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http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/usnews/ci_20044564
LOS ANGELESBill Shishima shares how he joined the Boy Scouts as a 12-year-old behind the barbed wire of a Japanese American internment camp, or how he had to work on a rabbit farm to earn his keep when his parents couldn't afford to move the family back to California after World War II.
The 81-year-old retired teacher answers the questions of those who askschool groups, news reporters and sometimes his children and 14-year-old granddaughterbut he's never sat down and recorded his life story or that of his now-deceased parents, who lost the family's grocery and hotel business when they were sent to Wyoming's Heart Mountain camp.
"They just endured," he said. "My parents never talked about it."
Like many survivors, Shishima is now being asked to write down his memories with thousands of others before they're lost to time.
Seventy years after the U.S. government uprooted more than 110,000 people and shipped them off to remote, military-style camps, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has started a three-year project aimed at recruiting survivors and their descendants to share their stories and photos on a web site poised to become a snapshot of history.
To this day, it is difficult for Japanese Americans to reconcile how the only country they knew, and a democratic one, could incarcerate them because of their ancestry. Many say it is vital to remember the order that forced people from their homes as the country waged war with Japan to prevent others in America from ever suffering the same fate.
More at link...Very important to have this history recorded for posterity so they will make sure it does not happen again...
LOS ANGELESBill Shishima shares how he joined the Boy Scouts as a 12-year-old behind the barbed wire of a Japanese American internment camp, or how he had to work on a rabbit farm to earn his keep when his parents couldn't afford to move the family back to California after World War II.
The 81-year-old retired teacher answers the questions of those who askschool groups, news reporters and sometimes his children and 14-year-old granddaughterbut he's never sat down and recorded his life story or that of his now-deceased parents, who lost the family's grocery and hotel business when they were sent to Wyoming's Heart Mountain camp.
"They just endured," he said. "My parents never talked about it."
Like many survivors, Shishima is now being asked to write down his memories with thousands of others before they're lost to time.
Seventy years after the U.S. government uprooted more than 110,000 people and shipped them off to remote, military-style camps, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has started a three-year project aimed at recruiting survivors and their descendants to share their stories and photos on a web site poised to become a snapshot of history.
To this day, it is difficult for Japanese Americans to reconcile how the only country they knew, and a democratic one, could incarcerate them because of their ancestry. Many say it is vital to remember the order that forced people from their homes as the country waged war with Japan to prevent others in America from ever suffering the same fate.
More at link...Very important to have this history recorded for posterity so they will make sure it does not happen again...
