A group of faculty, staff and students at the University of Colorado Boulder are working to fill in the gaps in the history of Japanese and Japanese Americans on campus.
Head of archives Megan Friedel started chewing on the idea with colleagues when they realized 2019 is the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt suspending Japanese and Japanese American imprisonment during World War II.
“We’ve already done work in the archives to document some of the experiences of Japanese Americans on campus during World War II, but as we were talking we were realizing this is an important part of CU’s story,” she said. “The full scope of that history, from the day the first Japanese American student walked through the doors to present day, hasn’t really been told.”
Friedel, Japanese and Korean studies librarian Adam Lisbon and archivist David Hays secured a grant from CU Boulder’s Office for Outreach and Engagement to kick start a project to build up the university’s archives.
To start with, student interns are combing through a mountain archival material to look for stories about Japanese Americans on campus that might have been missed.
The group is also seeking people in the Japanese American community for stories, letters, photos — anything that gives a glimpse at what it was (and is) like for Japanese Americans on campus.
“I think a lot of people in general don’t feel like their personal effects are important to history and that’s simply not true,” Lisbon said. “It’s the documents and impressions of people living those lives that we’re missing.”
One of the first people the group reached out to was Gil Asakawa, the manager of student media at CU Boulder who has been active in the Japanese American community for decades.
The trauma from being incarcerated in camps across the United States still reverberates through the Japanese American community today, Asakawa said. But there’s also much more to the story.
“The Japanese community, like many communities of color, we don’t get a lot of specific attention, so it was nice to see that there’s a history here at CU,” he said. “It’s pretty great to have that visibility and have our voices heard.”
The grant lasts through June, but Friedel said she can already tell the effort to bolster CU Boulder’s archives will go long past that.
“We’re all starting to feel like this is the basis for a project that’s much longer term,” she said. “We want to celebrate the history of Japanese Americans on campus and we want to give a very realistic picture of what that’s been like and how it’s changed over time. As archivists, we are merely the record keepers but we’re also not going to whitewash history.”