Event: Documenting the Japanese American Incarceration through Narratives and Data. June 2

Documenting the Japanese American Incarceration Through Narratives and Data

June 2 | 2-4 p.m. | Doe Library, Morrison Library

In person and online: ucberk.li/bancroft-symposium

Hosted by The Bancroft Library, Berkeley Library

The event is posted in the UC Berkeley Events Calendar here.

Session 1: Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project: Is Healing Possible?
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

This session explores the Oral History Center’s ongoing Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project that documents and disseminates the ways in which intergenerational trauma and healing occurred after the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. This project examines and compares how private memory, creative expression, place, and public interpretation intersect at the Manzanar and Topaz prison camps in California and Utah. This panel will include discussion with interviewers, and it will feature conversations with a clinical psychologist and specialist in intergenerational trauma who advises on the project and leads healing circles for narrators, as well as a narrator who was interviewed for the project.

Roger Eardley-Pryor, Interviewer, the Oral History Center
Shanna Farrell, Interviewer, the Oral History Center
Dr. Lisa Nakamura, clinical psychologist and Topaz descendant
Ruth Sasaki, Topaz Stories Editor
Amanda Tewes, Interviewer, the Oral History Center

Session 2: Giving Data Back to the Community through Computational Scholarship: Two Case Studies Focused on Japanese American Incarceree Records from World War II
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

This session brings together two in-process projects that are working to encourage computational and ethical access to collections and data. Presenters from The Bancroft Library and Densho will discuss their projects related to records surrounding the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The intersectional and positional work of these projects highlights the importance of building new partnerships outside of the archives to create new content and implement community co-curation models to support on-going inquiry, knowledge-building, and exploration around this topic, with implications for vulnerable communities today.

Mary Elings, Interim Deputy Director, The Bancroft Library
Marissa Friedman, Digital Project Archivist, The Bancroft Library
Brian Niiya, Content Director, Densho
Geoff Froh, Deputy Director, Densho
Vijay Singh, CEO, Doxie.AI

These events will be recorded.

Funding for this event was made possible, in part, by grants from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program and The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation.

Covid Protocols
We ask that participants comply with all health and safety guidelines and protocols recommended by UC Berkeley. This includes wearing a mask while indoors.

 All Audiences

 bancroft@library.berkeley.edu, 510-642-3781

If you require an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please contact Amber Lawrence at libraryevents@berkeley.edu or 510-459-9108 at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.


Objectivity and Subjectivity in Oral History: Lessons from Japanese American Incarceration Stories

Sari Morikawa is an intern at the Oral History Center (OHC) of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. She is a Mount Holyoke College history major with a keen interest in American history.

Sari
Sari Morikawa, c. 2021

This fall, I had an opportunity to work on the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project (JAIN) with OHC interviewers Amanda Tewes, Shanna Farrell, and Roger Eardley-Pryor. For this project, I identified oral history interviews discussing Japanese American incarceration during World War II in the OHC’s collections. Later, I compiled and constructed an annotated bibliography for the team, as well as for future researchers. At the same time, I engaged with and acquired knowledge of basic oral history theories and methodologies. Through this project, I had a chance to reflect upon the idea of intersubjectivity and contemplate how this concept plays out in a real oral history project. This entire experience caused me to wonder how my own subjectivity—including my background as a Japanese woman and not an American citizen—might influence how I interpret and share these oral history narratives on Japanese American incarceration.

