Go For Broke National Education Center

Go For Broke Monument in Little Tokyo.

During World War II, the United States government incarcerated over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans in camps like Manzanar and Tule Lake. For years, these Japanese Americans — many of whom were American citizens — lived in these camps, with their loyalty to the United States government questioned at every minute. However, despite this mass incarceration and anti-Japanese sentiment, many Nisei volunteered or were drafted into the army, going on to valiantly serve in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the 100th Battalion, and the Military Intelligence Service (among others). In both the European and Pacific theaters, these Nisei men and women fought in the battlefields, most notably risking their lives in the Rescue of the Lost Battalion; served as nurses and medics; and used their Japanese language skills to provide crucial intelligence for the American army. 

The Go For Broke National Education Center is a non-profit located in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo that honors the Nisei veteran story. As the Getty Marrow Collections Intern in Summer 2022, I scanned and digitized submitted archival materials, including photo albums and documents, to add to the organization's digital collections. I also conducted heuristic analysis on the website's UX/UI and accessibility and piloted ArcGIS storymaps to revamp the website's history content. 

Final Project

For my final project, I recorded the demographics and metadata for 900+ oral histories in the Hanashi Oral History Collection and visualized the data using Tableau and Voyant Tools. It was such a great opportunity to create a new dataset, clean the data, and visualize it all over the course of ten weeks! 

Some of the visualizations can be found below!

Units represented in the Hanashi Oral History collection.
One of the data visualizations I created on Tableau showing the units represented in the Hanashi Oral History collection. Many of the interviewees were in the 442nd, the Military Intelligence Service, and the 100th Battalion.
Another visualization that shows the incarceration camps and temporary detention facilities that the interviewees were in during WWII.
Another visualization that shows the incarceration camps and temporary detention facilities that the interviewees were in during WWII.

 

Visualization that shows the basic training camps and MIS language schools that the interviewees attended. Camp Savage and Fort Snelling were two iterations of the Military Intelligence Service's Language Schools in Minnesota.
Visualization that shows the basic training camps and MIS language schools that the interviewees attended. Camp Savage and Fort Snelling were two iterations of the Military Intelligence Service's Language Schools in Minnesota.
Map that shows where the interviewees were born.
Map that shows where the interviewees were born. Many of the interviewees were born in Hawai'i, the Pacific Northwest, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles, with some born in Japan and across the contiguous United States.

Special Thanks

Huge thanks to Janis Tanji Wong and Dr. Mitch Maki, as well as the rest of the Go For Broke staff, for being such amazing mentors throughout the ten weeks. Also a shoutout to Aurora Tang for being such an incredible learning community leader!