Exhibition places viewers in midst of WWII-era forced removal of Japanese Americans
‘BeHere / 1942,’ presented by the Yanai Initiative of UCLA and Tokyo’s Waseda University, runs from May 7 to Oct. 9
Russell Lee/Library of Congress
Cameramen record Michi Tanioka, 5, as she waits to be sent from Los Angeles to the Manzanar prison camp in April 1942. This image, taken by photographer Russell Lee, and others by Lee and Dorothea Lange documenting forced removals along the West Coast were used as inspiration for Masaki Fujihata’s immersive AR re-creation.
| May 2, 2022
Eighty years ago, during World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast, incarcerating 120,000 in concentration camps. This May, an exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum lets visitors step into those dark days of 1942 through an augmented reality re-creation at the very site where thousands of Japanese Americans living in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood were ordered to report before trains and buses took them to the camps.
“BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration,” which opens May 7, is presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, a joint project of UCLA and Japan’s Waseda University, in collaboration with the museum.