About the NJAHS Digital Archives
Bear Witness: Camp Oral History Digital Collections
Current Project
Bear Witness is a digital collections collaborative preservation project of the National Japanese American Historical Society, Inc. (NJAHS) and the University of San Francisco (USF) that provides first time access to 181 oral history interviews from the NJAHS permanent collection. The selection includes the stories of Japanese Americans who were evicted from their homes and imprisoned at the Japanese American confinement sites and Japanese Americans who fought in the U.S. Army during WII. Full transcripts will be created, digitized, and / or edited and made available by request, while summaries, keywords, quotes, and indexes for each interview will be available from the USF Gleeson Library Digital Collections. Each full interview will be digitized from the original recording media and excerpts from select interviews will be made available online. With this project, NJAHS and USF will preserve and amplify the voices of those who lived through the Japanese American experience before, during, and after WWII.
Project Status: Completed!
181 new oral history interview excerpts have been added to the online database. View 48 video excerpts here.
We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the following individuals and institutions in creating this website:
USF 2018 Undergraduate Interns:
Benjamin Nhuch Aubrey Welchelberger-Muniz
USF Museum Studies Program Class of 2019:
Megan Udell
NJAHS 2019 Summer Interns:
Catherine Sakurai Hiro Edeza
NJAHS 2020 Summer Interns:
Yi-Shen Loo Charlene Tonai
Connor Nakamura
2019 Oral History Interviews:
Claudia Katayanagi – Biosphere Productions
Specialized Videotape Digitization:
Calvin Roberts – Granma Productions
From the Camps they Served: Nisei Soldier Digital Archives
From the Camps They Served is a digital collections collaborative preservation project of the National Japanese American Historical Society, Inc. (NJAHS) and the University of San Francisco (USF) that provides for the first time online public access for 300 rare objects and documents from Japanese Americans who served in the US Army from WWII Japanese American confinement sites. Selection of at least 300 items will be made from the NJAHS permanent collection, which includes objects from the Nisei military personnel of the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion and the Military Intelligence Service, including the Women’s Army Corps that tell a story of their unique experience dealing with the exclusion, incarceration and their military service to their country. From the private collections of Nisei soldiers, this project showcases such items as their diaries, correspondence letters, v-mail to and from family members, specially – sized military uniforms, camp – made good luck mementos, blue star emblems, private photographs, scrapbooks and albums from camp to overseas, drawings, and memorabilia that represent their perspectives as Nisei soldiers from behind barbed wire. Other featured objects such as dog tags, patches, medals, daily reports, POW tags, banners, flags shall illustrate their unique encounters with their combatants of Japanese, German and Italian descent, as well as their special relationships as liberators of the French, Filipino and Okinawan people.
Project Status: Completed!
277 new entries into the online database representing 304 WWII artifacts have been uploaded.
We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the following individuals and institutions in creating this website:
USF Museum Studies Program Class of 2018:
Catherine Armstrong Jamie Blankenship
Jennifer Cha Michael Reyes
USF Museum Studies Program Class of 2019:
Lauren Dillon
USF Museum Studies Program Class of 2020:
Chloe Clouse Sarah Wehlage
NJAHS Interns:
Nathaniel Yu