For the first phase of my internship, I engaged with prominent oral historians’ scholarly work and learned basic oral history methodologies and practices. In particular, the idea of intersubjectivity struck me. In oral history, intersubjectivity means that both the interviewer’s and narrator’s subjectivity, or identities and lived experiences, impact their interpretations of memories and shape the interview they co-create. In particular, Kathleen Blee’s article, “Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” was very influential for me. In this article, Blee sheds light on the idea that historians need to grapple with how to tell people’s stories while considering their own social identities and perspectives, especially when they disagree. After briefly discussing the author’s main argument, Amanda asked me a question, “Do you think history can be objective?” This question struck me. At that point, I believed that objectivity in history was important to avoid romanticization of the past. For example, in order to justify the incarceration plan, the U.S. federal government conceptualized Manzanar as a “holiday on ice” and shared this interpretation with the general public. As a result, some of the oral history transcripts demonstrate (particularly white) narrators’ misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Japanese Americans incarceration. Thus, I believed that history should be neutral to prevent romanticization. Yet, my views on objectivity and intersubjectivity changed as I started writing the annotated bibliography and engaged more with oral history theory and methodology. 

By the beginning of October, we started working on an extensive annotated bibliography. I identified oral history transcripts which discuss Japanese American imprisonment during World War II. It turned out Japanese Americans’ incarceration experiences were too diverse to generalize. It was wonderful to see that narrators who discussed the incarceration ranged from formerly incarcerated deaf family members to the War Relocation Authority officials to a fisherman who delivered fish to incarceration centers. I recognized how diverse their voices are and realized that the stories that we tell are not objective at all. Thus, history cannot be objective. For example, some formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans expressed their bitter feelings that life in incarceration camps was shocking and traumatizing. Some of them, like Nancy Ikeda Baldwin, even said that these experiences decreased their performance in school after their incarceration. On the other hand, others said that the incarceration camps were enviable experiences. One generation later, Eiko Yasutake confessed, “I was kind of a little jealous when you went to the camps, because that, for kids, was that side of it, that they were all together and kind of had that playtime if you will.” In fact, so many photographs from this time highlight Japanese Americans’ agency. Jack Iwata’s work uncovers Japanese Americans hosting beauty pageants, emphasizing Japanese Americans’ power to make the most out of their circumstances. This wide array of recollections, even among Japanese Americans, confused me. However, it made me contemplate how I would utilize the idea of intersubjectivity to share this nuanced and complex history with people who don’t really know about these incarceration experiences.

Queen of Manzanar
Margie Midori Shimizu Hirashimal, “Queen of Manzanar.” The image of a beauty queen at Manzanar shows the resilience of the Japanese American community incarcerated there. Photograph by Jack Iwata, c. 1942-1945. Courtesy of Calisphere.

The question of how I would interpret these stories and share them with people who are unfamiliar with this topic led me to another question: how my identity as Japanese would impact interpretations of Japanese American incarceration. As a person who partially shares the same heritage and cultural background, I felt a sense of familiarity and interacted with interview transcripts with care. Encountering some of the Japanese words in oral history interview transcripts that don’t quite translate into English, such as ‘gaman‘ and ‘shikataganai,’ I felt a cultural connection to Japanese American prisoners. When someone discusses that formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans are hesitant to talk about their experiences, I recognize how Japanese culture made them react that way. My own subjectivity helped me grapple with these Japanese Americans’ incarceration stories. At the same time, I learned that I should also step back from my own subjectivity. Some of the Chinese and Filipino Americans’ transcripts on this topic allowed me to tackle this idea. Caroline and Frank Gwerder said, “[Filipinos] were fearful of what the Japanese might do.” These interviews reminded me of how Japanese imperialistic and super nationalistic policies and how they implanted fear on other Asian Americans and reshaped U.S. homeland politics. Since then, I felt more cautious about my national identity, in particular as a person coming from a country with this imperialistic past. That adage that “winners write history” nicely illustrates how imperialists write and rewrite history and leave behind the perspectives of marginalized communities. Recognizing this, I became to be more mindful about valuing the stories of incarcerated Japanese Americans.

