Tacoma Japanese Language School Oral History Collection

About

The Japanese Language School Oral Histories is a collection of oral histories about Nihongo Gakko, Tacoma’s Japanese Language School. The school was opened on May 21, 1912, by the Tacoma Japanese Association at 411 S 15th Street and was a source of community and education for the Japanese and Japanese American community until 1942, when it was closed due to the incarceration and internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans by the US Government.

The University of Washington Tacoma acquired the property in 1997, which had been mostly vacant for over 50 years and had deteriorated to such a degree that it couldn’t be restored with historic integrity.

Professors Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman received grants from the Founder’s Endowment at UW Tacoma and the Ethnic Studies in the United States Fund at UW Seattle in 2003, to collect oral histories of the former students of the school, recording more than 40 interviews. These oral histories make up the foundation of their book Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma, which shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. A selection of the oral histories are shared with you here.

This project was made possible through funding and support from the University of Washington Tacoma Library and the Friends of the UW Libraries.

Credits

Special thanks to:

Tamiko Nimura
Kim LeRoy
Cris Graffa
Caitlin Oiye

This digital exhibit is made possible by:

Erika Bailey
Melissa Fallon
Lindsey Jackson
Spencer Naar
Courtney Nomiyama
Benjamin Riesenberg
Justin Wadland