Roger Shimomura Oral History Interview

Roger Shimomura talked about his life. As a child growing up during World War II, he was detained along with his family and other Japanese Americans at the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. He later became an artist whose work focused on creating pieces that examine issues such as ethnicity, race, and the Japanese-American experience throughout the 20th century. This is a portion of an interview from the Densho Visual History Collection which was conducted by Alice Ito for Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. It took place on March 18, 2003, in Seattle, Washington.

VIDEO: Roger Shimomura Oral History Interview | C-SPAN.org

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project

The Japanese word ‘densho’ means “to pass on to future generations.” The organization was founded in 1996 with a primary goal of collecting personal testimonies from Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. Over the years, its mission expanded to “educate, preserve, collaborate, and inspire action for equity”. Densho uses digital technology and best archival practices to collect, record, preserve, and share its oral histories, documents, photographs, newspapers, and other primary source materials documenting the wartime detention of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent without due process of law. Wikipedia*

On the C-SPAN Networks:

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project has hosted 18 events in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first program was a 1997 Interview. The year with the most events was 2008 with six events. The year with the highest average number of views per video was 1998 with an average of 1,271 views per video. Most appearances with Tom Ikeda, Megan Asaka, Stephen Fugita. Most common tags: Japanese Americans, World War II, Asian Americans.