Mapping Japanese American internment with Densho
Visualizing internment in detention sites during WWII with Sites of Shame and Manzanar CloseUp
In 2021, Stamen began working with Densho, a nonprofit committed to documenting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on American soil during WWII. Sites of Shame tells the stories of the 125,000 imprisoned individuals and how they were transported around the country, often separated from their families.
Manzanar CloseUp is an extension of Sites of Shame that Stamen and Densho created to showcase daily life at the Manzanar internment camp in California. With this tool, most of the 10,000+ individuals imprisoned at Manzanar are mapped at the apartment level. You can see how the population changes over time, view different demographic information about individuals, read biweekly newspapers written by prisoners, and find specific people by name.