Throughout this process, I realized that the inner dialogue between my identity, my interpretation of these oral history interviews, and how I would disseminate them to a larger audience is all subjective. Historians cannot avoid being subjective. In order to best reflect these interviews through my annotated bibliography, I would highlight their plight caused by the government’s racially discriminatory plan and Japan’s imperialistic military policy. Yet, more importantly, I would also emphasize incarcerated peoples’ agency and adoption of “gaman.” Utilizing my shared culture and history, as well as acknowledging the imperialistic past that my country made, I will utilize the oral history as bottom-up narratives to overturn the romanticized past.

Find out more about the oral histories mentioned here  from the search feature on our home page. You can search by name, key word, and several other criteria.


Ancestors and Archives online workshop: UC Berkeley, October 20, 2021

Colleagues,

As a co-organizer of the event that is related to the DEIB work, I would like to invite you to attend the following event, “Ancestors and Archives online workshop,” on October 20, 2021. Please register using the link below. Please feel free to share this event with your respective professional lists.

https://ucberk.li/ancestors-and-archives-event


Primary Sources: Japanese American Internment: Records of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

sign reading "instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry"The Library has recently acquired Japanese American Internment: Records of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, a digitized collection of materials that were assembled by library staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The finding aid for the microfilm version provides more detailed information about what is included in the collection and how it is arranged.


Primary Sources: Rafu Shimpo Digital Archive

Rafu Shimpo

The Library has acquired the digital archive of Rafu Shimpo, the longest running Japanese American newspaper in the United States. The paper began in 1903 supporting the small but growing Japanese community in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles, California. By the 1940s it was the most widely circulated paper in the region and included a weekly English section for second generation Japanese Americans. The paper was forced to cease publication and its publisher was imprisoned by the government during World War II, but was revived in 1946. The resource contains all obtainable issues from 1914 through 2018.

 


Trial: Digital resources related to Civil Rights, Japanese-American Relocation, Farm Workers, and Native Americans

The Library has set up trial access to evaluate four digital collections:

Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement
National Farm Worker Ministry: Mobilizing Support for Migrant Workers, 1939-1985
Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress
Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life

These are all part of a resource called Archives Unbound from Gale Cengage. The company was not able to set up a trial for just these four resources, so all of the collections are available to view.

Available via the same link is another trial resource, Indigenous Peoples: North America, which covers the history of American Indian tribes and supporting organizations. The collection includes sources from American and Canadian institutions, tribal newspapers, and Indian-related organizations. The collection also features Indigenous language materials, including dictionaries, Bibles, and primers.

I am particularly interested in your feedback on the resources listed above, but if you see other collections of interest, let me know and I’ll put them on my wish list.
Trial access ends 3/17/16.


Primary Sources: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive

The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce the publication of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive.

The result of a two-year digitization project generously funded by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, the digital archive makes available nearly 100,000 original manuscript items from The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study initiated in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. This research project sought to document the mass internment of Japanese Americans by embedding Nisei social science students recruited from the Berkeley campus into selected internment sites.

 The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive website provides access to this massive collection of research materials through various means, including textual searches and browsing options, visual mechanisms such as GIS tagging and interactive maps, a timeline, and pointers to related resources. The collection comprises daily journals, field reports, life histories, extensive correspondence between staff, evacuees, and others, and secondary research materials collected and compiled by the research staff.

Margo Padilla
Digital Project Archivist
The Bancroft Library


Primary Sources: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive

The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce the publication of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive.

The result of a two-year digitization project generously funded by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, the digital archive makes available nearly 100,000 original manuscript items from The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study initiated in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. This research project sought to document the mass internment of Japanese Americans by embedding Nisei social science students recruited from the Berkeley campus into selected internment sites.

 The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive website provides access to this massive collection of research materials through various means, including textual searches and browsing options, visual mechanisms such as GIS tagging and interactive maps, a timeline, and pointers to related resources. The collection comprises daily journals, field reports, life histories, extensive correspondence between staff, evacuees, and others, and secondary research materials collected and compiled by the research staff.

Margo Padilla
Digital Project Archivist
The Bancroft Library