Brian Niiya
In this episode we connect with Brian Niiya, the Content Director of Densho. Brian shares the beginnings of Densho, interviewing and documenting Japanese Americans who were incarcerated following executive Order 9066.
As we are 30 years beyond the start of the project, a lot of the participants are no longer with us. Brian discusses the wealth of stories, photos, and information Densho has been able to archive and disseminate. We also cover how a lot of the participants shared the challenges after the camps closed and they returned to a sometimes hostile, post war environment without a home, or job, or community to help them.
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Guest
Brian Niiya is the content director for Densho, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. His professional life has been dedicated to Japanese American public history, having held various positions with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i that have involved managing collections, curating exhibitions, developing public programs, and producing videos, books, and websites. He has published many articles on Japanese American history in a variety of academic and mainstream publications and is the editor of the online Densho Encyclopedia.
"...we've really made a more conscious effort to draw connections between the past and our story, to things that are going on in the present and to be an advocate, an ally for communities that are suffering some of the same things that we did in 1942."
Credits
Chapters is a multi-part series concerning the history and the lessons of civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices carried out against communities or populations—including civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices that are perpetrated on the basis of an individual’s race, national origin, immigration status, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
This project was made possible with support from Chapman University and The California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library.
Guest: Brian Niiya
Hosts: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by: Past Forward
Transcription
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[00:00:04] Brian Niiya: One thing that I'm struck by, with a number of the interviews of people that we've done that have focused on this immediately post-war period as people were coming back, is that more than one person, and these would be Young Nisei, have literally said that that period was harder than being in camp. That while you were imprisoned in these concentration camps, you were at least sheltered and fed three meals a day, and then all of a sudden you're thrown back into society with nothing having to fend for yourself.
You didn't know where your next meal was coming from. You didn't know where you were going to be sleeping that night. That was a striking thing, that people would feel that way. That with freedom came these difficulties that extended even beyond when they were incarcerated.
[00:00:59] Host: Welcome to the Fourth Installment of the Chapters Podcast Series. I'm your host, Jon-Barrett Ingels. In our Chapter Series, we focus on stories surrounding the exclusion, forced removal, and internment of Japanese Americans, but with all that is happening in our country right now, in this historic moment ripe with the potential for change and growth, we are expanding our scope and amplifying the voices of organizations and individuals who are trying to make a difference, who are standing at the convergence of art, education, and social justice. With this series, we honor those who have struggled and suffered in the past and question, how are we still here? How have we not come any further than this? In this episode, we connect with Brian Niiya, the content director for Densho, a repository of interviews, documents, photos, articles, and other archives of the Japanese Americans incarcerated following executive order 9066.
Why don't we start by giving a little history of the Densho Organization and what exactly the organization does?
[00:02:13] Brian: Okay. Densho started in the mid-1990s, I think '95 or '96, and was started by a couple of recent retirees from Microsoft who were looking for a way to make an impact on the community. They were inspired by a project that Steven Spielberg had started after Schindler's List, the Shoah Project, where he was interviewing Holocaust survivors on film, and realizing that at that point in time that maybe you could do something similar with Japanese Americans who had lived through the World War II incarceration experience. But the technology had changed, so that maybe you could do it for a lot cheaper now with digital video and with the internet as your distribution medium. That was the impetus, and we started doing these interviews a couple of years later, from the late 1990s. You're talking 50-something years after, but still a fair number of people who are still around, and it's just grown from there. Then the natural companion to that is someone that we'd interview would say, "Oh, let me show you a picture of my mom. Oh, this is where we lived." We started to then scan images and documents that were related to those stories, and then started to just scan material that wasn't necessarily related to the interviews but was still related to the subject matter and building an archive of documents and photos and other things. Then it kept growing from there.
