America’s Cultural Treasures: This text is a part of a collection sponsored by the Ford Basis highlighting the work of museums and organizations which have made a big impression on the cultural panorama of america.
“We ask if you could carry this history with you, understanding that it is not a Japanese-American history, this is an American history, then maybe you can prevent it from happening again.”
Karen Kano, Information for the Irei Undertaking, The Japanese American Nationwide Museum
The reply to the query “Who belongs here?” — that’s to say, who is taken into account a part of the neighborhood that the Japanese American Nationwide Museum (JANM) serves — could appear apparent on its face. The Japanese-American neighborhood that surrounds it includes a historic and important constituency within the space of downtown Los Angeles referred to as Little Tokyo or J-town. It was based on the flip of the twentieth century and is dwelling to the most important Japanese-American inhabitants within the continental United States. It’s bigger and extra populous than the 2 different majoritarian Japanese ethnic enclaves within the US: San Francisco and San Jose. In accordance with Kristen Hayashi, the museum’s director of Collections Administration & Entry, previous to World Warfare II, maybe 90% of the Japanese-American neighborhood lived inside a 10-mile radius of JANM.
The story of what occurred to Japanese immigrants throughout and after the battle itself poses this and associated questions: Who thrives as a result of they’re made to really feel welcome, and who’s made to really feel that they don’t belong?
Within the intervening years between the early 1900s and the museum’s founding in 1985, one thing momentous and irredeemable occurred to the individuals who lived in Little Tokyo. Earlier than the battle, there was a vibrant, thriving neighborhood of Japanese Individuals in California. However in 1942, months after the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service carried out a shock assault on america at its Pearl Harbor naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, Japanese Individuals have been rounded up, relocated, and forcibly incarcerated in 10 focus camps and 65 different confinement websites scattered across the nation. Over 125,000 ethnically Japanese individuals (together with these deported from Latin American international locations like Peru) have been incarcerated between February of 1942 and about March of 1946, utilizing the authorized justification of Government Order 9066. Approved by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt two months after the Pearl Harbor assault, the order empowered regional navy commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” This virtually allowed the removing of all individuals of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast (plus German Individuals and Italian Individuals). These detainees have been relocated to focus camps in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and as far east as Arkansas.
The Japanese American Nationwide Museum’s Pavilion constructing (picture by Paloma Dooley)
For a lot of of these being forcibly relocated from Little Tokyo, the unique website of JANM was a spot of makeshift refuge. The museum’s birthplace was in one of many buildings the place Japanese Individuals have been instructed to line up earlier than being compelled onto the buses that took them to the incarceration camps: the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, constructed in 1925 as the primary Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. As a result of detainees have been solely permitted to take with them what they may carry, the constructing was used as a storage facility for its members’ property. And in 1945, when the federal government started releasing Japanese Individuals from the camps because the battle got here to a detailed, it served as a hostel for these returning dwelling.
Forty years later, the museum was based in that constructing, and the day earlier than it formally opened its doorways to the general public in Could 1992 was additionally the identical day a jury acquitted 4 Los Angeles Police Division officers charged with utilizing extreme pressure within the arrest and beating of Rodney King — an motion that precipitated the LA Rebellion. Ann Burroughs, the present president and chief government officer, explains that the museum “came out of this history of discrimination, dispossession, forced removal, suspension of Constitutional rights … birthed in this crucible of racial tension within the city.”
“Our plaza [is] one of the ground-zero points in the civil rights history of this country, and it’s from our plaza that we get our power of place,” Burroughs continues, emphasizing the importance of location to the museum’s id. “We’ve become a point of pilgrimage.”
