Thousands of voices hold the stories that can teach us about a dark chapter
in America's past.
At the Densho Project our mission is to preserve these memories
before they fade away.
The first Japanese began immigrating to the United States in the late 1800s.
By 1940, Japanese Americans were more or less settled into American society.
This all changed on December 7, 1941,
when suddenly they looked like the enemy.
And before my mother got home, the FBI showed up, and it must have been shortly after lunch.
They came for my dad that night, early in the morning of December 8th.
One of the teachers said, "You people bombed Pearl Harbor."
And I'm going, "My people?"
All of a sudden, my Japanese-ness became very aware to me.
I was seen as a "Jap," just the same as the enemy.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor made America angry and afraid.
As Japan's army and navy swept unchallenged through the Pacific,
most Americans thought it perfectly reasonable to take action against their
Japanese American neighbors here at home.
Even today, many Americans still don't know that more than a hundred and twenty
thousand Japanese Americans,
two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were forced from their homes
and put behind barbed wire because of their race.
Not until 1983, almost forty years later,
would a a U.S. Congressional commission uncover evidence from the war years
proving there had been no military necessity for the mass incarceration
of Japanese Americans.
In 1997, there were two forces that really shaped Densho.
The first one was that our elders in our community were dying.
These were people who lived through World War II, and we need to get their story,
so there's a sense of urgency.
The second force was the emergence of high technology.
Here we had digital video, the internet
and multimedia computers to really preserve these stories for the future.
When I think back eight years, I realize how far we've come.
When we first started, we didn't know how to do interviews, so we had to train ourselves,
train volunteers, and then we were ready.
But what threw us for a loop was that when we started asking people to be interviewed,
many of them said no.
They said the stories were too painful.
And so we had to tell them that
the stories weren't for them, or really for my generation,
they were for future generations.
And that's why we call ourselves the Densho Project. Because "Densho" means
to pass stories on to the next generation. And our narrators said
that's really why they're doing this.
So once the community saw what we were doing, they saw the value of our work,
and they wanted to support it.
So right away, we started receiving checks, which allowed us then
to continue doing more interviews and collect more photos and more documents.
And so right now, just day by day, doing this work,
we've collected over 230 interviews,
we've collected over six thousand photographs and documents,
and all this is now available online on the internet.
To make these unique materials widely available,
Densho created a massive web database.
With just a few clicks of a mouse,
users anywhere in the world can see and hear
entire interviews indexed by topic, complete with written transcripts.
Or they can sift through thousands of historic documents and rare photographs
pulled from basements and closets, then scanned into the database.
As a result, Densho's web archive is not only a comprehensive living history,
but an unparalleled resource for understanding what happened
to Japanese Americans.
Every year, over 80,000 people come to our website,
and they come from all over the world.
But what really excites me is that most of them are students.
And that's important because
our mission at Densho is education.
We're not about just preserving the past,
we're about inspiring the future also.
For anyone who didn't live through World War II,
the idea that the American government would put its own citizens inside barbed wire camps
might seem beyond belief, not possible.
Well, do you know what they were allowed to take with them, what they were limited to?
Any teacher in any classroom anywhere
can take students back to 1942
and sit face to face with Americans who tell their own stories of what really happened.
The ability to see interviews and to see actual chronologies and hear
people making actual speeches, whether they were for or against the detention,
that's all very positive.
When I see them talking about their experiences.
it hits me much harder. And I really feel like their presence and their experience.
The most important thing is really to have
firsthand experience from it. And you can't get that in a textbook no matter
how hard you try. But to have someone actually
tell you what happened, that's priceless.
In 1988, Congress passed and President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act.
This law mandated monetary payments and formal apologies
to all survivors of the incarceration.
The lesson, of course, was clear:
any time we single out a group because of how they look
or what God they pray to, we undermine America's democracy.
That happened during World War II and it's happening again today.
One of the beauties of the Constitution
is that it's a document that applies really without exception.
It's not to be applied when it's convenient,
it's not to be applied when it's easy,
it's really to be applied when it's hard.
It's at those times when you have to be least willing
to throw away your constitutional rights and really hold yourself as a country
to those constitutional rights.
By bringing the lessons of the past into the present and the future,
Densho promotes critical thinking as well as compassion,
and provides a vital perspective on the complex problems facing all of us today.
During World War II our country made a terrible mistake.
We want people to understand this.
Not because we want to dwell upon the past,
but we want people to make better, more informed decisions.
I think it's really important that people know what happened.
I mean, only I think when you really understand something and you really know
why this happened and what we did
can you prevent it from happening again.
How do you keep alive something as important
as the interment experience and the lessons that we learned from it?
Don't hesitate, but get out and speak up your feelings
and let them know that you want justice.
And so we take the mistakes of history
and determine for ourselves that in our lifetime
it will happen never again.