Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project

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"Densho" means "to pass on to the next generation." In this quest, this website offers an archive of more than 668 oral histories presented in countless hours of video interviews on Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Materials also include approximately 12,000 historical photographs, documents, and newspapers. Visitors to this website should keep in mind that Densho is continually engaged in expanding its resources and adding more interviews, photographs, and documents, so be sure to check back periodically to discover new content!

Access to archival materials requires free registration. Once registered, users may select materials according to 32 topics, including immigration, community, religion and churches, education, race and racism, identity values, resistance, economic losses, redress and reparations, and reflections on the past.

Materials available without registration include lesson plans and information on "Causes of the Incarceration," "Civil Rights and Japanese American Incarceration," "Sites of Shame: Japanese American Detention Facilities," and "In the Shadow of My Country: A Japanese American Artist Remembers." The website also offers 90 multimedia materials providing historical context, a timeline, a glossary, and a list of related sources in print and online.

Manzanar: Desert Diamonds Behind Barbed Wire

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According to the Apple Learning Interchange site, "The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and the National Park Service present a sobering visit to the Manzanar War Relocation Center. This National Historic Site provides a compelling classroom to relive the experience of Japanese Americans held captive during World War II, as well as the plight of countless nationalities who face discrimination and intolerance still today. This is a tale of the indomitable Issei and Nisei generations. Watchers can learn through the emotional memories of survivors, and the invincible cheers of detainees at baseball games that still echo across the desert valley.

Resources for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

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Every May, the U.S. observes Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Americans whose families had roots in the nations of Asia and the Pacific Islands have experienced and shaped U.S. history in many ways. Teachinghistory.org's resources can help you explore these experiences with your students.

We've gathered together website reviews, lesson plans, quizzes, teaching strategies, primary sources, and more on our Asian Pacific American Heritage Month spotlight page. Available year-round and constantly expanding, this page, like our other spotlight pages, is a valuable resource you can turn to for materials and inspiration.

Here are some suggestions for other ways to inspire your teaching:

  • Follow links from the Library of Congress's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month gateway to exhibits and collections, audiovisual presentations, images, and teacher resources.
  • Locate historic sites related to Asian Pacific American history with the National Park Service's resource guide.
  • Uncover lesson plans, online exhibits, teacher guides, music, and more on the Smithsonian Institution's heritage month page.
  • Scan an overview of data on Asian Pacific Americans in the U.S., courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau.
  • Retrace the journeys of early contact between the U.S., Asia, and the Pacific Islands with EDSITEment's lesson plans and suggested websites.
  • Confront hardships and mistrust that many Asian Americans faced in the U.S., with resources from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, including a lesson plan on Chinese immigrants and teaching resources on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
  • Browse Asian Pacific American heritage booklists from Colorín Colorado.
  • Honor the service of Asian Pacific Americans in the U.S. military. Both the Navy and the Army maintain pages highlighting Asian Pacific American service.
  • Flip through the Smithsonian National Postal Museum's stamp album of stamps related to Asian Pacific American heritage.
  • Review past presidential proclamations for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month from the White House.
  • Read the stories of Asian Pacific Americans who immigrated to the U.S. and hear from Asian Pacific American authors on publisher Scholastic's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month hub.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2011

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Photo, Princess of Hawaii Kaiulani, c.1893, E. Chickering, Library of Congress
Photo, Princess of Hawaii Kaiulani, c.1893, E. Chickering, Library of Congress
Photo, Princess of Hawaii Kaiulani, c.1893, E. Chickering, Library of Congress
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In 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102.42, permanently designating May as Asian Pacific American Month. Just as with other heritage months, May is barely enough time to scratch the surface of the many strands of history the month memorializes. In May 2009, Teachinghistory.org suggested some places to start digging. Continue to dig this year, with more suggestions.

Japanese Americans and World War II

Modern history textbooks now recognize the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps during World War II, and its violation of the U.S. understanding of citizenship has increasingly become a core strand in narratives about the war. Digital archives offer rich collections of primary sources related to the internments. Many of these sources feature children, making them a natural choice for drawing students into the story of history. Others focus on law, press, and the choices adults made both during and after the internment years.

