America’s Cultural Treasures: This text is a part of a sequence sponsored by the Ford Basis highlighting the work of museums and organizations which have made a major 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 Mission, 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 contains a historic and important constituency within the space of downtown Los Angeles often known as Little Tokyo or J-town. It was based on the flip of the twentieth century and is residence 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 Struggle 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. Licensed by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt two months after the Pearl Harbor assault, the order empowered regional army commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” This virtually allowed the elimination 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 (photograph by Paloma Dooley)
For a lot of of these being forcibly relocated from Little Tokyo, the unique web site 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 pressured 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 might 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 residence.
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 Might 1992 was additionally the identical day a jury acquitted 4 Los Angeles Police Division officers charged with utilizing extreme power 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 (photograph by Paloma Dooley)
The Japanese American Nationwide Museum has grow to be a touchstone for telling this story in all its harrowing and triumphant particulars, notably 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 Frequent Floor: The Coronary heart of Group, a chronological exhibition that profoundly retold Japanese-American historical past via private accounts, art work installations, uncommon artifacts, images, textiles, residence film footage, and scale fashions. Although Frequent Floor closed in January because the museum undergoes renovations till late 2026, one notably poignant facet 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 totally 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 with out a ceiling or cowl because of fireplace 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 similar 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 Staff, 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 dimension and size of service within the historical past of the US army. 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 Frequent Floor: The Coronary heart of Group on the Japanese American Nationwide Museum (photograph by Doug Mukai)
Nonetheless, on the opposite aspect of the problem of draft conscription, some younger Japanese Individuals refused to acquiesce to a coercive and arbitrary authorities. In Wyoming, on the similar 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 Struggle Division and the Struggle Relocation Authority that will grow to be often known as the loyalty questionnaire. This survey of incarcerated males contained two notably troublesome questions: one which requested respondents whether or not they have been keen to serve on fight obligation 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. Finally 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 remainder 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 deal with 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 necessary 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 discovered find out how to assist guests and patrons metabolize this guilt by totally 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 often known as the “Children’s Courtyard,” the place the names of youngsters whose mother and father 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 gaggle of 5 younger girls from Los Angeles, California, posing with arms 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 challenge — which was on show from October 11, 2022, via December 1, 2024 — additionally demonstrated how integral naming and remembrance are to the work of the museum. At the moment touring throughout america, the challenge seeks to comprehensively record each particular person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated within the World Struggle II camps, instigated and led by Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams, director of the USC Shinso Ito Heart for Japanese Religions and Tradition. On the middle of the three-part challenge is a monument within the type of a guide referred to as the Ireichō. In a partitioned area on JANM’s floor ground, Karen Kano, the challenge’s information and one of many employees who spent hundreds of hours transcribing, researching, and modifying the names, confirmed guests right into a sort of shrine. Three deep blue partitions imbued the area with a way of calm. Every of the 75 focus camps was marked by a sotoba, a picket 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 identify of a member of the family or somebody unknown to them. The small circle is supposed to represent a visitation stone, the sort left by somebody paying a name at a gravesite to recollect and honor the deceased. Kano explains the that 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 strange, particular person lives suffuses the museum’s exhibition program and gathering practices. In accordance with Hayashi, the museum is “the largest repository of Japanese-American material, culture, and archives in the world,” largely because 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 akin to Don’t Fence Me In: Coming of Age in America’s Focus Camps (2023), Frequent Floor, and ongoing on-line exhibits together with Tanaka Photograph Studio and Henry Sugimoto’s Inventive Evolution. JANM was among the many first museums within the US to supply digital applications in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now enjoys near one million 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 typically makes use of widespread supplies (akin to barracks timber) to convey narrative. Lynn Yamasaki, the museum’s director of Schooling, 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 (photograph by Doug Mukai)
Guests noticed this play out in Frequent Floor, the place the story moved via the post-war narrative arc of Jimmy Carter appointing the Fee on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to research the camps, the fee’s conclusion that the incarceration was the product of racism, and Ronald Reagan’s signing into regulation 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 standard tradition, the emphasis just isn’t on explicit heroes however moderately 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 particular ethnic neighborhood as key to its success, via 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 way of one of many first applications they developed, “Finding Family Stories,” they’ve joined arms 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 regarded for artists and writers inside companion communities to guide the challenge, discovering widespread themes in conditions that relate to familial complexity, akin to staged household portraits, coping with an absent mother or father, and immigrant colonial historical past. The ensuing exhibits have been all exhibited on the taking part establishments across the similar time.
Individuals holding sotoba in the course of the Ireichō procession in entrance of the JANM on September 24, 2022 (photograph 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 challenge supervisor of the core exhibition Within the Future We Name Now, including that JANM needs 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 challenge is An American Vocabulary: Phrases to Motion, an ongoing, collaborative challenge 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 concern 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 way of its applications and partnerships, the Japanese American Nationwide Museum has configured itself to additionally serve a wider collective, a set of disparate teams linked by means of cultural values, comparable and adjoining experiences, and political identities.
The Nationwide Heart for the Preservation of Democracy (Democracy Heart) acts as an important method for JANM to collaborate and join with different organizations. Created in 2005 and situated throughout the plaza from the Pavilion, its indispensable characteristic 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 area to carry occasions. For instance, the middle has labored with a gaggle referred to as entertwine that levels a yearly 24-hour playwriting contest, via 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 via a elementary 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 might be redeemed as a result of the individuals who belong to this museum not solely join over a shared previous, but additionally fervently consider within the beliefs that this nation has lengthy touted but failed to satisfy. Can a nation of disparate individuals uncover methods to carry arms and discover widespread 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 seek 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.”
This text is licensed beneath a Artistic Commons Attribution 4.0 Worldwide license.
