In season 8 of The Berkeley Remix, a podcast of the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, we are highlighting interviews from the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. The OHC team interviewed twenty-three survivors and descendants of two World War II-era sites of incarceration: Manzanar in California and Topaz in Utah. This four-part series includes clips from these interviews, which were recorded remotely via Zoom. Using healing as a throughline, these life history interviews explore identity, community, creative expression, and the stories family members passed down about how incarceration shaped their lives. 

In this episode, we explore the history, legacy, and contested memory of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. 

Incarceration represented a loss of livelihoods, property, and freedom, as well as a disruption—cultural and geographic—in the Japanese American community that continued long after World War II. While some descendants heard family stories about incarceration, others encountered only silence about these past traumas. This silence was reinforced by a society and education system which denied that incarceration occurred or used euphemisms to describe what Japanese Americans experienced during World War II. Over the years, Japanese Americans have worked to reclaim the narrative of this past and engage with the nuances of terminology in order to tell their own stories about the personal and community impacts of incarceration. 

This episode features interviews from the Oral History Center's Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project:
https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/bancroft/oral-history-center/projects/jain
This episode includes clips from: Miko Charbonneau, Bruce Embrey, Hans Goto, Patrick Hayashi, Jean Hibino, Mitchell Higa, Carolyn Iyoya Irving, Susan Kitazawa, Ron Kuramoto, Kimi Maru, Lori Matsumura, Alan Miyatake, Jennifer Mariko Neuwalder, Ruth Sasaki, Masako Takahashi, Peggy Takahashi, Nancy Ukai, and Rev. Michael Yoshii. Additional archival audio from the US Office of War Information and the Internet Archive. 
To learn more about these interviews, visit the Oral History Center's website:
https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/bancroft/oral-history-center

Produced by Rose Khor, Roger Eardley-Pryor, Shanna Farrell, and Amanda Tewes. Narration by Devin Katayama. Artwork by Emily Ehlen. Original theme music by Paul Burnett. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Album artwork by Emily Ehlen.

Newsreel audio clip "Japanese Relocation" from the U.S. Office of War Information, ca. 1943, courtesy of Prelinger Archives. Newsreel audio clip "August 14, 1945, Newsreel V-J Day" from the Internet Archive.

A special thanks to the National Park Service's Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant for funding this project.

The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: "A Place Like This": The Memory of Incarceration:
https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/the-berkeley-remix-season-8-episode-2a-place-like-this-the-memory-of-incarceration/

"From Generation to Generation" Episode 2 - "A Place Like This": The Memory of Incarceration

This episode takes a look at the medical community’s first encounter with AIDS in San Francisco. As reports began to circulate of a mysterious disease affecting gay men, fear spread even faster than the virus itself. Here medical researchers and healthcare professionals discuss how the health community grappled with this fear of the unknown: from medical institutions and staff refusing to treat patients, to the internal conflict of the health practitioners themselves as they faced the reality that their pursuit to save lives could very well risk their own. Ultimately, the management of fear—among patients, the public, and the health community itself—proved to be one of the first steps in the city’s medical response to AIDS.

Ep 2: The Virus of Fear

This episode charts the uphill battle medical researchers faced in securing the needed resources and funding to combat the AIDS epidemic. The discovery of the epidemic coincided with the rise of fiscal and social conservatism in national politics with the election of Ronald Reagan. Public health budgets were slashed and there was little sympathy or support to fight a disease affecting gay men. In this episode, medical researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and University of California San Francisco’s KS Clinic reveal how they had to improvise in this context to piece together the crucial resources needed to make headway against the epidemic.

Ep 5: The Fight For Resources

Our final episode looks at how the collaboration between community members and health officials ultimately came to redefine care for AIDS. We hear medical staff and community members describe the multi-pronged approach developed at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 5b, which  combined care, research, social work, and community involvement. Together, health officials and community members pioneered a new way of treating epidemic disease and human suffering—a new way that became known as the San Francisco Model.

EP 6: Ward 5b, or The San Francisco Model

The Oral History Center preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. Our podcast, The Berkeley Remix, delves into pressing issues, making our vast archive accessible to scholars and the public. The UC Berkeley Oral History Center, a division of The Bancroft Library, was founded in 1953 and produces carefully researched, audio/video-recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretative historical materials for the widest possible use.

"From Generation to Generation" Episode 2 - "A Place Like This": The Memory of Incarceration

The Berkeley Remix

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