  • Students describe their own experiences of internment in the University of Arkansas's Land of (Un)Equal Opportunity. World War II-era high-school students' essays, poems, and other documents record the thoughts of modern students' historical peers.
  • Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project's archives preserve more than 900 hours of oral history interviews on Japanese American experiences, as well as 10,830 photographs, documents, and newspapers. Browsing them by topic reveals sources on little-covered aspects of the World War II era, such as the experiences of Japanese Hawaiians.
Chinese Americans

Photo, Manpower. Boatyard workers, Jul. 1942, Howard R. Hollem, LoC The lives and experiences of all groups in the U.S. overlap and intertwine with each other, and no group's history exists in isolation. Japanese American history didn't begin and end with World War II, nor did it exist in a vacuum. Enter the keywords "registration certificate 1942" into the search box at the Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive for a primary source that captures the complicated nature of identity, perception, and categorization in U.S. history. Remember that Chinese and Japanese Americans are not the only groups represented by this artifact—consider what groups' views motivated the creation of this source.

Filipino Americans

Groups within the U.S. have often banded together based on shared identities to push for change. The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project tells the story of Filipino Americans and unionism in the Seattle canning industry.

Korean Americans

World War II, the Korean War, and the whole span of U.S. international history and involvement (and lack of involvement) can shift when seen from different perspectives. The University of Southern California's Korean American Digital Archive includes photographs and documents related to international events—and to daily life.

Hawaiians

Photo, Princess of Hawaii Kaiulani, c.1893, E. Chickering, Library of CongressBoth a Pacific Island and a U.S. state, Hawaii has a unique position for Asian Pacific American Month. Many different cultures come together here, including Native Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, among others, and it is one of only four states where non-Hispanic whites do not form the majority. Sources on the history of many of these groups can be found in the digital archives of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

More Resources

These resources touch on only a scattering of the many Asian American and Pacific American groups represented in the history of the U.S.—and only a scattering of the resources available to teachers. Comment and tell us what you use to teach Asian Pacific American history this month—and the rest of the year. What books, lesson plans, films, primary sources, and other materials have their place in your classroom and curriculum?

Online Archive of California

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Photo, Joseph Sharp, 1849 gold miner of Sharp's Flats, Online Archive of CA
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This archive provides more than 81,000 images and 1,000 texts on the history and culture of California. Images may be searched by keyword or browsed according to six categories: history, nature, people, places, society, and technology. Topics include exploration, Native Americans, gold rushes, and California events.

Three collections of texts are also available. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive furnishes 309 documents and 67 oral histories. Free Speech Movement: Student Protest, U.C. Berkeley, 1964–1965 provides 541 documents, including books, letters, press releases, oral histories, photographs, and trial transcripts.

UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office offers full-text transcripts of 139 interviews organized into 14 topics including agriculture, arts, California government, society and family life, wine industry, disability rights, Earl Warren, Jewish community leaders, medicine (including AIDS), suffragists, and UC Black alumni.

Japanese American National Museum Collections

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Drawing, Playing Go K5-BA, 8-24-42, George Hoshida, Japanese American Nat. Muse.
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This site provides access to the digitized resources of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Collections include more than 300 letters sent to Clara Breed, a San Diego librarian, by her former patrons after their relocation to internment camps; panoramic photos from Buddhist Churches of America events; artwork by Hideo Date, Hisako Hibi, Estelle Ishigo, Henry Sugomoto, and Benji Okubo; the diary of Stanley Hayami, a high school student during the internment years, later killed in combat at age 19; sketches and watercolors from the diary of George Hoshida; photographs of Manzanar and Tule Lake by Jack Iwata, as well as other photographs of daily life in the internment camps; a major collection of issei immigrant artifacts and plantation clothing; and photographs for the Rafu Shimpo, one of the oldest Japanese American newspapers in the U.S.

This is an excellent source for anyone seeking primary sources related to Japanese American experience in the U.S., particularly with an emphasis on the years of internment.

Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar

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Photo, Tsutomu Fuhunago, Ansel Adams
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During World War II, the U.S. Government forced more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to leave their homes and businesses, relocating them to internment camps from California to Arkansas. Well-known photographer Ansel Adams documented the lives of Japanese Americans at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California—from portraits to daily life, including agriculture and leisure.

This site presents 242 original negatives and 209 photographic prints, often displayed together to show Adams's developing and cropping techniques. His 1944 book on Manzanar, Born Free and Equal is also reproduced. Adams donated the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, writing, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice . . . had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment."

A More Perfect Union

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Photo, Tule Lake renunciant, November 23, 1945
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Based on a 1987 Smithsonian exhibition, this site allows visitors to click and drag through sections of text, music, personal accounts, and images that tell stories of the forced—and ultimately determined to be unconstitutional—internment during World War II of 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Also provides searching capabilities to retrieve images of more than 800 artifacts relating to the lives of those interned.

Sections in the narrative cover immigration, removal, internment, loyalty, service, and justice. Provides a 5,000-word audio file of interview excerpts; 6,400-word accompanying text from the 1994 traveling exhibition; annotated timeline; 72-title bibliography; 20 links to related sites; and two classroom activities. Also invites visitors to share their responses and to read those of others. Of value to students of Asian American history, the homefront during World War II, and constitutional issues.

Thinking About the Future in a World War II Barrack

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Material culture is at the heart of the work of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Using material culture, we fulfill our mission of promoting the understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. JANM has a permanent collection of over 60,000 photographs, documents, crafts, artwork, and moving images. These artifacts make up the material culture that illustrates and substantiates the history of one ethnic group in the United States.

One of the largest artifacts in our collection is a barrack from a World War II-era American concentration camp. During World War II this barrack was located in Heart Mountain, WY, and housed Japanese American families forcibly removed from the West Coast. It is now on display as part of Common Ground: The Heart of Community, JANM's ongoing exhibition covering the history and culture of Japanese Americans from the 1880s to the present.

Within the exhibition the barrack confronts people with the reality of the experience of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent who were confined in one of 10 camps run by the United States government. For Japanese Americans who were once confined in similar barracks, seeing this artifact often serves as an emotional reminder of a difficult past.

. . . the barrack confronts people with the reality of the experience of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent who were confined in one of 10 camps run by the United States government.

Each year, over 20,000 students in Los Angeles visit JANM and are able to stand inside this barrack. They listen to the volunteer docents' first-person stories about life during World War II. Material culture brings history to life so when students see the gaps between the barrack floorboards and hear the volunteers recount the mass removal and confinement without due process, they often respond by saying, "That's not fair."

An opportunity for dialogue opens when students ask how this could have happened to the Japanese Americans. This allows us to share not only the World War II experience, but also the pre-war discrimination, the community's post-war struggles to get back onto its feet, and the coalition that fought for and in 1988 achieved redress from the United States government. A tour that began in a 70-year-old barrack can become a discussion about race-based discrimination and the struggle to redress a constitutional wrong.

A tour that began in a 70-year-old barrack can become a discussion about race-based discrimination and the struggle to redress a constitutional wrong.

The barrack from Heart Mountain is one example of an object's ability to teach and invite thoughtful conversation. Like many other museums, we are beginning to experiment with ways to increase the accessibility of more of our artifacts. This school year we have introduced two new school programs. Digital Speakers Bureau is designed to allow real-time, Web-based dialogue between docents and students who cannot visit the museum. Object Analysis with the Education Collection is for students who live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in hands-on analysis of a subset of JANM's collections. Additionally we have begun to upload 30- to 60-second video clips of volunteers sharing stories that relate to artifacts from our collection and have a handful of online collections.

Material culture encourages students to think critically about the real-life lessons that this experience holds for us all. While the Heart Mountain barrack evokes deeply personal memories for many Japanese Americans, it also stands as a general warning against the discrimination, mass removal, and incarceration of any one ethnic group. The barrack from World War II reminds us that—now and in the future—it is our individual and collective responsibility to uphold constitutional rights for all.

Teaser

Material culture brings history to life so when students see the gaps between the barrack floorboards and hear the volunteers recount the mass removal and confinement without due process, they often respond by saying, "That's not fair."