Reflections on DISLOCATED: Memory, Forgetting, and the Landscapes of Japanese American Incarceration

Last summer, we had the remarkable privilege of leading DISLOCATED, an intensive travel seminar exploring Japanese American heritage sites across California. Sponsored by the American Culture Studies program, the course brought together 15 students from a wide range of arts, humanities, and social sciences (and a fantastic teaching assistant, Maria Siciliano, a doctoral candidate in English).

For us, it was a transformative experience, both personally and intellectually. The idea for such a course grew out of our long-term collaboration on Beauty in Enormous Bleakness, an interdisciplinary research initiative that documents the remarkable contributions of Japanese American artists and architects to design modernism — many made during or shortly after their detention on U.S. soil during WWII. With this work, we seek to uncover “hidden” design legacies of their incarceration in a range of locations across the U.S.

Over 17 days, we engaged those legacies — and the complex geographies of incarceration history — through travel. We moved through radically different landscapes, from the dense urban fabric of San Francisco’s Japantown to Angel Island (the “Ellis Island of the West”); from the former Tanforan “Assembly Center” in suburban San Bruno (where a BART station now stands) to the agricultural Central Valley near Fresno; and from the granite cliffs of Yosemite to the expansive Sierra mountains, where we made our final stop at the Manzanar National Historic Site (a former prison camp on the edge of Death Valley).

Each of the sites we visited required different ways of seeing and understanding. We challenged students to set aside the default assumptions and practices of their discipline, and to learn from immersive experience — from being there in the fullest sense possible.

To understand the character of cultural landscapes requires sustained effort. We sought to listen to the community — both voices past (by reading oral histories and autobiographies, studying photo albums and newspaper accounts) and voices present (by engaging descendants, activists, artists, and historians). And we paid close attention to visual and material evidence, studying not just famous, readily accessible works (for example, Ruth Asawa’s works in a “Retrospective” exhibition on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Minoru Yamasaki’s Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in Japantown), but subtler design choices and spatial elements, as well as narrative traces of the kind found on street signs, plaques, and park benches. Collectively, this evidence constitutes cultural knowledge of the past, and ongoing, often conflicted negotiation with its meanings and legacies today.

As the course unfolded, students moved between archival study, in situ observation, and historical analysis, engaging narratives such as Shipu Wang’s “American Modern,” Miné Okubo’s “Citizen 13660,” and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston’s “Farewell to Manzanar,” and a host of archival photos. They often observed how each of these documentary approaches strengthens — and sometimes challenges — the others, and how they can be creatively combined (as students would do in their group “midterm” site studies and final projects).

We began with the university’s own archive, studying sources pertaining to the admission of Japanese American students during the war years (WashU was one of only a handful of institutions to do so), and their campus experiences. These materials revealed institutional investments, and the complex negotiations the students endured in this period of racial exclusion. It also raised thorny questions about the politics of preservation: whose experiences wind up in archives and on museum walls. We pursued these questions further with a visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden, where Ben Chu, horticulture supervisor, provided an in-depth tour of the Japanese Garden, and the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, where we engaged with issues of representation of trauma and memory.

From there, we traveled to California, moving between a range of historic and cultural sites that revealed different strategies of preservation and interpreting history. At the Military Intelligence Service Historic Learning Center in San Francisco’s Presidio, students engaged a community-run museum dedicated to documenting the extraordinary linguistic and intelligence work of Japanese American service-members. At Angel Island, they encountered poems carved into detention barracks walls where acts of creative expression transformed architecture into testament. In Japantown, they studied how a neighborhood maintains cultural identity through festivals, businesses, public art, and spatial design despite dramatic demographic shifts.

We designed the course around patient observation and hands-on documentation. Each day involved preparatory readings, site visits, and intensive fieldwork — sketching, photographing, note-taking, and interviewing. Our own complementary approaches shaped how we structured the course. We modeled collaborative research across disciplines, describing how, as a cultural historian and architect, we ask different questions of the same sites, and discover more together than either would alone. We also learned from our students. They brought varied perspectives from their respective fields to every discussion.

Several moments stand out. In Yosemite, students sketched Half Dome and El Capitan while studying Chiura Obata’s paintings of the same views and reading his words about nature and creativity. They experienced firsthand what Obata described: the overwhelming scale of granite cliffs, the quality of light, the challenge of translating what they saw onto paper. Our visit sparked conversations about what it meant to maintain artistic work across radically different and sometimes painfully dislocating circumstances.

At Manzanar, which is now a National Park Service–run historic site with recreated barracks and an interpretive museum, students walked the landscape where only traces of the original camp remain — pieces of fencing, crumbled foundations, remnants of Japanese gardens, and cemetery memorials. They met with National Park Service staff who explained ongoing collaborations with descendant communities around preservation and interpretation. Students observed how the site balances multiple functions: memorial, educational resource, pilgrimage destination, tourist attraction, and most recently, target of federal scrutiny. They asked thoughtful questions about who decides what gets preserved and how, whose voices guide interpretation, what responsibilities institutions have to communities.

What we hoped students gained extends beyond knowledge of this particular history. The course fostered skills for reading landscapes critically — of noticing what is present and what is missing, whose stories are centered and whose are marginalized, and asking how things came to be this way in the first place. It also revealed the many ways communities preserve and share their stories, from museums and memorials to gardens, festivals, rituals, neighborhood spaces, and everyday objects. These aren’t supplementary practices but essential ones, particularly now as heritage institutions face systemic challenges and immigrant communities navigate ongoing questions of identity and belonging.

Teaching this course reminded us why we do collaborative research. Working across our disciplines — architecture and cultural history, oral history and material practice — we discover connections, and arrive at insights, that neither of us would find alone. We hope our students experienced that same deep gratification of collaborative discovery, learning to value different forms of knowledge and different ways of making meaning. Most importantly, we hope they learned that sites tell stories through many forms — through spatial arrangements and design choices; through what remains and what has been erased; through slow transformation, and ongoing community practice; through shared but also deeply individual memories.

Traveling through these landscapes with our remarkable students reinforced that this history remains active and urgent — and also that it persists in community practices, in design legacies, and in the questions students carry forward into their own work.