By the time Chien-Shiung Wu died in 1997, she had helped build the atomic bomb, become one of the world’s foremost experimental physicists, and overturned one of the most important laws in modern physics. Yet she never received a Nobel Prize. Many scientists have spent decades asking why.
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Behind barbed wire, thousands of Japanese American students faced a future that suddenly seemed impossible. Through determination, community support, and the work of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, more than 4,000 students found their way back to college.
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A school built to preserve language, culture, and dignity for Tacoma’s Japanese American children later became a registration site for their forced removal during World War II. The same place that taught them how to belong became one of the places where they were ordered to disappear.
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In May 1944, Japanese American Military Intelligence Service linguists began translating the Japanese Navy’s secret “Z Plan” after critical documents were recovered from a plane crash in the Philippines. The intelligence would help shape one of the most decisive American victories of the Pacific War.
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For Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, the Selective Service Act of 1917 exposed a contradiction that would continue for decades: America was willing to accept their military service long before it was willing to fully accept them as Americans.
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The Japanese American National Museum opened on May 15, 1992, just days after the Rodney King verdict sparked the LA riots. Leaders like Bruce Kaji and Col. Young Oak Kim helped create JANM to ensure the history of Japanese American incarceration would never be forgotten.
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The largest American concentration camp during World War II stretched across the Arizona desert so far that authorities considered guard towers unnecessary. At its peak, Poston became the third-largest “city” in Arizona, holding more than 17,000 Japanese Americans.
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On May 4, 1887, San Jose’s Chinatown was destroyed in an arson fire, just weeks after city officials voted to remove it. The attack displaced nearly 1,400 Chinese residents and erased one of the largest Chinatowns in California.
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California’s 1913 Alien Land Law never mentioned Japanese immigrants, but it didn’t have to. By barring “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land, it effectively targeted Japanese farmers across the state.
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