Producer Rory Banyard’s film, “Betrayed: Surviving An American Concentration Camp,” explores the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II. The Nichi Bei Foundation will screen the film online during its 11th annual Films of Remembrance Saturday, Feb. 26 at 2 p.m. PST. The film may be viewed through […]
Minidoka survivors on U.S. government’s violation of Americans’ civil rights
February 17, 2022 by Leave a Comment
A classroom favorite and must-have for families
January 1, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Hello Maggie! Revised 2nd Edition By Shigeru Yabu, illustrated by Willie Ito (Camarillo, Calif.: Yabitoon Books, 2021, 42 pp., $19.95, paperback) “Hello Maggie!” is the true childhood story of author Shig Yabu and his best friend, a magpie named Maggie. It is also a chronicle of Shig and his family’s forced removal from their life […]
How Hawai‘i avoided incarcerating Japanese Americans en masse
January 1, 2022 by Leave a Comment
INCLUSION: HOW HAWAI‘I PROTECTED JAPANESE AMERICANS FROM MASS INTERNMENT, TRANSFORMED ITSELF, AND CHANGED AMERICA By Tom Coffman (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021, 384 pp., $24.99, paperback) Tom Coffman is a prolific scholar, journalist and filmmaker whose books “Nation Within” and “The Island Edge of America: A Political History of Hawai‘i” have shaped scholarly discourse […]
THE GREAT UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN GREAT: ‘By Order of the President’ turns 20
August 19, 2021 by Leave a Comment
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my book “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans.†“By Order†was my first book. It introduced me to the public as a specialist in the history of Japanese American wartime confinement, and helped launch my career as both scholar […]
Graphic novel documents acts of resistance
July 22, 2021 by Leave a Comment
WE HEREBY REFUSE: JAPANESE AMERICAN RESISTANCE TO WARTIME INCARCERATION By Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, illustrated by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki (Seattle: Chin Music Press/ Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, 2021, 160 pp., $19.95, paperback) The graphic novel, “We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration,†focuses on the real life experiences of Jim Akutsu, a Minidoka War Relocation Authority camp draft resister; Mitsuye Endo, a Topaz (Central Utah) WRA inmate who challenged the incarceration through a habeas corpus petition; and Hiroshi Kashiwagi, […]
Minding and mining the gaps of one family’s trauma
July 22, 2021 by Leave a Comment
FORCED OUT: A NIKKEI WOMAN’S SEARCH FOR A HOME IN AMERICA By Judy Y. Kawamoto (Louisville, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 2020, 202 pp., $29.95, hardcover) I immensely enjoyed and was greatly enlightened by Sansei psychotherapist Judy Kawamoto’s singular book. I would classify its genre as a meditative memoir. As she succinctly notes, “psychotherapy is […]
A digestible telling of familiar snippets of JA WWII history
July 22, 2021 by Leave a Comment
FACING THE MOUNTAIN: A TRUE STORY OF JAPANESE AMERICAN HEROES IN WORLD WAR II By Daniel James Brown (New York: Viking Books, 2021, 560 pp., $30, hard cover) Daniel James Brown’s “Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II†recounts the narrative of the Japanese American wartime experience by focusing on the individual histories of Gordon Hirabayashi, Katsugo “Kats†Miho, Fred Shiosaki and Rudy Tokiwa. Hirabayashi famously contested Executive Order 9066 in the courts, […]
Remembering the incarceration: 10th annual Films of Remembrance
March 18, 2021 by Leave a Comment
The Nichi Bei Foundation held its 10th annual Films of Remembrance film series on the wartime incarceration of some 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. While this year’s program largely moved online due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it also included a drive-in screening of “Farewell to Manzanar†at the West Wind […]
Film uncovers little-known story of music in camp by incarcerated Nikkei
February 18, 2020 by Leave a Comment
“For Joy,†a film by Julian Saporiti and the No-No Boy project, tells the little-known story of a Nikkei teenager who sang with a jazz band formed in the World War II concentration camp for Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain, Wyo. The story also sheds light on a hidden history — the music played during […]
Japanese American concentration camp survivors call for closure of immigrant detention centers on 78th anniversary of wartime incarceration
February 13, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Members of San Francisco’s Japanese American community on Feb. 7 spoke about their experiences being incarcerated in camps during World War II, while standing in solidarity with present-day immigrants being detained at the U.S.-Mexico border. Speaking at the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco’s Japantown to commemorate the incarceration of Japanese Americans in […]
More info visit: Digital.Nichibei.org
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