Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations

10. The Regenerations Project: A Comparative Collaboration in Community Oral History

THE REGENERATIONS PROJECT 131 10 10 The REgenerations Project Darcie C. Iki and Arthur A. Hansen THE REGENERATIONS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: Rebuilding Japanese American Families , Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era was initiated in 1997 by the Japanese American National Museum (National Museum) and funded largely by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. Inspired by a commitment to document Japanese American history beyond the World War II incarceration experience, this three-year collaborative, comparative, and community-based audio /video oral history project explored Japanese Americans’ struggle to rebuild their shattered lives during the period 1942 to 1965. The project focused on four Nikkei communities in the United States. Three of the sites (Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose) were cities in the prewar mainland population center of Japanese America—California. Because all of this Pacific Coast state eventually fell within the theater of war as declared by the Western Defense Command in the wake of Pearl Harbor, it was not open to resettlement by Japanese Americans until 1945. The remaining project study site was the midwestern metropolis Chicago, Illinois. Located in the so-called free zone, it atA COMPARATIVE COLLABORATION IN COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY DARCIE C. IKI AND ARTHUR A. HANSEN 132 tracted 30,000 Nikkei wartime residents and gained the reputation, which it retained into the early postwar years, as Japanese America’s provisional capital. A substantial number of those who resettled in Chicago during the war came originally from Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, whereas many Chicago resettlers later became secondary resettlers in one or more of the three California cities covered by the REgenerations Oral History Project. It could be maintained that the project’s choice of the four study sites, however financially and pragmatically desirable and cognitively defensible, was less than fortuitous. Since Los Angeles was the demographic, economic, and institutional stronghold of the prewar Japanese American mainland community, it was imperative that it be one of the targeted places to assay the phenomenon of resettlement. Another compelling study site selection was Chicago, not only because its Japanese American community was chiefly a creation of resettlement but also because the city contained the country’s largest concentration of wartime and immediate postwar Nikkei residents. However, the analytical rationale for the choice of San Diego and San Jose, two medium-sized California cities with fairly substantial and comparable Japanese American populations, was less clear. Justification could perhaps be made that Denver and Salt Lake City would have been even better study site choices than either San Diego or San Jose. Both of these intermountain western cities had a sizable enough prewar Japanese American presence to support a vernacular press with a fledgling English-language section. More important, these two cities could boast together of having provided a refuge for the bulk of the 6,000 firstwave Japanese American resettlers who, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, “voluntarily evacuated” from the West Coast defense zones during the brief window in early 1942 when the U.S. government sanctioned such migration. Moreover, each city’s wartime Nikkei population and community infrastructure were greatly augmented when the War Relocation Authority, in the closing months of 1942, began in earnest to implement its policy of relocating the Nikkei detained in its ten concentration camps (a number of which were proximate to either or both Salt Lake City and Denver). Plausible grounds also existed for selecting a variety of alternative study sites for the REgenerations Project. Seattle was a non-California West Coast city with a large prewar Japanese American community; San Francisco was Japanese America’s prewar cultural and intellectual capital, and New York was an urban mecca for prewar Nikkei avant-garde artists and writers, along with enterprising merchants and political radicals. Obviously, the site selection process for this project, as for similar comparative ones, defied resolution by a “magic bullet.” In hindsight, the REgenerations Project could have benefited from a more rigorous collaborative discussion by consulting subject specialists to determine just what Nikkei communities the project should study and precisely why. THE REGENERATIONS PROJECT 133 THE PARTNERSHIP The National Museum’s programs, as this volume attests, are driven by a philosophy that encourages collaboration and community involvement.The REgenerations Oral History Project was no exception. In 1996 the National Museum identified three partnering organizations to participate in the collaboration: the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, the Japanese American Historical Society of San...