Japanese American National Museum

The Japanese American National Museum is dedicated to preserving the history and culture of Japanese Americans. The museum covers more than 130 years of Japanese-American history, dating to the first generation of immigrants.

The museum was founded in 1992 and is located in the Little Tokyo area near downtown Los Angeles, California. The museum is an affiliate within the Smithsonian Affiliations program.

The museum’s artifacts include textiles, art, photographs, and oral histories of Japanese Americans. Its collection of moving images contains hundreds of home movies in 16 mm and 8 mm made by Japanese Americans from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Activists and the Japanese-American community had organized to gain recognition of the injustice they had suffered from the federal government during World War II.

The museum has hundreds of artifacts and letters from children in internment camps. The museum was conceived as a way to preserve the positive aspects of Japanese American’s history and culture in the United States.

Issei

Issei is a Japanese-language term used by ethnic Japanese in North America and South America to specify the Japanese people who were the first generation to immigrate there.

Issei are born in Japan; their children born in the new country are Nisei (ni ‘2’ + sei ‘generation’), and their grandchildren are Sansei (san ‘3’).

The first members of the Issei emigrated not directly to the mainland United States, but Hawaii. These emigrants, the first of whom arrived in 1885, were laborers escaping hard times in Japan to work in Hawai’i.

Their immigration was subsidized by the Hawaiian government, as cheap labor was needed for essential commodity crops, especially its sugar plantations. Numerous Japanese eventually settled in Hawaii.