Densho director on connecting young Asian Americans with history

Eighty-one years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and incarcerated them across the West Coast, including parts of Washington, California and Oregon. 

Now, as elderly survivors of wartime incarceration pass, Densho’s new executive director, Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, said she is prepared to work with the next generation of young Asian Americans to collect stories about their own lived experiences.

Some of this group’s present-day stories may still echo those of their elders. Part of Densho’s ongoing work is connecting the country’s history of anti-Asian racism to current injustices, xenophobia and violence, said Ostwald Kawamura, who joined the Seattle-based nonprofit last September. 

Six months into her role at Densho, Ostwald Kawamura has led conversations with teachers and other educators to help develop resources to connect young people with the legacy of Executive Order 9066 and present events.

Between March 2020 and March 2022, Washington accounted for 556 of the 11,467 hate incidents reported against Asian Americans in the U.S., according to a 2022 report by the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate. Advocates attribute the ongoing discrimination and violence in part to the wrongful blame placed on Asian Americans after COVID-19 spread to the U.S. from China. Asian Americans continue to face violence in 2023. In January, a gunman killed 10 people and injured another 10 during a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, California (one of the injured victims died the next day). This month also marks the two-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. 

“We engage folks in activism through learning about the past,” Ostwald Kawamura said. “Anti-Asian violence is nothing new. … That’s why it’s so vital for us to document and share the past, learn about this today and break these cycles.”

Passed down through generations 

Densho, which means “to pass on to the next generation,” was founded in 1996 to preserve and share the history of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. In light of Day of Remembrance, observed annually on Feb. 19, the organization partnered with the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center to create Wikipedia pages of history-making Japanese American women. 

Ostwald Kawamura said the organization is looking to fill gaps in coverage and hopes to further expand its educational programs to help Densho reach more students and educators.

“What other stories do we need to be collecting that we haven’t been? What are other promising areas of Japanese American history [that] need further exploration?” Ostwald Kawamura asked. “We’re constantly pushing ourselves to evolve or change, particularly around how we’re going to respond to these massive generational shifts in our community.” 

Last year, Ostwald Kawamura took over as Densho’s leader following the retirement of founder Tom Ikeda. Ostwald Kawamura said she wants to highlight the untold stories of survivors and bring renewed attention to modern connections to the movement. 

“Stories shape who we are,” Ostwald Kawamura said, noting that some marginalized figures get lost in storytelling. “Even how it connects us to each other, and how we have a sense of shared identity through these shared experiences.” 

In an email, Ikeda said Ostwald Kawamura was tapped as the new leader because of her “ability to listen carefully to the needs of others.” 

“People enjoy and want to work with Naomi, which is so important when leading a community organization in a world that is changing so rapidly,” Ikeda added.

“I needed to live a life in service of people”

Ostwald Kawamura was born to Japanese immigrants in San Diego and now lives with her husband and daughter in Vancouver, B.C. Her father and grandfather survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

“I felt a responsibility towards it. I felt the obligation to do something with my life,” Ostwald Kawamura said of her family’s legacy. “To honor that it felt like I needed to live a life that was in service to people.” 

“I really understand in the Japanese American community this idea of how history has impacted people and their descendants,” she added. 

Ostwald Kawamura graduated from the University of Washington. She later earned a master’s degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is graduating this year with a doctorate in curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Ostwald Kawamura previously served as the executive director of the Nikkei Place Foundation, a Japanese Canadian community organization, and director of education at the San Diego History Center. 

“The theme of memory and the importance of remembering the past and how much the past shapes us is a theme that runs through my life, both personally and professionally,” Ostwald Kawamura said. 

Seattle’s First Day of Remembrance 

The first Day of Remembrance was held on Nov. 25, 1978, in Seattle. Activists Frank Chin and Henry Miyatake were among the advocates who led the redress movement, a campaign that called for reparations and a formal apology to Japanese Americans years after the signing of Executive Order 9066. 

The push for restitution was successful. In 1988, former President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which provided Japanese survivors with $20,000 each and a presidential apology for the wrongful incarceration.

“Day of Remembrance is about how folks took past events and needed something that energized the community to take action in the present moment,” Ostwald Kawamura said. 

Later this year, Densho plans to add translated letters and journals to its rich digital archive and launch a koseki retrieval and translation service to help Japanese Americans locate their ancestors. A koseki is a Japanese family registry where relatives record major life events such as births, deaths and marriages. Densho’s service will help families request physical copies of koseki records from a local government office in Japan and translate them. Currently, koseki family information is not available online. 

For Ostwald Kawamura, remembering the past also provides lessons for a brighter future. 

“It helps to bring folks back into community with one another, and with our elders and the experiences they endured,” Ostwald Kawamura said. “Recalling the past is incredibly important because it’s all part of a longer story.”