My visit to the Japanese American National Museum in DTLA

 A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Japanese American National Museum located in downtown Los Angeles. The museum featured a number of exhibitions that covered life for Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, the atomic bombs and their impact, and the Japanese American experience as a whole. 

During my visit, the museum had just opened a brand new exhibition: A Life in Pieces, the Diary and Letters of Stanley Hayami. This exhibition, which opened July 9, 2021 and will be open until January 9, 2022, presented diary entries, letters, and drawings from teenager Stanley Hayami who was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in the US during World War II. The exhibit essentially tells the story of this significant component of Japanese American history through the lense of an ordinary teenager. As I made my way through the exhibit, something that really stuck with me was just how authentic and personal the writings were. This exhibit, unlike most history museum exhibits, offered to me and other museum goers, a much more human perspective of the struggles of Japanese Americans imprisoned in Japanese internment camps. Learning about this aspect of Japanese American history through diary entries and letters of a single teenager really gave me a much deeper understanding of what it felt like to be in Stanley’s position. Of course, that’s not to say I can ever understand Stanley’s experience, but the exhibit succeeded in offering unique insight into life inside Japanese internment camps. I think that when we look at any historical event through these very raw and personal perspectives, it can help us to gain a fuller grasp of the subject or topic. While learning about the facts and data is, of course, important, it is through lenses like Stanley’s that can help us to learn a more real and authentic version of history. 

Overall, my trip to the Japanese American National Museum was an incredibly worthwhile one, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to gain insight into the Japanese American experience throughout American history.