The Japanese American Nationwide Museum’s Historic Constructing, the previous Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple (picture by Paloma Dooley)
The Japanese American Nationwide Museum has change into a touchstone for telling this story in all its harrowing and triumphant particulars, significantly because the 1999 opening of its fashionable 85,000-square-foot Pavilion simply subsequent door to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. The museum’s debut presentation was the long-running Widespread Floor: The Coronary heart of Neighborhood, a chronological exhibition that profoundly retold Japanese-American historical past by means of private accounts, paintings installations, uncommon artifacts, images, textiles, dwelling film footage, and scale fashions. Although Widespread Floor closed in January because the museum undergoes renovations till late 2026, one significantly poignant side of the exhibition was a portion of the barracks initially erected within the Coronary heart Mountain focus camp in Wyoming. JANM workers acquired the constructing (which was on privately owned land), disassembled the construction, after which absolutely reassembled it within the museum’s plaza, the place it stood for a number of years. When the Pavilion opened, it was introduced inside and a portion was displayed and not using a ceiling or cowl as a consequence of hearth codes. Exhibited this fashion, it might have had much more resonance than it did within the courtyard. For years it stood as a shifting metaphor for the porosity of our collective ethics, the gaps that exist within the community of authorized, political, and sensible protections for these with no roof over their heads.
On the identical time, this set up demonstrated one thing else. Hayashi noticed it as emblematic of “a community reclaiming its history,” simply because the museum at massive conveys narratives of Japanese self-determination. One part of the exhibition highlighted the 442nd Regimental Fight Group, a segregated unit that was activated on February 1, 1943, practically one yr after the signing of the manager order that incarcerated their households. Two-thirds of the regiment comprised Hawaiian-born Nisei (second-generation Japanese Individuals), with the remaining third consisting of Nisei from the mainland US. The 442nd is acknowledged as probably the most adorned unit for its measurement and size of service within the historical past of the US navy. This unit of about 18,000 males earned over 4,000 Purple Hearts, 4,000 Bronze Stars, 560 Silver Star Medals, 21 Medals of Honor, and 7 Presidential Unit Citations.
An unique barrack from the Coronary heart Mountain focus camp in Widespread Floor: The Coronary heart of Neighborhood on the Japanese American Nationwide Museum (picture by Doug Mukai)
Nevertheless, on the opposite facet of the problem of draft conscription, some younger Japanese Individuals refused to acquiesce to a coercive and arbitrary authorities. In Wyoming, on the identical focus camp whose barracks lengthy stood inside JANM, the Coronary heart Mountain Truthful Play Committee was organized in 1943 to protest the draft of Nisei from authorities focus camps and the deployment of a doc by the Warfare Division and the Warfare Relocation Authority that will change into referred to as the loyalty questionnaire. This survey of incarcerated males contained two significantly troublesome questions: one which requested respondents whether or not they have been keen to serve on fight responsibility wherever ordered, and one other that requested them to swear unqualified allegiance to america and surrender allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. The committee, which started with Kiyoshi Okamoto, later joined by different inmates, refused to volunteer for or take part within the draft. Ultimately all 63 members have been placed on trial and convicted for Selective Service Act violations, with the group leaders sentenced to 4 years in jail and the remaining to 2 years. Although this protest constituted the most important single draft resistance motion in United States historical past on the time, the Truthful Play Committee members have been seen as traitors by many within the Japanese-American neighborhood for many years, even after their pardoning in 1947.
A part of JANM’s work has been to handle the unstated disgrace of incarceration with care. “There were a lot of Japanese Americans who were in camp who did not want to talk about it; the community as a whole didn’t want to talk about it,” says Clement Hanami, vp of exhibitions. “I feel that the work that we have done has made it okay for 80 percent of the community to talk about it.” This work of remembrance and comprehension is vital for subsequent Sansei and Yonsei generations, a degree Director of Public Applications Pleasure Yamaguchi echoes.
“There are a lot of folks who come and really feel themselves reflected in what they see,” Yamaguchi explains. “They get to say, ‘This was my family’s history, this was something that happened to my parents that I’ve actually not heard that much about but we want to understand better,’ … and there’s maybe some shame around it or misunderstanding.”
The establishment’s leaders realized assist guests and patrons metabolize this guilt by absolutely telling these tales and by recognizing those that have been caught up within the cyclone of hysteria. Naming them has been key. Within the out of doors plaza adjoining to the Pavilion there’s an space colloquially referred to as the “Children’s Courtyard,” the place the names of kids whose dad and mom or grandparents donated to the museum are incised into the terracotta flooring. On the glass partitions of the foyer, names are equally incised, representing the individuals who donated cash to the museum for themselves in commemoration of another person. Kristen Hayashi can attest to the grassroots basis of the museum, whose storytelling the neighborhood acknowledged as wanted and worthwhile. “JANM was really built by the community,” Hayashi says. “This history wasn’t sufficiently being told elsewhere, not at the Smithsonian, our national museum, so they wanted this history to be preserved and shared.”
