2022 Grant Project Summaries

Please note: projects are listed by the states of the grant recipients.

California

Recipient: Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA)

Project Title: EXILED: The Real Internment Story
Grant Award: $136,081
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center will support a documentary film, directed and produced by Claudia Katayanagi, to examine the Department of Justice’s internment of Japanese citizens in the United States who were barred by law from pursuing United States citizenship. Interviews with scholars and descendants, artwork by imprisoned Issei men, historic photographs and films, and footage of the sites themselves will contribute to telling the story. The film will also follow families from Mexico and Central America currently seeking asylum in the United States, illuminating similarities and contrasts between the two groups.

Recipient: Internet Archive (San Francisco, CA)

Project Title: Digital Collection of 100 Japanese American Incarceration Films Grant Award: $100,360Site(s): Multiple SitesDescription: The Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest libraries with 1.5 million daily patrons and 70 petabytes of archival materials, will curate, digitize, preserve, and web host free online viewing of 100 films and videos that examine the World War II forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, many of which are presently only available through limited copies recorded on materials near the end of their functionality.

Recipient: Japanese American Citizens League (San Francisco, CA)

Project Title: The League of Dreams
Grant Award: $165,300
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: The Japanese American Citizens League will produce a film, directed by Lane Nishikawa, to chronicle the history of the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization in the United States. The League of Dreams film will be part of a celebration of 100 years of the organization and will share unheard stories and difficult wartime decisions from its work tackling immigration, naturalization, miscegenation, and redress.

Recipient: Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA)

Project Title: Preserving America’s Community Treasures (PACT): The Toyo Miyatake Collection
Grant Award: $327,974
Site(s): Manzanar Incarceration Site, Inyo County, CA
Description: The Japanese American National Museum will collaborate with Toyo Miyatake Studio to evaluate, curate, digitize, catalog, and present on its website all of Miyatake’s Manzanar photographs, a sample of earlier and later images, and accompanying metadata. Through his photography, Miyatake chronicled the vibrant pre-war Japanese American community in Los Angeles, 1942 – 1945 incarceration, and community members’ return home. Although he took a lead in documenting Manzanar with both skill and an insider’s perspective, a majority of his images have never been seen by the public.

Recipient: Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA)

Project Title: Eating Together: Food in Japanese America
Grant Award: $175,903
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: The Japanese American National Museum will develop an exhibit that explores what food was like in Japanese American incarceration facilities—from everyday institutional eating to holiday celebrations. This exhibit will address a subject that is simultaneously one of the more universal human experiences and one of the most emotionally charged anchors of identity and community.

Recipient: Midpeninsula Community Media Center (Palo Alto, CA)

Project Title: 50 Objects/Stories: The Japanese American Incarceration
Grant Award: $72,892
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Midpeninsula Community Media Center will add twenty-five more objects to their web-based history project to unveil personal stories of World War II incarceration through artifacts, ranging from a gold pocket watch to a child’s doll to a rediscovered monument. This second phase of their project will include five short videos by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Emiko Omori and live-streaming interviews with an incarceration survivor about one of the objects.

Recipient: National Japanese American Historical Society (San Francisco, CA)

Project Title: Musicmakers: Bands Behind Barbed Wire
Grant Award: $190,616
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: National Japanese American Historical Society, Inc. (NJAHS) will examine how American jazz inspired creative expressions during World War II confinement. An educational and interactive presentation, exhibition, and teacher professional development will highlight how camp dance bands became a means of protest and survival among young Japanese Americans as they forged cultural identity in and out of incarceration.

Recipient: Poston Community Alliance (Pleasant Hill, CA)

Project Title: Restoration of the Poston Elementary School Site I Library – Phase II
Grant Award: $170,760
Site(s): Poston Incarceration Site, La Paz County, AZ
Description: The Poston Community Alliance will continue their efforts to restore a historic structure that once served as the Poston Elementary School Site I library. Located on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, the historic structure is in dire need of stabilization and protection from the elements. The remaining adobe elementary school buildings are not only unique to Poston, but also rare, as very few similar structures remain at any of the ten incarceration sites built by the U.S. government to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. Previous JACS funding allowed for structural stabilization, demolition of later walls, and construction plans for restoration, but pandemic shortages and shelter-in-place measures delayed and increased costs of construction.

Recipient: Tides Center, National Veterans Network (San Francisco, CA)

Project Title: What Was Life Like in the Camp: Building Educator Capacity for Elementary andMiddle Schools
Grant Award: $185,860
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Tides Center’s National Veterans Network will host a teacher training institute to instruct teachers, both in-person and virtually, on curricula to teach elementary and middle school students about the history of Japanese American World War II incarceration and the Nisei soldiers who volunteered for military service while their families remained incarcerated behind barbed wire. The three-day Institute will be held at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Through these efforts, more than 2,400 students will learn about this history, with the virtual component reaching even more students nationwide.

Recipient: University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)

Project Title: Ireizo: A Virtual Names Monument to Japanese American WWII Incarcerees
Grant Award: $425,447
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: University of Southern California will develop a web-based memorial honoring the names of over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry who experienced incarceration during World War II in various confinement sites in the United States. Research and analysis will result in a comprehensive listing for a website created by the award-winning design firm Spoon+Fork, which will link each name to additional information from the Densho Digital Repository and provide opportunities for the inclusion of crowd-sourced family photographs and audio recordings of the names.

