About the Encyclopedia

Overview

The Densho Encyclopedia is a free and publicly accessible website that provides concise, accurate, and balanced information on many aspects of the Japanese American story during World War II. It is designed and written for a non-specialist audience that includes high school and college students and instructors, multiple generations of Nikkei community members, confinement sites preservation groups, amateur and professional historians, librarians, journalists, documentarians, and the general public.

The Encyclopedia is thoroughly cross indexed and articles are linked to relevant primary and secondary materials from the Densho archive and from other websites that include still and moving images, documents, databases, and oral history interview excerpts as well as standard bibliographical sources.

The editor of the encyclopedia is Brian Niiya, director of content at Densho. Niiya has previously served as the editor of the Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference, published in 2000. The blue ribbon advisory committee for the first phase (positions listed are as of that time) consisted of Eiichiro Azuma, the Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History Emeritus in the University of Cincinnati; Lane Hirabayashi, George and Sakaye Aratani Professor in Japanese American Redress, Internment and Community and chair of the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA; Tetsuden Kashima, professor, American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington; Franklin Odo, former director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution; and Greg Robinson, Professor of History at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, who also serves as associate editor.

This first two year phase resulted in an encyclopedia containing approximately 360 articles that went online in the fall of 2012. A second phase that brought the article count to over 1,000 went online in 2015. In 2017, the Densho Resource Guide to Media on the Japanese American Removal and Incarceration went online. The Encyclopedia is envisioned as a long-term, living resource that will continue to grow over time. Additional articles and features will be added, and the project governance structure is being designed to emphasize sustainability.

Read the Editor's Message

This is a living project

The Encyclopedia is an ongoing project with new content and features being added actively. Please let us know what you think. We are interested in hearing:
  • Your suggestions for new articles
  • How you are using the Encyclopedia
  • Problems, bugs or other issues you've experienced

Support and funding

Major funding for the first phase of the Encyclopedia is being provided by grants from the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, administered by the National Park Service and by the California State Library through the California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

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This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.

This material received Federal financial assistance for the preservation and interpretation of U.S. confinement sites where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, as amended, the U.S. Department of the Interior prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability or age in its federally funded assisted projects. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to:

Office of Equal Opportunity
National Park Service
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240

Using and citing content

Densho strongly believes in free and open access to knowledge. We want to make it as easy for you to share and reuse our materials. To make this possible, we are offering the text and most of the primary source photos, documents and videos under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License).

This means you are free to use, share and remix our content as long as you:

  • Attribute the work to Densho
  • Only use it for non-commercial purposes
  • Offer any work that builds on Densho's content under these same conditions

(For more information, see the license details at Creative Commons.)

To properly cite articles and primary source content, be sure to include the name of the article, the author(s), the publication name, "Densho Encyclopedia," the url of the article page, and the date/time that you accessed the page. In APA format, an example citation would look like this:

Odo, F. (2012). Varsity Victory Volunteers. Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved on July 31, 2015 from https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Varsity%20Victory%20Volunteers/.

For more information and examples in other citation formats, click on the Cite Help link located on each page.

Careful, please!
Where indicated, some primary source content in the Encyclopedia is not under Creative Commons terms. You must contact the original rights-holder directly for permission to license their content.

Contact us

We are interested in hearing your comments, suggestions and questions, especially during this first phase of the Encyclopedia project. You may contact us at:

[email protected]

Densho
1416 South Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98144

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Terms of Use/Privacy Policy

Terms of Use

Published or Commercial Work

Unless otherwise noted, all content in the Densho Encyclopedia is offered for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). For more information, see Using and Citing Articles.

Some content is the property of third-party owners. Densho is using these materials either by prior arrangement with rights-holders or under the auspices of fair-use doctrine. If you are a rights-holder who believes that your materials are being used improperly, please contact Densho.

Warranties

DENSHO DOES NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION: THAT THE WEBSITE ENCYCLOPEDIA.DENSHO.ORG WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE; THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED; THAT THIS SITE, INCLUDING THE SERVER THAT MAKES IT AVAILABLE, IS FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS; AS TO THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM USE OF THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE; OR AS TO THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, SUITABILITY, QUALITY, OR OPERATION OF ANY INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, OR SERVICE PROVIDED ON OR ACCESSIBLE FROM THE SITE.