I came aboard in around 2010 and started an online encyclopedia just to provide some context. Someone is talking about, "Oh, this is what happened during the loyalty questionnaire episode, and then we were at Manzanar, and then we went to Tule Lake." Just a quick way for users to look up what is Manzanar, what is the loyalty questionnaire, et cetera. That grew on its own and then we then started doing educational materials and then it just kept building from there.
The heart of the project is, I think it's, at some level, still the archive element. We continue to do these oral histories. We continue to scan documents and photos and so forth. In some ways, that's still the heart of what we do. Then I think the other thing that’s added in recent years, we've really made a more conscious effort to draw connections between the past and our story, to things that are going on in the present and to be an advocate, an ally for communities that are suffering some of the same things that we did in 1942.
[00:05:13] Host: There was a partnership or help… Right now currently in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum is the, I'm going to mispronounce this and I apologize, but the Ireichō. Am I saying that correctly?
[00:05:29] Brian: Yes.
[00:05:30] Host: There was work… a lot of that was with help from Densho as well, which is just a list of all the names of everyone who was incarcerated. What an incredible opportunity for families to be able to go and place this stamp next to the name of their relative who was unfortunate to participate in that.
[00:05:55] Brian: We were well-positioned to help out with that because we had actually scanned… Actually, it was more than scanning. Some of the records were actually just on microfilmed documents, so we actually had to have volunteers physically enter names and so on in order to capture some of that data. Then it's one of those projects where 90% or 95% of it is not that difficult to come by, but that last 5% is really, really hard. Duncan Williams over at USC and their whole team did an incredible job in ferreting out those last names that are so difficult to pull out of old archival documents and so forth.
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[00:06:48] Host: You have, at this point, hundreds of interviews?
[00:06:52] Brian: Yes. Almost 1,000, I believe.
[00:06:55] Host: Incredible. We're 85 years after Executive Order 9066. Unfortunately, the majority of the people that Densho was able to connect with are no longer with us.
[00:07:08] Brian: Correct. Yes.
[00:07:09] Host: How important is it that those voices and those stories of survival are preserved and shared?
[00:07:17] Brian: Well, you said it. These people are no longer with us. That's always a question, is how we remember these historical episodes once the generation that has lived through it is no longer with us with this new era of technology and being able to have these interviews. We're not the only one doing it, certainly, but, in general, it'll be interesting to see what happens in terms of how that affects how these episodes, how these historical events are remembered because now even though these people are no longer with us, you just click a button on your computer and you can hear their first 10 memories of it. The technology really opens up, I think, new opportunities to remember those events.
[00:08:14] Host: It's way different than reading someone's words to hear and see someone's face as they're going through these experiences. A lot of people get emotional when they remember the people they've lost or the things that happened.
[00:08:34] Brian: So much for that generation. I knew so many of those people and for so many of them, at some level, they weren't necessarily comfortable in speaking to the public about their experiences and so forth and they were private, but they had such an overwhelming sense of mission to tell the story so that won't happen to anybody else. That overcame all of those hesitations, and they just did it. I have such great gratitude for people who were brave enough to just step forward and just tell their stories. It was great to see.
[00:09:19] Host: Since everything started in the 90s, a lot of them were either young adults or children when they were incarcerated, so they have a different-- I would say that most of them were Nisei or second generation, correct?
[00:09:37] Brian: Correct. Yes. Yes.
“That voice of the Issei generation, the immigrant generation, those who were adults, older adults in particular, it's largely missing.”
[00:09:39] Host: They have a different experience than what their parents-- It was the parents who lost everything, who made those huge sacrifices. No, they're not even sacrifices. They were just taken. I know that there was, from what I've heard, this sense of almost shame from that Nisei generation that they didn't want to talk about it, that they just wanted to go back to their life and continue. It was that second generation and third generation, going on, that felt that need to share the story. Is that correct? Or--
[00:10:23] Brian: Yes and no. First of all, I think because we started when we did in the 90s, and other oral history projects started a little earlier, some in the 70s, some in the 80s, but I think in general, one of the limitations of our collections is exactly as you said, it's largely Nisei, largely people who were young adults or teenagers or children in camp. That voice of the Issei generation, the immigrant generation, those who were adults, older adults in particular, it's largely missing. There are other sources. There are written accounts and diaries and all kinds of other things. It's true that that perspective is missing from oral history collections in general, not just ours.
I would say that, in some ways, that Issei were maybe more open to talking about it in some respects. We just don't have that because they were mostly gone by the time we came around. I think Nisei were the ones that were very reluctant to talk about their stories for many, many years through the 50s, 60s, 70s. It was only in the 80s and 90s through the-- you may be aware, the movement for Redress and reparations that starts in the 1980s. Ultimately, against all odds, it's successful, and a bill has passed, and they receive some monetary reparations, an apology letter. So, many of the Nisei said that that apology just changed so much for them.
The government acknowledging that it was wrong just unleashed a lot of the hesitation. A lot of people at that point felt that, yes, I do want to talk about this and I do want people to know what happened to us. For the Nisei, I think it really shifts depending on when you're talking about it. I think a lot of the same Nisei who refused to talk about it in the 50s or 60s are some of the people that are willingly doing so 30, 40 years later. Those are a lot of the types of people that we're interviewing.
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[00:12:46] Host: One thing that came up a lot in the clips that I watched was this experience, and we don't read a lot about this, but that experience of post-war and post-camp. What you're going back to when you either lost everything or you sold everything for pennies on the dollar, or you hopefully had somebody watch over, but the majority didn't. What is that life? What are they going back to once those gates are open, so to speak?
“It was so bad that the War Relocation Authority, this is the agency that administered the concentration camps, they actually had to start these makeshift housing projects in Los Angeles working in tandem with the federal public housing authority.”
[00:13:27] Brian: That was the focus of this oral history project and others that we've done. It's a period that tends to be neglected in history because so much focuses on the actual, the roundup and what was life like in these camps and the people who left and to go to other parts of the country, to Chicago and New York and so forth. Once the West Coast was opened up again at the beginning of 1945, about half of the Japanese Americans leaving the camps came back to the West Coast. As you mentioned, many of them had little to return to. Their property was gone, their homes were gone. It's a variable experience.
There are some success stories, people who were able to have friends or business associates or whatever look after their property and did have something to return to. Others had all their possessions vandalized. There's just a wide range of responses. I think that we wanted to capture that. Then just how the difficulties, in particular with housing, jobs, too, but housing in particular, because during the war, all of the West Coast cities grew dramatically in population. All these West Coast war industry jobs drew people from all over the country. Japanese Americans are returning to a housing market that's already really bad. It's got all these returning GIs coming back.
They're Japanese, so there's just this restrictive covenant and racism that they face as well. That was one of the key things we wanted to get at is what was the housing situation like for them? It was so bad that the War Relocation Authority, this is the agency that administered the concentration camps, they actually had to start these makeshift housing projects in Los Angeles working in tandem with the federal public housing authority. There are these trailer parks and repurposed military barracks and so forth that were started around Southern California, Burbank and Lomita and other parts of LA.
The fascinating thing to me is in reading some of those accounts and looking at the photos is that they look almost exactly like the camps that they have been released from. Some of the images you look and say, "Wait, that's not Manzanar, that's actually a housing project in Lomita? Interesting.” We really wanted to capture that story. From a practical standpoint, it buys you a few more years. If you have people who are discussing experiences in the late 40s into the early 50s, you have a little more leeway in terms of more people who are alive, who are adults at that time, are around than even five years or eight years or whatever earlier.
Just from a practical purpose, there's more people that we can interview who have memories of that time period.
[00:16:39] Host: How important was this community that was developed before the war, this Japanese American community, but really strengthened together in these camps after. It seems like a lot of the stories were, “we had these friends, or there was someone that got us work, or we were 22 in one apartment”.
[00:17:07] Brian: A lot of stories like that. Sure. You hear a lot of stories of people who were fortunate enough to have been able to retain their homes or whatever, opening it up and having friends and relatives and others live with them and having 10, 15 people living in the same house for a short period of time. It resonates because you read about stories like that today with families in some parts of LA who have to do that just because of the price of housing. Yes, you do have that. Inevitably, there's also the other side, too, of some taking advantage of their co-ethnics. You also hear those kinds of stories of people who exploit the misfortune of others, too.
It's a story that encompasses all different experiences.
“California, Los Angeles, in particular, for decades had many neighborhoods that were restricted, whether officially or unofficially. Many officially had restrictive covenants. These are language written into deeds that if you bought in this neighborhood, you were not allowed to sell to anyone other than a white person.“
[00:18:07] Host: Talk a little more, if you would, about that discrimination that they return to. Specifically here in California, that covenant that you mentioned, just give us a little explanation of what that was and how that affected them.
[00:18:24] Brian: California, Los Angeles, in particular, for decades had many neighborhoods that were restricted, whether officially or unofficially. Many officially had restrictive covenants. These are language written into deeds that if you bought in this neighborhood, you were not allowed to sell to anyone other than a white person. These literally existed. I forget the year now. Those were eventually ruled unconstitutional, but those practices continued into the 1960s. I remember my uncle moved into a neighborhood in Torrance in the 1960s. They were one of the first people of color to move into that neighborhood that was restricted even that far into the future.
Right after the war, Japanese Americans, Jews, African Americans, all were restricted from many neighborhoods and limited to only certain areas, and those areas just became super crowded. The competition for housing in those areas really grew because they were restricted from living in other areas. Then over the next two decades, those restrictions broke down little by little. You hear these stories of a combination of real estate agents and developers and others and civil rights activists who helped to open up different neighborhoods in Pasadena, the South Bay.
These satellite ethnic communities open up as Japanese-Americans and other ethnic groups as well, are able to move out of these restrictive areas out of the Little Tokyos and into the Crenshaw District, into Gardena, into Monterey Park, and so forth. The impact of those movements is still evident today because there are still those ethnic communities in a lot of those places even today.
[00:20:43] Host: There was one article that was listed in your repository that was really fascinating. It was from the Chicago Defender. It was about African American community being evicted from what was previously a Japanese Buddhist temple and it talks about race war, and it really just feels like pitting these groups against each other. These were war they called them war employees, I'm sure they were former soldiers or whatever, who were living in this temple who thought that they had paid for it outright.
Then after the war as Japanese-American, as the incarcerated were returning, and they called it evacuated Japanese-Americans in that article. As they were returning, they were taking back over this temple and that pitting of one marginalized community against the other still continues. Was that fairly common back then?
[00:21:59] Brian: Oh, yes, definitely. What goes unspoken in talking about this conflict between African Americans and Japanese-Americans in the former Little Tokyo. What had happened is that because of the mass removal, those Little Tokyo were empty. As African American war workers came West to work in war industry jobs because those were jobs that were open to African Americans. Many of them were restricted from living in other parts of the city so they settled in Little Tokyo. Little Tokyo during the war becomes known as Bronzeville, becoming an African American community.
Then as you noted, when Japanese Americans start to return to Little Tokyo… I think by and large the groups got along quite well overall considering that there was some conflict inevitably. The whole unspoken subtext of the whole thing is it's because both groups were prevented from living anywhere else. That's the larger context that this is occurring in. You did have some of that take place during that period, right after Japanese-Americans started to return.
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[00:23:27] Host: Let's finish. What are some of the things that you've taken away that you've learned that have moved you or surprised you the most from your work with Densho? I know that your work extends beyond. You've been studying this history for a lot of your life, but through these projects and through these interviews what are some of the key takeaways for you?
[00:23:59] Brian: Boy, that's a tough one. One thing that I'm struck by with a number of the interviews of people that we've done that have focused on this immediately post-war period is when people were coming back, is that more than one person, these would be young Nisei, have literally said that that period was harder than being in camp. That while you were imprisoned in these concentration camps, you were at least sheltered and fed three meals a day. Then all of a sudden, you're thrown back into society with nothing, having to fend for yourself. You didn't know where your next meal was coming from. You didn't know where you were going to be sleeping that night. That was a striking thing that people would feel that way, with freedom came these difficulties that extended even beyond when they were incarcerated.
“...when, in 1945, the war relocation authority announced that the camps would be closed, you had a substantial number of people who refused to leave, who didn't want to leave. They had been reading press accounts about how bad it was on the outside world for Japanese-Americans.”
[00:25:06] Host: I imagine that could be drawn to the parallel of homelessness and vagrancy today.
[00:25:14] Brian: Absolutely. I'm sure you will find former incarcerated people today who might have a similar observation. In concert with that, the fact that when, in 1945, the war relocation authority announced that the camps would be closed, you had a substantial number of people who refused to leave, who didn't want to leave. They had been reading press accounts about how bad it was on the outside world for Japanese-Americans. The first Japanese-Americans leave the camps and come back to the West Coast in early 1945, there was a spate of terrorist incidents, people shooting into houses, arson fires, racist graffiti, all of this stuff that was going on.
People in camp were saying, "I don't want to go back to that." At least here we're protected. You had this weird phenomenon where a lot of people having been in prison now didn't want to leave. They literally had to be forced to leave. At the end, some people were literally physically carried on to trains and sent back to where they had been picked up, which is a strange phenomenon, but when you think about it, you can understand people's reluctance and fears.
[00:26:36] Host: Well, these camps were turned into cities. They had schools, they had newspapers.
[00:26:44] Brian: Many Japanese-Americans, once they were there, really did whatever they could to make the situation as pleasant as possible.
[00:26:58] Host: On this level.
[00:26:59] Brian: There have been exhibits that have shown this incredible furniture that people made out of scrap lumber and objects and these elaborate gardens that people made in these camps. They had established a certain level of comfort that they had within this context of imprisonment.
[00:27:24] Host: Then you're leaving-
[00:27:27] Brian: To uncertainty.
[00:27:28] Host: -to the unknown, which is one of the scariest things for anyone to deal with. I don't know what's happening next.
[00:27:35] Brian: There are many, many other stories too in terms of stuff that I've learned over the years from this. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how much you know, and no matter how much is written and how many-- there've been dozens, hundreds of films and books and articles, but there are entire areas of the story that no one studied, that we still know very little about. I'll have my work cut out from me and many other scholars and researchers as well looking at these other elements that no one's looked at and that might be important.
"Unfortunately, it may just be a fact that we're always going to have to be there to say, 'Hey, no, this is wrong! Look what happened back then.'"
[00:28:15] Host: After everything that's already been cataloged and archived, where do you see the future of Densho?
[00:28:22] Brian: We continue to do interviews because we continue to move our latest projects, while there are still a handful of people who still have memories of the camps, we're moving into people who-- our last interview project was people who were inspired by their families' wartime incarceration to activism any time from the 50s to the present. There have been some really interesting stories that have come out of that. We're going to keep doing interviews, we're going to keep scanning material. I think at some level we're a technology company, so at some level with new technologies, there's just different ways to present the information, different things you can do.
I think we're excited to think about new ways to present this information in new media. I think that's always going to be something that we're interested in. Then, unfortunately, the story is always seemingly relevant because there's always stuff going on. You had mentioned the homelessness crisis and anti-immigrant attitudes and all of this stuff, it all draws parallels to stuff that happened in the 1940s to Japanese-Americans. Unfortunately, it may just be a fact that we're always going to have to be there to say, "Hey, no, this is wrong! Look what happened back then."
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[00:29:58] Host: We want to thank Brian Niiya and everyone at Densho. For more information, visit densho.org. Chapters Podcast was produced by Past Forward and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library. For more information, visit pastforward.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.
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