Behind barbed wire in Japanese internment camps, a free press

"On tiny suede match covers bearing the inscription, 'It's a match — Ruby and George,' the engagement of Miss Ruby Kanaya to Pfc. George K. Suzuki of Ft. Sam Houston, Tex...."

The items are redolent of Small Town U.S.A., but the newspapers that carried them weren't exactly published in Mayberry.

They were written and edited in the desolate internment camps of World War II —- fenced-off patches of desert that suddenly became home for the 120,000 Japanese Americans torn from their West Coast communities after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Each of the 10 camps had its own newspaper, staffed by people known in the bureaucratic parlance of the day as"evacuees." Published as often as three times weekly, the papers covered events great and small, featuring humble notes about flower shows as well as ringing locutions on the timeless themes of democracy.

Over the last few months, the papers' nearly 4,000 editions have been given new life on the Internet, posted by Densho, a Japanese American advocacy group based in Seattle.

"Our hope is that this will open up a new wave of interest and research in the camps," said Tom Ikeda, a retired software engineer who heads Densho, which translates from Japanese as"to leave a legacy."

Related Links

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project