Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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Image
Japanese Immigrants at Angel Island
About 85,000 Japanese immigrants—roughly one-third of the total from Japan—arrived via Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, including many picture brides.” This image shows the arrival, likely Japanese picture brides, onto Angel Island in the 1910s.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Image
Japanese American Gardeners in Los Angeles
Most Japanese Americans were farmers or worked in occupations tied to agriculture. As such, residential landscape gardening became one of the most popular urban occupations for Japanese Americans men. This image shows Japanese American gardens in Los Angeles, 1928.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Video
K.M. Akiyama Co. in Little Tokyo
Japanese American businesses flourished in Little Tokyos up and down the West Coast in the 1930s. This is footage of K.M. Akiyama Co in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Japanese Americans in the American Legion Parade
Japanese Americans take part in an American Legion parade in Los Angeles, ca. late 1930s. As international tensions rose in the 1930s, many Japanese Americans sought to highlight both their American patriotism and their pride in their Japanese heritage.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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1939 Wedding Portrait
Many aspects of Japanese American culture such as this 1939 Buddhist wedding mixed traditional Japanese and Western elements. In this image taken in 1939, notice the groom’s tuxedo while the woman dons a kimono, embracing both cultures.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Japanese Family Picnic
The uptick of marriages among Japanese immigrants in the 1910s led to a baby boom. By the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese American family life flourished.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Video
Mary Hirata Interview
Picture bride refers to an early 20th century practice of immigrant workers who would pair brides and grooms by photographs. Women would then join her new husband. Mary Hirata recalls her mother’s experience as a picture bride.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Opening of the Japanese Hospital of Los Angeles
Japanese immigrant doctors successfully challenged alien land laws in the California Supreme Court that initially prevented them from building the hospital. In 1929, they celebrated the opening of the Japanese Hospital of Los Angeles.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Image
Japanese American Flower Growers
Both vegetables and flowers were popular crops for Japanese American farmers in California and the West before World War II. This image shows Japanese American flower growers in Compton, California.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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First Fishing Outing of the Nanka Fishing Club
Fishing was a popular job or hobby for Japanese immigrants as many had grown up with fishing in their home country. This image shows the first fishing outing of the Nanka Fishing Club in the early 1920s.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Sugar Cane Plantation Laborers
Many women traveled to Hawaiʻi for better lives, but once on the islands, they worked grueling hours on sugar cane plantations. As soon as couples and families could, they would leave for the mainland for better opportunities.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Text
Plantation Labor Contract
Japanese laborers who worked on Hawaiian sugar plantations typically signed labor contracts like the Ouchi labor contract of 1899 which specified wages and work expectations. Trapped by these contracts, some tried to escape while others organized.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 2
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Kito Family and Their Fugetsu-Do Shop
Brian, Roy, Korey, and Tomoko Kito, three generations of the Kito family, stand outside of Fugetsu-Do, their Japanese sweet shop on East First Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, c. 2002.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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The Signing of HR 442, The Civil Liberties Act of 1988
After over 40 years, President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law, the culmination of the movement for redress and reparations. This included a presidential apology and monetary redress of $20,000 per person for surviving incarcerees
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Issei Naturalization Ceremony
Despite the travails of World War II, many Issei opted to become US citizens once the ban on naturalization was lifted in 1952. This photograph captures the excitement during a mass naturalization ceremony for Issei in Seattle, April 14, 1953.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Henry Sugimoto’s Camp Jerome Painting
Artists like Henry Sugimoto, Dick Sata, and Doris Ota Saito documented camp conditions in their art. This painting by Henry Sugimoto depicts Jerome, Arkansas camp, showcasing the contradiction between gardens created by inmates and the barracks, guard towers, and American flag in the background.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Concentration Camp Basketball
Sports and other recreational activities played an important role in making concentration camp life bearable for the incarcerated population. To play, courts, fields, and stages all had to be built by Japanese Americans themselves. This game takes place at Manzanar.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Concentration Camp Mess Hall
Japanese Americans were housed in military style barracks with communal bathroom and meal facilities. Because much of concentration camp life was communal, leading everyone to be with friends rather than family, this weakened their own immediate family bonds. Photographed by Dorothea Lange, this photo was captured in Manzanar, CA, July 1942.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Temporary Detention Centers and War Relocation Authority Camps Map
A total of about 110,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to ten governmental concentration camps located in isolated areas of the country. By contrast, Japanese Americans from Hawaiʻi were not forcibly removed, but were surveillanced.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
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Video
Forced Removal from Guadalupe, California
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. There were no charges, no trials, no findings of guilt. This rare footage shows Japanese Americans being transported to Tulare Assembly Center from Guadalupe, CA.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 1
