Toshio Mori was an American author, best known for being one of the earliest Japanese–American writers to publish a book of fiction. He participated in drawing the UFO Robo Grendizer, the Japanese series TV in the years 1975–1977.
Yoshiko Uchida was an award-winning Japanese American writer of children's books based on aspects of Japanese and Japanese American history and culture. A series of books, starting with Journey to Topaz (1971) take place during the era of the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. She also authored an adult memoir centering on her and her family's wartime incarceration, a young adult version her life story, and a novel centering on a Japanese American family.
The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp that housed Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945.
The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II is a National Park Service site to commemorate the contributions of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and their parents who patriotically supported the United States despite unjust treatment during World War II.
The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American concentration camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942, until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California. Among the inmates, the notation "朗和" was sometimes applied. The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Lieutenant-Colonel Tatsuji Suga of the Imperial Japanese Army was the commander of all prisoner-of-war (POW) and civilian internment camps in Borneo, during World War II. A war criminal, Suga died by suicide five days after being taken prisoner by Australian forces in September 1945.
American Pastime is a 2007 fictional film set in the Topaz War Relocation Center, a Utah prison camp which held thousands of people during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent a year in an internment camp. He nevertheless emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene and as an influential educator, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly twenty years and acting as founding director of the art school at the Topaz internment camp. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.
Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.
Miné Okubo was an American artist and writer. She is best known for her book Citizen 13660, a collection of 198 drawings and accompanying text chronicling her experiences in Japanese American internment camps during World War II.
Tsuyako "Sox" Kitashima was a Japanese-American activist noted for her role in seeking reparations for Japanese American internment by the United States government during World War II, particularly as investigated by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s.
Clara Estelle Breed was an American librarian remembered chiefly for her support for Japanese American children during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many residents of California who were of Japanese descent were moved to remote Japanese American internment camps where they stayed until the end of the war. Breed kept in communication with many of the children who were sent to the camps, sending reading materials and visiting them regularly.
Mitsuye "Maureen" Endo Tsutsumi was an American woman of Japanese descent who was placed in an internment camp during World War II. Endo filed a writ of habeas corpus that ultimately led to a United States Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was a Japanese American political activist who played a major role in the Japanese American redress movement. She was the lead researcher of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a bipartisan federal committee appointed by Congress in 1980 to review the causes and effects of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. As a young woman, Herzig-Yoshinaga was confined in the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California, the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas, and the Rohwer War Relocation Center, which is also in Arkansas. She later uncovered government documents that debunked the wartime administration's claims of "military necessity" and helped compile the CWRIC's final report, Personal Justice Denied, which led to the issuance of a formal apology and reparations for former camp inmates. She also contributed pivotal evidence and testimony to the Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui coram nobis cases.
Estelle Ishigo, née Peck, was an American artist known for her watercolors, pencil and charcoal drawings, and sketches. During World War II she and her husband were incarcerated at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. She subsequently wrote about her experiences in Lone Heart Mountain and was the subject of the Oscar winning documentary Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo.
George Hoshida was a Japanese American artist known for his drawings made during World War II, when he was incarcerated in three US internment camps and two Justice Department camps between 1942 and 1945. Nearly 300 of his works form the George Hoshida Collection, held and displayed by the Japanese American National Museum, founded in 1992 in Los Angeles, California.
Hisako Shimizu Hibi (1907–1991) was a Japanese-born American Issei painter and printmaker. Hibi attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California where she garnered experience and recognition in the fine arts and community art-exhibition. Here, she met her husband George Matsusaburo Hibi, with whom she raised two children, Satoshi "Tommy" Hibi and Ibuki Hibi.
In 1969, Shizuko "Minn" Matsuda and Kazu Iijima founded the Asian Americans for Action (Triple A or AAA) in New York City. The two women were inspired by the Black Power movement and originally planned a Japanese American political and social action movement, but ultimately chose to make it a pan-Asian organization, inviting members of all Asian ethnic groups to join. The story goes that it was Iijima's son, Chris Iijima, who convinced them to broaden their focus.