A photograph of a bunch of 5 younger ladies from Los Angeles, California, posing with fingers on hips with guard tower in background at Coronary heart Mountain focus camp, Wyoming, round 1942–1945, in Don’t Fence Me In: Coming of Age in America’s Focus Camps (2023) (Japanese American Nationwide Museum, Reward of Mori Shimada)
The Irei undertaking — which was on show from October 11, 2022, by means of December 1, 2024 — additionally demonstrated how integral naming and remembrance are to the work of the museum. Presently touring throughout america, the undertaking seeks to comprehensively checklist each individual of Japanese ancestry incarcerated within the World Warfare II camps, instigated and led by Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams, director of the USC Shinso Ito Heart for Japanese Religions and Tradition. On the heart of the three-part undertaking is a monument within the type of a e book known as the Ireichō. In a partitioned house on JANM’s floor flooring, Karen Kano, the undertaking’s information and one of many employees who spent 1000’s of hours transcribing, researching, and modifying the names, confirmed guests right into a type of shrine. Three deep blue partitions imbued the house with a way of calm. Every of the 75 focus camps was marked by a sotoba, a wood memorial board, which was affixed with a jar of soil from the corresponding camp. On a plinth sat the Ireichō, on which guests might use a small stamp to imprint a dot beneath the title of a member of the family or somebody unknown to them. The small circle is supposed to represent a visitation stone, the type left by somebody paying a name at a gravesite to recollect and honor the deceased. Kano explains the which means of those gestures:
“We’re doing this because we want to restore their personhood after the government assigned them a number and they were incarcerated … to recognize that this is not just a list of Japanese-American people; this is a list of individuals, each of whom had livelihoods and different personalities and family.”
A recognition of the significance of peculiar, particular person lives suffuses the museum’s exhibition program and amassing practices. In accordance with Hayashi, the museum is “the largest repository of Japanese-American material, culture, and archives in the world,” largely as a consequence of the truth that donations make up a lot of their assortment. These artifacts, starting from images to household keepsakes, are typically curated into exhibitions similar to Don’t Fence Me In: Coming of Age in America’s Focus Camps (2023), Widespread Floor, and ongoing on-line exhibits together with Tanaka Photograph Studio and Henry Sugimoto’s Creative Evolution. JANM was among the many first museums within the US to supply digital applications through the COVID-19 pandemic, and now enjoys near 1,000,000 views per yr by way of each the museum and Uncover Nikkei websites.
Whereas particular person artists are typically named within the headlines of exhibitions, the museum usually makes use of frequent supplies (similar to barracks timber) to convey narrative. Lynn Yamasaki, the museum’s director of Training, clarifies, “In our gallery, nothing is made of gold and silver; that’s not why [they’re] valuable. It’s because of the stories they have.”
“You go to museums where [there are] million-dollar paintings on the wall. That’s amazing and you can appreciate it. But it’s different where you see a fishing anchor and it’s like, ‘We have one of those at home,’” she continues. “The reason that that’s valuable is you have one at home, too, not because it’s one of a kind. That’s another thing that’s important in our messaging: Everybody’s story matters.”
Ireichō and sotoba in blue room (picture by Doug Mukai)
Guests noticed this play out in Widespread Floor, the place the story moved by means of the post-war narrative arc of Jimmy Carter appointing the Fee on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to analyze the camps, the fee’s conclusion that the incarceration was the product of racism, and Ronald Reagan’s signing into legislation the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which formally apologized for the incarceration and licensed fee of $20,000 to every former detainee who was nonetheless alive. Right here, going in opposition to the grain of White American common tradition, the emphasis isn’t on explicit heroes however relatively on the work of a whole neighborhood and their allies.
Rick Noguchi, the museum’s former chief working officer and now the president and CEO of California Humanities, pointed to JANM’s give attention to a selected ethnic neighborhood as key to its success, by means of its cautious cultivation of community-based storytelling, commemoration, and recognition. In accordance with Noguchi, “JANM has become, in many ways, a role model for other ethnic museums.”
