BeHere / 1942
A New Lens on the Japanese
American Incarceration

Masaki Fujihata

The BeHere / 1942 project challenges the experiential way we understand events through a consideration of the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from Los Angeles in 1942. The exhibit peers deeply into the contemporary media of the time, photography, and a media contemporary to our own time, Augmented Reality (AR). Visitors are invited to explore the exhibit on photography installed in the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), then stand amongst the Japanese Americans who gathered at the Old Santa Fe Railway Station on April 1st, 1942 for relocation—people who now reappear in AR. After leaving the exhibit, attendees can explore the public square in front of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, a symbolic space that is transformed through the BeHere / 1942 AR App. Here they will find a bus one might find anywhere in 1942 Los Angeles, as well as a large group of people preparing to be relocated.

Two young girls being filmed as they wait to board a train that will take them to Owens Valley (Manzanar). Photograph by Russell Lee, Los Angeles, California, April 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8a31184.
Screen capture of Nishi Hongwanji Augmented Reality (AR) installation during its development. These composite still images, inspired by numerous photographs of the forced removal, were created by positioning renderings of individual people within a simulation of the plaza outside the Japanese American National Museum.

We can learn from historical facts. Not only as something we might commit to memory, but as a way to further cultivate our intellectual creativity, to consider a historical moment and judge how we ourselves may have acted. New media can generate new interactive technologies and new immersive environments. Media, we might say, can create experiential environments. In this exhibit, we recorded 3D space as if it were a movie. Through a technique called “Volumetric Capture,” we were able to capture the movement of actors as 3D models. In AR, those 3D models can be redistributed across real space. The end result is a space born out of this new media. Users can wander through that space freely and truly experience a historic site.