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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Nursery School Children Singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Schools in the camps, like this one shown here at Tule Lake, ran the gamut from nursery programs to high schools.
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Laborers at the Tule Lake Agricultural Field
Given wartime food rationing and labor shortages, Japanese Americans, like these Tule Lake inmates, labored in nearby agricultural fields to raise crops to feed themselves.
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Waiting for the Detention Centers
During the spring and summer of 1942, Japanese Americans, like this family in Hayward, California, boarded buses and trains bound for government detention centers. They tied tags with their names and government-assigned family numbers onto their belongings and the clothing they wore.
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Rafu Yossai Gakuen
Japanese American-owned businesses, like this sewing school in Los Angeles’ “Little Tokyo,” clustered in Japantowns on the West Coast.
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Matsuura Company Tailors
Japanese American-owned businesses, like this tailor shop in Los Angeles’ “Little Tokyo,” clustered in Japantowns on the West Coast.
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Yuka and Michi Yasui
Yuka (left) and Michi (right) Yasui, circa 1929, were raised to appreciate their Japanese heritage. Yuka also took tap and ballet lessons. Michi took piano lessons. Both girls performed publicly, even appearing on a Portland radio program, Stars of Tomorrow.
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Japanese Community Hall Christmas pageant in Hood River, Oregon
Christmas pageant inside the Hood River Japanese Community Hall, circa 1931.
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Terminal Island Cannery Workers
Japanese American women leaving work at a fish cannery on Terminal Island. Issei established fishing communities there and in San Diego and Monterey, California.
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City Market of Los Angeles
Issei farmers and businessmen founded the City Market of Los Angeles in 1909 to sell and promote the produce Japanese farmers raised. Similarly, Issei growers established the Southern California Flower Market in 1912, the first major wholesale flower market in Los Angeles.
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“Japs Bring Frightful Disease”
This photo accompanied a 1905 article in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper that inaccurately characterized Japanese immigrants as disease carriers who were threats to public health.
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Japan to Hood River Valley Map
Map pinpointing the area from which Masuo and Shidzuyo immigrated and also pinpointing the Hood River Valley.
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Masuo Yasui and Friend Katsusaburo Tamura
Masuo Yasui (left) with a friend, circa 1907, outside the Portland Japanese Methodist Mission where Masuo lived at the time.
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Japanese Railroad Workers
Between 1890 and 1907, about 132,000 young Japanese men came to the continental United States. Many, like Masuo Yasui’s father and brothers, and the men pictured here, built the railroads that crossed western and Rocky Mountain states.
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Boys in Front of Manzanar Cemetery Monument
To ensure that this history is not forgotten, Japanese Americans have organized pilgrimages to former campsites, and they have advocated for preservation of some as educational centers. Pictured here are participants in the first pilgrimage, in 1969, to the site of the Manzanar camp.
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Righting a Wrong
Japanese Americans recount the challenges they faced after World War II, and the decades-long fight for reparations.
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National Coalition for Redress and Reparations March
Japanese Americans and their allies across the country held marches and lobbied Congressional representatives for nearly ten years to gain support for redress legislation.
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President Carter Signing Legislation
President Jimmy Carter signing legislation to create a governmental commission to study the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
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Yasui Family Portrait
He married Shidzuyo Miyake, and the couple raised a large family. White farmers in Hood River lobbied state legislators to bar Issei from owning land. The Yasui children were treated differently than their white peers. Owners of their town’s movie theater, for example, made them sit in the balcony.
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Japanese American Responses to Incarceration
Japanese American men recount their reactions to incarceration, the draft, and their experiences fighting in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
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442nd Regimental Combat Team
In early 1943, military recruiters visited the ten WRA camps. About 1,500 Nisei men volunteered. They joined nearly ten thousand Japanese American volunteers from Hawaiʻi to form the 442nd Regimental Combat Team which fought in Europe. Many of its members served and died while their families were imprisoned in the US.
