The Japanese word densho means 'to pass on to future generations,' and the organization that carries this name was founded in 1996 with a sense of urgency that has only deepened with time. During World War II, over 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and incarcerated in government camps without due process of law. By the mid-1990s, the survivors of those camps were aging, and their firsthand memories were beginning to disappear. Densho set out to capture those memories on video before they were gone forever, building a digital archive from a small office in Seattle that has grown into one of the most significant oral history collections in the United States.
Densho's founding director, Tom Ikeda, understood that the window for recording firsthand testimony was closing. The organization began collecting video oral histories, sitting with survivors of the ten War Relocation Authority camps as well as Justice Department and War Department detention facilities. The collection now holds nearly two thousand hours of indexed and transcribed video interviews and eighty thousand historic photos and documents. The voices captured range from prominent figures, including former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, Senator Daniel Inouye, civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, and archival researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, to ordinary families from all walks of life. Densho also interviewed Japanese Americans who were not detained, white employees who worked in the camps, and non-Japanese Americans who witnessed the forced removal or supported the redress movement of the 1980s. Ikeda announced his retirement in 2022 and was succeeded by Naomi Ostwald Kawamura.
Densho began in 1996 as a project of the Japanese American Chamber of Commerce of Washington State and became an independent 501(c)(3) organization in 2002. From its Seattle base, it has grown into a staff of 17 supported by volunteers and graduate student interns, with funding from foundation and government grants as well as individual donations. The recognition has been substantial: Densho received the first NPower Innovation Award for groundbreaking use of technology, an American Library Association citation for online history, the Society of American Archivists' Hamer-Kegan Award, and the City of Seattle Mayor's Arts Award for Cultural Preservation. Its founding director received the Washington State Historical Society's Robert Gray Medal and the Japanese American National Museum's Founders' Award, among other honors. What began as a race to preserve vanishing memories became a model for how digital technology can democratize access to painful but essential history.
In 2012, Densho launched its online encyclopedia, a free, publicly accessible resource covering key concepts, people, events, and organizations connected to the wartime incarceration. Edited by Brian Niiya, the encyclopedia started with about 360 peer-reviewed articles contributed by professional scholars, graduate students, journalists, and participants in the story itself. It has since grown to nearly 1,500 articles, supplemented by photos, documents, and oral history clips drawn from Densho's archives. In 2017, Densho added its Resource Guide to Media on the Japanese American Removal and Incarceration. Funding has come from the California State Library's California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and the National Park Service. The content is provided under a Creative Commons license, ensuring the widest possible access to a history that was officially suppressed for decades.
Densho's educational mission extends beyond preservation into the classroom. The organization offers free social studies curricula meeting Washington State standards, built around essential questions that force students to grapple with civil liberties in practice rather than in theory. One unit asks, 'How do conflicts over immigration arise from labor needs and social change?' Another explores how citizens of a democracy become fully informed enough to participate responsibly. A third tackles the tension between individual rights and the common good. Densho has collaborated with the Wing Luke Museum, the Museum of History and Industry, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the ACLU of Washington, and the Washington chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, drawing deliberate connections between the Japanese American experience and the broader, ongoing story of discrimination faced by many communities. The broader goal is direct: inform the public about the false basis for the mass incarceration so that a similar injustice never happens again.
Densho is headquartered in Seattle at approximately 47.599N, 122.313W, in the central Seattle area east of downtown. The organization's work connects to sites visible across the Pacific Northwest, including the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial (visible on the northeast shore of Bainbridge Island) where the first forced removals occurred. Seattle's International District, home to many of the families whose stories Densho preserves, is visible south of downtown near the stadiums. Nearest airports: Boeing Field/King County International (KBFI) 4nm south, Seattle-Tacoma International (KSEA) 10nm south.