Building Evidence: Japanese Americans in Southern California During Mid-Century. 40 Years of Collecting. An Exhibition, October 2011-March 2012.
Archives and Special Collections, University Library, CSU Dominguez Hills.
Leo Cain Library North (New) Wing, #5039. Fifth Floor, University Archives.
For over 40 years historians and archivists at CSU Dominguez Hills have been gathering materials documenting the lives of Japanese Americans in the South Bay and Los Angeles. A large segment of material focuses on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, but there is also material on Japanese Americans before and after the War.
Consisting of photographs, yearbooks, artwork, letters, leases, the exhibition focuses on the lives and obstacles faced by Japanese Americans in the South Bay and Los Angeles prior, during and after World War II. Topics include the location of some Japanese American tenant farmer families on Dominguez/Rancho San Pedro lands before World War II and the removal of those families after Pearl Harbor; the mass evacuation of citizens and incarceration in concentration camps such as Manzanar and Granada, Colorado; letters from various Japanese Americans searching for jobs and places to live after the camps were closed. Several of the recently-rescued Ninomiya Studio photographs show Japanese American life in the 1950s. In addition the exhibition features artwork of Mary Higuchi, Henry Fukahara and H. Takata as well as a scale model of a camp barracks made by former Torrance resident Min Sueda.
