JANM’s newest exhibition, BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration, by artist Masaki Fujihata, invites visitors to experience the photographic archive of the 1942 forced removal of Japanese Americans in new ways, including through two augmented reality installations. Join us for a conversation with Fujihata and National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award medalist, Karen Tei Yamashita, about the exhibition and installations. Like the exhibit and installations, this event is co-presented by JANM and the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities at UCLA and Waseda University, Tokyo.

Opening exactly eighty years after Exclusion Orders 32 and 33 forced Japanese Americans to leave Little Tokyo, BeHere / 1942 mobilizes a variety of media forms to let visitors engage with this dark history. Through careful curation of little-known photographs by Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee, some presented in hyper-enlarged form or reimagined as video, BeHere / 1942 allows visitors to discover things in the archive that they never knew were there. Cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) technology takes the discovery a step further, inviting visitors to become photographers themselves, actually participating in the scene.

The exhibit inside JANM is complemented by a groundbreaking public AR installation in the plaza between the museum’s main campus and the historic Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. Here, a dedicated BeHere / 1942 app lets visitors step into the past, and walk among Japanese Americans on the verge of leaving for the camps. Realized with the participation of members of the local Japanese American community, this recreation includes three people who themselves experienced life in the camps as children.