“Irei: Nationwide Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration” shows the primary complete itemizing of the names of roughly 125,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry who had been imprisoned throughout WWII.
Photograph by Kristen Murakosh.
The USC Shinso Ito Middle for Japanese Religions and Tradition has launched a brand new a multi-faceted mission to handle the erasure of the identities of people of Japanese ancestry who skilled wartime incarceration. “Irei: Nationwide Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration” shows the primary complete itemizing of the names of roughly 125,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry who had been unjustly imprisoned in U.S. Military, Division of Justice, and Warfare Relocation Authority (WRA) camps.
“We’re drawing on Japanese Buddhist and Japanese American cultural traditions of honoring ancestors not merely by way of constructing monuments of remembrance, however monuments to restore the racial karma of America,” mentioned Duncan Ryuken Williams, the mission founder and director of the Ito Middle, primarily based on the USC Dornsife Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.
Supported by a $3.4 million grant from the Mellon Basis, the mission expands and re-envisions what a monument is thru three distinct, however interlinking parts: a sacred e-book of names as monument (Ireichō), an internet site as monument (Ireizō), and light-weight sculptures as monument (Ireihi). The primary monument, the sacred e-book of names, is presently on exhibition on the Japanese American Nationwide Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
The monuments will probably be put in across the nation in partnership with varied Japanese American stakeholders together with JANM, Densho, the Japanese American Confinement Websites Consortium, and various former focus camp museums and guests’ facilities together with Amache, Jerome, Coronary heart Mountain, Manzanar, Minidoka, Rohwer, and Tule Lake.
The principal award supporting the mission comes from the Mellon Basis’s Monuments Undertaking initiative, which was launched in 2020 with a quarter-billion-dollar dedication to remodel the nation’s commemorative panorama by supporting public initiatives that extra fully signify the multiplicity and complexity of American tales. A supplemental grant from the U.S. Nationwide Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Websites Grant program will help public engagement with the web model of the monument.