THE WEBSITE ENCYCLOPEDIA.DENSHO.ORG AND ALL INFORMATION, PRODUCTS AND CONTENT INCLUDED OR ACCESSIBLE FROM THIS SITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND (EXPRESS, IMPLIED AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT AND THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE), ALL OF WHICH DENSHO DISCLAIMS TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. YOUR USE OF ENCYCLOPEDIA.DENSHO.ORG IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.

Limits of Liability

In no event shall Densho be liable for any direct, indirect, special, incidental, punitive or consequential damages arising out of or related to the use, inability to use, authorized use, performance or nonperformance of this site, even if Densho was previously advised of the possibility of such damages and regardless of whether such damages arise in contract, tort, under statute, in equity, at law or otherwise.

Privacy and Your Data

Your privacy is important to Densho. Our Privacy Policy is your assurance of our commitment. The encyclopedia.densho.org website is owned and operated by Densho, a Washington State not-for-profit corporation. Our address is:

Densho
1416 South Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98144

Densho welcomes comments or questions about its Privacy Policy. Please feel free to contact us.

What Personal Information is Collected

Personal Information includes, but is not limited to, usage data, along with the name, telephone number, address, and e-mail address. Densho collects information from our users at several different points on our website:

Densho eNews Email Newsletter

The Densho eNews email newsletter is an optional monthly bulletin sent to people interested in the Densho project and related activities. Individuals must request to subscribe (i.e., "opt-in") at the Densho web site or through personal contact. Subscribers may choose to unsubscribe at any time and unsubscribe information is located at the bottom of each eNewsletter. Densho uses the Groundspring.org EmailNow service to send and manage the email list.

Cookies, Tracking Codes and Web Traffic Analysis

A cookie is a small packet of information that Densho puts on your computer's hard drive whenever a user visits our website. Tracking codes are small pieces of computer code that are passed to your web browser when it requests pages from our website. For each visitor to our website, this allows our servers to automatically recognize the following:

Your IP address which may imply your geographic location
How you were referred to the website
The pages you have viewed, how long you spent on the website and when you visited
Browser type and capabilities (e.g., "Firefox")
Platform dependant information (e.g., "MacOS 12.6")

Densho uses Google Analytics to analyze traffic to this website. This analytic service does not create individual profiles for visitors; it collects only aggregate data. For information about Google Analytics, click here. Densho also uses AddThis to collect and display statistics about how content is shared by users. For information about AddThis, click here.

In addition, Densho may examine and analyze technical logs created by the servers that operate the website. These logs may contain data similar to that described above.

How the Information is Used

Cookies and tracking codes are used to monitor the traffic on our website so we can determine how content is used and navigated, improve the user experience, and address technical issues with service capacity and availability.

Comments are used to revise, correct, update, and evaluate the content of our website.

With Whom Do We Share the Information

Densho does not sell, rent, swap or otherwise disclose any Personal Information to third parties. If Densho is required to disclose information collected from our members in response to any legal process issued by a court, Densho will comply with the legal process after giving notice to any members affected by it unless a court order prohibits such notice.

Notice and Takedown Policy

Densho provides open, free access to the digital collections found here in good faith. Although we employ policies and processes intended to prevent the display of materials that infringe on an individual's privacy or are in violation of copyright law, we recognize that mistakes may happen.

If you find materials that should not be publicly available for these reasons, please contact us to request removal by emailing our Collections team ([email protected]) or by mail at:

Collections - DCMA Request
Densho
1416 S. Jackson Street
Seattle, WA 98144
US

In the request, please include:

  • Your contact information
  • The reason for the removal request (personally identifiable information, intellectual property infringement, etc.)
  • Sufficient information for our staff to locate the materials, including url of the article page, and where available, the identifier (the unique code associated with each item -- e.g., "ddr-densho-1-345")

Upon receipt of valid complaints, Densho staff will respond within seven (7) business days and temporarily remove the material if requested pending resolution.