One of many methods JANM has embodied this mannequin is by partnering with different establishments to broaden and deepen their neighborhood. By one of many first applications they developed, “Finding Family Stories,” they’ve joined fingers with a number of organizations within the Southern California space: beginning with the Korean American Museum, and together with the California African American Museum, Watts Towers, Self Assist Graphics & Artwork, Plaza de la Raza, the Chinese language American Museum, the Skirball Heart, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Artwork. Clement Hanami explains that they seemed for artists and writers inside companion communities to steer the undertaking, discovering frequent themes in conditions that relate to familial complexity, similar to staged household portraits, coping with an absent dad or mum, and immigrant colonial historical past. The ensuing exhibits have been all exhibited on the collaborating establishments across the identical time.
Individuals holding sotoba through the Ireichō procession in entrance of the JANM on September 24, 2022 (picture by Nobuyuki Okada)
“We’re also thinking about an audience beyond the Japanese-American community, an audience of LA or museumgoers who find themselves in our museum for some reason,” says Lisa Doi, the undertaking supervisor of the core exhibition Within the Future We Name Now, including that JANM desires these guests to “see connections between themselves, their communities, and the Japanese-American experience.”
The museum embraces this Japanese-American expertise in all its permutations, together with facets that non-Japanese communities who’ve additionally been persecuted and marginalized can acknowledge. One such undertaking is An American Vocabulary: Phrases to Motion, an ongoing, collaborative undertaking launched in late 2022 by visible artist Audrey Chan and rapper jason chu (who’re each Chinese language American). The 2 artists produced a set of flashcards that portrays individuals, occasions, and customs rooted in Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities. Every card depicts a specific phrase or phrase that’s translated into English from Korean, Laotian, Cantonese, Tagalog, and different languages, demonstrating the methods AANHPI communities have needed to translate their uniquely American histories throughout linguistic, cultural, and imaginative gulfs. As chu admits, “to be entrusted with the mission of creating something that spoke to an Asian-American or Asian American Pacific Islander, a pan-ethnic message and vision, was huge.” Audrey Chan affirms, “[It’s] about using JANM as this umbrella to talk about different intersecting narratives.”
Gordon Yamate, a member of the museum’s board of trustees, regards this challenge as a perennial one for JANM: “The other question that has always been at the heart of the museum is if we’re preaching to the choir, how do we reach the people who aren’t part of that choir?” By its applications and partnerships, the Japanese American Nationwide Museum has configured itself to additionally serve a wider collective, a set of disparate teams related by the use of cultural values, comparable and adjoining experiences, and political identities.
The Nationwide Heart for the Preservation of Democracy (Democracy Heart) acts as a vital method for JANM to collaborate and join with different organizations. Created in 2005 and positioned throughout the plaza from the Pavilion, its indispensable function is the 200-seat Tateuchi Democracy Discussion board theatre. This facility hosts significant applications, which embody unique content material and deep collaborations. It additionally permits different organizations which might be aligned with the museum’s values to make use of this house to carry occasions. For instance, the middle has labored with a bunch known as entertwine that levels a yearly 24-hour playwriting contest, by means of which AAPI writers are given a possibility to provide a 10-minute play for the prize of getting the work staged for a digital studying. The middle additionally works with the group that produces the podcast Gratitude Blooming and makes use of their common public dialog to work by means of a basic query: “Can we start to see the beauty and power in ourselves, in others around us, and democracy as a whole?” Democracy Heart Director Jim Herr expresses, “I think there is a space for us to fill in terms of talking about the arts and democracy. Ultimately, it’s all focused on having our stories told so that they become part of an American canon that’s not just made up of Western voices.”
Maybe this harrowing historical past may be redeemed as a result of the individuals who belong to this museum not solely join over a shared previous, but in addition fervently consider within the beliefs that this nation has lengthy touted but failed to meet. Can a nation of disparate individuals uncover methods to carry fingers and discover frequent trigger? Maybe by following JANM’s lead.
The individuals who belong right here consider within the humanizing energy of storytelling, consider there’s some measure of grace to search out within the terror of being othered. As Hayashi insists: “I think the lesson that we try to impart to visitors is that we need to uphold these ideals about protecting liberty and justice for all, because [they are] so fragile, right? Not everyone is protected. Many people remain vulnerable. That’s the lesson that we tell here.”
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