Barbara Takei

It was not until her mother died that Satsuki Ina came to understand the historic event that deeply affected her family—a part of World War II history that has been long suppressed within the Japanese American community.

“My mother had it all set up for me when she left me that box,” Satsuki Ina said of the small metal box she found at her deceased mother’s home. “I was stunned by what she described.”

From that box emerged the little-known story of Japanese American resistance to their wartime II incarceration as told in Ina’s new film, From ...

A remarkable journey began as a handful of Nisei survivors gathered on the wind-swept plains of Bismarck, North Dakota, at the site of what was once Ft. Lincoln, a World War II-era Department of Justice prison.

What made this weekend so memorable was that the program, hosted by Native Americans, was one of those welcome occasions where a part of history that is little known within the Japanese American community was acknowledged and validated.

These former inmates at Tule Lake Segregation Center—who renounced their citizenship and were sent to the DOJ internment camp in Bismarck, ND—participated in an ...

Referred to as the camp for “troublemakers” and “bad” and “disloyal” people, Tule Lake’s reputation still carries stigma for those who were incarcerated there. The stigma remains so pervasive that most Nisei who refused to answer “yes” to the so-called “loyalty questionnaire” questions 27 and 28 some 65 years ago don’t like talking about what one Nisei referred to as Tule Lake’s “dirty linen.”

On December 5, 2008, President George W. Bush acted to change all that, designating the Tule Lake Segregation Center as a National Monument. The Monument designation transformed the so-called “dirty linen” into a ...

A recent film on Santa Fe, Prisoners and Patriots: The Untold Story of Japanese Internment in Santa Fe, according to the film’s writer/director/producer Neil H. Simon, is the first film to tell the story of the WWII era internment camp run by the Department of Justice in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The film (which was shown at Day of Remembrance events in Northern California and scheduled at JANM in April) assembles a rich collage of material related to Santa Fe’s history as a Department of Justice (DOJ) internment camp where so-called “enemy aliens” of Japanese descent ...

Time of Remembrance observances are coming up in another few weeks, a good time to do something to assure, “never again.”

This year, in the context of the National Defense Authorization Act that provides for indefinite military detention of the accused, we need to be more vigilant than ever, especially with two companion pieces of legislation introduced this session of Congress. The two bills, S 1698 and HR 3166, resurrect the specter of the little-known government denationalization and deportation program that the Department of Justice used to strip nearly 6,000 Americans of their U.S. citizenship while they were ...