Recipient: Vigilant Love (Los Angeles, CA)

Project Title: Solidarity Arts Fellowship
Grant Award: $141,986
Site(s): Manzanar Incarceration Site, Inyo County, CA
Description: Vigilant Love will offer a fellowship for twelve to sixteen American Muslim and Japanese American youth from Southern California to visit the Manzanar National Historic Site to reflect on personal identity, community history, and the importance of building solidarity. The students will also use the arts to contextualize, preserve, and share the experience with their greater communities, including some with minimal knowledge of Japanese American incarceration.

Recipient: Visual Communications (Los Angeles, CA)

Project Title: Temporary Detention: A Guide to the “Assembly Centers”
Grant Award: $99,061
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Visual Communications will create a robust, interactive, multimedia website that focuses on the fifteen “assembly centers” and two “reception centers” established by the Wartime Civil Control Administration, a division of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command. Present-day photos and videos, interactive maps, and new and existing oral history recordings will provide context for the sites, the majority of which were demolished or turned back to uses in place prior to World War II.

Hawaii

Recipient: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI)

Project Title: Starting Fresh: Gathering Primary Sources to Improve the JCCH Hawaii Internee Directory
Grant Award: $63,596
Site(s): Honouliuli Internment Camp, Honolulu County, HI
Description: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii will expand and enrich their online directory of Japanese American internees from Hawaii. Expanded material will come from the internee case files and Honouliuli Internment Camp weekly reports at the National Archives, which will be scanned and examined for specific information such as arrival and departure dates, biographical details, and other materials to better contextualize each person’s incarceration experience.

Illinois

Recipient: Full Spectrum Features NFP (Chicago, IL)

Project Title: Reckoning with Redress: Reflecting Community Memories
Grant Award: $471,606
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Full Spectrum Features will produce a short narrative film and K – 12 curricula focused on the Chicago Japanese American community’s role in the redress movement and the 1981 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings at Northeastern Illinois University. The film also will highlight lessons for current movements of racial justice and healing.

Massachusetts

Recipient: Center for Independent Documentary (Boston, MA)

Project Title: In Her Name
Grant Award: $297,472
Site(s): Tanforan Incarceration Site, San Mateo County, CA; Topaz Incarceration Site, Millard County, UT; and Tule Lake Incarceration Site, Modoc County, CA
Description: The Center for Independent Documentary will produce and distribute a documentary film and accompanying curriculum and conversation guide. The director’s grandmother and namesake, Keiko Elizabeth Suda, was one of a small group of adults who repatriated to Japan from Tule Lake while refusing to renounce their United States citizenship. The film will trace the reverberations of Suda’s untimely death through three generations while striving to motivate audience members to begin healing conversations in their own families.

Washington

Recipient: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association (Bainbridge Island, WA)

Project Title: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Visitor Center
Grant Award: $153,952
Site(s): Bainbridge Island/Eagledale Ferry Dock, Kitsap County, WA
Description: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association will develop plans for the construction of a visitor center at the site, one of the first communities where Japanese Americans were removed from their homes during World War II and put on a ferry to Seattle, beginning their forced removal to confinement sites. Previous JACS grants have supported the construction of a story wall and departure deck at the site. The visitor center is the third element the Association has aspired to complete within the lifetime of some of the survivors of the incarceration experience.

Recipient: Northwest Film Forum (Seattle, WA)

Project Title: Hybrid Jerome / Rohwer Pilgrimage
Grant Award: $60,557
Site(s): Jerome Incarceration Site, Chicot and Drew Counties, AR and Rohwer Incarceration Site, Desha County, AR
Description: Northwest Film Forum and Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages will host an in-person and virtual pilgrimage to the Jerome and Rohwer sites in Arkansas to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the openings of the Jerome and Rohwer camps while providing a space for elders to share their stories and an opportunity for younger generations to learn and participate. This hybrid event will provide opportunities for broad participation through in-person activities in McGehee, Arkansas and virtual activities. Programming will include panel and small-group discussions and oral history and artifact workshops.

Recipient: Northwest Film Forum (Seattle, WA)

Project Title: Tadaima 2023
Grant Award: $125,000
Site(s): Multiple Sites
Description: Northwest Film Forum will collaborate with Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages to produce Tadaima 2023, a month-long virtual pilgrimage with educational videos, small-group discussions, and live-streamed panels. Programming will facilitate connections related to Japanese American incarceration as well as identities such as Shin-Nikkei, Ryukyuan, Ainu, Sansei, Yonsei, and LGBTQ+. Recordings will be available on the Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages YouTube channel and website. The California Genealogical Society will also consult with participants interested in family history.

Wyoming

Recipient: Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (Powell, WY)

Project Title: Hello Maggie: Animated Short
Grant Award: $40,577
Site(s): Heart Mountain Incarceration Site, Park County, WY
Description: Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation will produce an animated short featuring author Shig Yabu, incarcerated at Heart Mountain and illustrator Willie Ito, incarcerated at Topaz. Yabu and Ito are co-creators of a picture book that tells the story of Shig and his constant camp companion, a magpie named Maggie. The Nemo Academy of Digital Arts in Florence, Italy, students at Sheridan College in Toronto, Canada, and an international team of animators will work with Ito to realize his dream to turn the book into an animated short using modern technology and classic hand drawings. The film and accompanying elementary curriculum will be available to the public following its premiere at the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage.