August 2015 
From Executive Director Tom Ikeda
Individual stories add a powerful depth to our understandings of WWII incarceration. This awareness motivated me and a team of supporters to start conducting oral history interviews nearly twenty years ago and continues to drive Densho's efforts to find new ways to get these stories out to the world.

Today, the Densho Archives include over 800 interviews and 1,600 hours of video. While this is an invaluable resource, we wanted to make it easier for people looking for simple ways to incorporate incarceration stories into a presentation or classroom activity. With this in mind, Densho's Production Manager, Dana Hoshide, who has been working with our oral history archive for over a decade, drew upon her deep knowledge of our content to curate a selection of clips for a new YouTube channel. The 150 clips she selected are organized by topic:  
When I am asked to give public presentations, I customize each talk to fit the audience. One of the ways I do this is by turning to this curated collection of videoclips and selecting an interview that I think will help my audience relate to the history. For example, if I talk to a group of high school students, I like to show clips of Japanese Americans who were in high school when World War II started. Or if I talk with a veteran group, I focus on clips from the 442nd and MIS. I can always find something interesting and hope you'll find these curated video clips as useful as I have. 

Click on a topic and look at the clips. If you like it, share this page with your friends. And please let me know what you think at tom.ikeda@densho.org. Happy summer!
Mayor's Arts Award
We are honored to announce that we have been named a recipient of the 2015 Mayor's Arts Award. The award honors cultural contributions to the community that take a variety of forms, from cultural preservation to increasing the community outreach of the arts. Together with our fellow recipients, Akio Takamori, Seattle JazzED, Robin Wright (of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art), and Daniel Brown (author of The Boys in the Boat), we'll be presented with the award as part of the opening ceremony of Bumbershoot, Seattle’s end-of-the-summer arts celebration, on September 4 at the Seattle Center’s Mural Amphitheatre.
New Partner Collection: Frank C. Hirahara Photographs from the Oregon Nikkei Endowment
We have a new addition to our Digital Repository: The Frank C. Hirahara collection of historical photographs of Japanese American life in post-WWII Portland. Thanks to our partners at the Oregon Nikkei Endowment for their painstaking efforts to digitize, caption, and identify the individuals and places in these photographs. 
 
*Financial assistance for this project was provided by Japanese American Confinement Sites program of the National Park Service and the Oregon Heritage Commission.
Summer Appeal 2015
We're in the midst of our summer fund drive! This is one of the few times each year we ask our community of supporters to make a financial contribution that will allow us to continue the important work of documenting and disseminating stories of Japanese American incarceration. And we need your support now more than ever!

In June we received a grant from the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program of the National Park Service (NPS) to expand our digital encyclopedia and to initiate a new community partnership to link the story of Japanese American incarceration with other social injustices.  But did you know that we are required to raise matching funds before we can begin work on the funded projects?

If you believe we're doing important work here at Densho, please consider making a donation now. And, thanks to the NPS funding, your donations will go three times as far! 

Learn more about options for giving and the exciting incentives we're offering this year.
Japanese Language Website
In addition to launching the new www.densho.org in July, we also unveiled a new Japanese language website. The site uses photographs, oral history interviews, and narrative to bring the story of Japanese American incarceration to Japanese speaking communities around the world.

Take a look and then share with your Japanese-speaking friends and family!
 
*Financial assistance for this project was provided by the United States-Japan Foundation and the Tateuchi Foundation .
Oral History Spotlight
Norm Mineta, former California state representative, witnessed President Reagan's signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. He discusses that experience in this interview from the Densho Archives. Follow the link to watch the video:
 
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