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
Citizens Behind Barbed Wire
A page from a scrapbook by Kiku and Mary Masaoka, who were incarcerated in Santa Anita, California and Jerome, Arkansas. Despite administrative attempts to make life as normal as possible, inmates never forgot they were being held behind barbed wire.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Image
Waiting For the Mess Hall
Photographed by Dorothea Lange, this image shows the long lines inmates had to wait in before entering the mess hall at Manzanar, July 1942. Many recounted the many lines they had to endure as part of camp life
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Image
Camp Maintenance
Concentration camps were run as if they were small towns. Many incarcerees staffed these positions, receiving one-tenth of what white WRA staffers were paid for similar work. This image shows the stark reality for Heart Mountain incarcerees in Wyoming.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Image
Miné Okubo’s Community Toilets at the Tanforan Assembly Center
Nisei artist Miné Okubo documented her family’s incarceration in drawings that were later published as a book titled Citizen 13660 (1946). This image illustrates the lack of privacy in communal bathrooms at the Tanforan Assembly Center, 1942.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Image
Forcibly Removed Japanese Americans Bound for Manzanar
Thousands of Japanese Americans were forced from their homes, uncertain of their futures. In this image, they gathered at Old Union Station in downtown Los Angeles in May 1942, where they were transported to Manzanar concentration camp in central California.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Image
Kilauea Military Detention Camp by George Hoshida
A young Issei artist and leader in the Hilo, Hawaiʻi, Japanese American community, George Hoshida documented his internment following his arrest and detention in Kilauea Military Detention Camp, 1942
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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Video
Interview with Kay Uno Kaneko, Hana Shepard, and Mae Matsuzaki
By December 10, nearly 1,300 such men had been detained, with another 1,000 arrested by February 1942. George Uno was among them. Interviewed by filmmaker, Loni Ding, Hana Uno Shepard recalls the arrest and internment of her father.
Featured in:
Japanese Americans, Module 3
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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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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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Image
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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Image
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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Image
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
