Campu

Food is more than just sustenance. It’s a vehicle for culture, a way to delight in the world around us, engage our senses, connect with other people. It’s how we tell someone we love them. It’s the lessons we pass down between generations—and the ones we don’t. This episode is about food in Japanese American concentration camps. It’s about mutton, so much mutton...but it’s also about disrupted traditions, about memory, about politics, and about subtle—and not so subtle—acts of resistance.

In this episode, we talk about everything you never wanted to know about latrines in WWII Japanese American concentration camps. Our research may have gone down the toilet, but we promise this story isn’t all about poop. We’ll look at how incarcerees adapted to extremely adverse conditions and the unique challenges women incarcerees faced, including sexual violence and harassment.See episode transcripts and learn more at www.densho.org/campuResources for teaching with Campu can be found at www.densho.org/campu-education-hubFollow @DenshoProject on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Pictures allow us to peer into the past, but those images are often far more complicated than what initially meets the eye. Photographs (and the people who took them) portrayed Japanese Americans as menacing threats, as hapless victims, as model Americans. But there were also covert acts of resistance playing out on both sides of the camera. In this episode, we talk about the visual record of WWII incarceration and the stories that unfolded behind the lens. About what you see — and what you don’t. See episode transcripts and learn more at www.densho.org/campuResources for teaching with Campu can be found at www.densho.org/campu-education-hubFollow @DenshoProject on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Thanks for subscribing to Campu -- we hope you like what you’ve been hearing so far. We’re going to take a short break while we work on this season’s remaining three episodes, but we’ll be back on January 6th with more stories about life in Japanese American concentration camps. During this break we want to encourage you all to learn about why this history still matters today by attending the virtual Densho Dinner at Home on Saturday, October 24th. Densho is home to one of the largest digital archives of Japanese American history and we couldn’t have made this podcast without them.The Densho Dinner @ Home promises to be an inspiring evening of community, remembrance and solidarity. They’ve put together a stellar lineup of artists and activists to inspire us to see that together we can transform this challenging time into a moment for powerful social change. I’m looking forward to tuning in, and I hope you’ll join me. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you again on December 2nd. Learn more and sign up for free at www.densho.org/denshodinner

Not all fences are of the white picket sort. Many, in fact, represent a reality that goes against everything America imagines itself to be. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the barbed-wire fence of World War II concentration camps -- what it meant to the people it imprisoned, and to those it kept out.See episode transcripts and learn more at www.densho.org/campuFollow @DenshoProject on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

After Japanese Americans were released from incarceration, most of what remained were mounds and mounds of paper. Papers that told us about choices the incarcerees made, big and small. About how even in camp, people were still just being people. In this episode we're talking about paper—the stories it tells, the ones it doesn’t, and what that says about power in historical narratives.See episode transcripts and learn more at www.densho.org/campuFollow @DenshoProject on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

This episode is about the forced removal of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, but it’s also about the bedrock that lies beneath. Literally. We talk about rocks -- not just in the geographic sense, but also the stories they hold: of origins and stolen lands; of passing time and reviving tradition; of memory and of the questions we learned not to ask. See episode transcripts and learn more at www.densho.org/campu.Follow @DenshoProject on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Densho’s new podcast, Campu, tells the story of Japanese American incarceration like you've never heard it before. Brother-sister duo Hana and Noah Maruyama weave together the voices of survivors to spin narratives out of the seemingly mundane things that gave shape to the incarceration experience: rocks, fences, food, paper. Follow along is they move far beyond the standard Japanese American incarceration 101 and into more intimate and lesser-known corners of this history.