel by Kermit Roosevelt (Simon & Schuster, 2015) Book review by Brian Niiya, Densho Content Director Kermit Roosevelt’s Allegiance is an engaging historical mystery novel set during World…
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…
Book Review: The Sun Gods
The Sun Gods by Jay Rubin (Chin Music Press, $15.00) Book review by Brian Niiya, Densho Content Director Set largely in Seattle, Japanese literary scholar and translator Jay Rubin’s The Sun Gods…
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…
Fall Harvest in Japanese American Concentration Camps
Even in urban Seattle, it’s hard to avoid the signs of fall harvest time: haystacks and pumpkins are cropping up in the parking lots of local grocery stores; scarecrows keep lookout over…
Intersections: Hispanic and Japanese American History
While the incarceration of people of Japanese descent throughout Latin America has been the focus of a number of studies, little has been written about interactions between Hispanic and Japanese American communities in…
Honouliuli Internment Camp: The Path to Becoming a National Park Service Unit
Earlier this month, the National Park Service (NPS) released the Honouliuli Gulch and Associated Sites Special Resource Study, which recommends that the former internment camp site on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu be designated a…
Densho Encyclopedia Reaches a Milestone
The Densho Encyclopedia published its 1,000th article this month—a milestone made possible, in part, by a grant from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites…
Photo Essay: Colorado’s Amache Concentration Camp
On August 27, 1942 the Amache concentration camp opened its doors to thousands of Japanese Americans who had been uprooted from their lives in California and transported to the remote,…
Voices from Heart Mountain
This week, the annual Heart Mountain Pilgrimage will draw visitors to rural Wyoming, where they will pay tribute to the more than 14,000 Japanese Americans from California, Washington, and Oregon…
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,…
Hiroshima and the Japanese American Hibakusha
In recognition of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, people across the globe are commemorating the lives lost and impacted by this tragedy. The anniversary also provides an opportunity…