Eric Bittner, a Certified Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—Rocky Mountain Region in Denver, was raised in Colorado and Wyoming. He attended Black Hills State College in Spearfish SD and the University of Wyoming and holds a M.A. degree in American Studies.  Employed at the National Archives since 1988, his duties include reference, record description and inventory, outreach (including workshops for genealogists), and preservation. He is a member of the Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists, Wyoming State Historical Society, & the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

Updated May 2008

Roy Usaku Ebihara, O.D. was born in Clovis, New Mexico on January 11, 1934 in a family with ten siblings.  His father worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and they lived in a “Japanese Camp” on the railroad property.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a vigilante group held them in detention in the mountainous area of Southwest New Mexico, followed by incarceration at Topaz, and eventually his family resettled in Cleveland, Ohio.  He served in the U.S. Army for two years immediately post Korean War.  He earned a Doctors Degree in Optometry at the Ohio State University and practiced optometry in Cleveland. Ebihara is now retired, but involved in numerous community services including the Cleveland JACL.

Updated June 2008

Dr. Louis Fiset is an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has published two books and numerous peer reviewed journal essays on the Nikkei experience in World War II. With a current appointment in UW’s Department of Medical Education, Dr. Fiset is the curriculum director for DENTEX, a two-year training program for Alaska Natives (e.g., Eskimos, Aleuts) to provide dental care for fellow villagers in the most remote regions of the Alaska bush.

Update September 2008

Nobusuke Fukuda was born and raised in San Francisco. He was educated at the University of California, MSW degree, and worked as a child welfare administrator before retirement. Fukuda is married with two children and two grandchildren. He is active with the Konko Church of San Francisco, the Boy Scouts of America, Nikkei in Retirement and a founder of the Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program, San Francisco Unified School District.

Updated May 2008

Donna Graves, the director of Preserving California’s Japantown Project, is an historian and cultural planner based in Berkeley, California.

Updated October 2008

Art Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he retired in 2008 as the director of the Center for Oral and Public History.  Between 2001 and 2005, he served as Senior Historian at the Japanese American National Museum. Since 2018, he has authored or edited four books that focus on the topic of the resistance by Japanese Americans to their unjust World War II oppression by the US government.

Updated August 2023

David M. Hays is an archivist and Director of the US Navy Japanese/Oriental Language School Archival Project at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.

Updated April 2008

James Aikira Hirabayashi (1926-2012) had a distinguished thirty-year academic career at San Francisco State University which included the position of Dean of Undergraduate Studies and the Dean of Ethnic Studies. In the latter position, he is recognized for his pioneering leadership in establishing the nation's first School (now College) of Ethnic Studies. He has also held research and teaching positions at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and University of Zaria, Nigeria, Africa. Over the course of his career, Dr. Hirabayashi also provided guidance and direction to the Japanese American National Museum's educational and curatorial programs which included its collections, exhibitions, public education programs, film, and research.

Updated August 2018

Dr. Gwenn Jensen is a consulting medical anthropologist and oral historian and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Together with Naomi Hirahara, she co-authored Silent Scars of Healing Hands: Oral Histories of Japanese American Doctors in World War II Detention Camps (2004), a project funded by the Japanese American Medical Association and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program and published by the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton.

Updated June 2008

Dan Killoren is a Ph.D. history student at Arizona State University.

Updated May 30, 2008

Yosh Kuromiya was born in Sierra Madre, California, in 1923. He was attending Pasadena Junior College when WWII broke out with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He and his family were incarcerated at the Pomona Assembly Center in Los Angeles County, California and later shipped to Heart Mountain, Wyoming concentration camp. He passed away on July 2018 at age 95. (Photo courtesy of Irene Kuromiya)

Updated July 2018

Karen J. Leong is an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies and director of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. She is also co-coordinator of the Japanese Americans in Arizona Oral History Project, a collaboration between the JACL Arizona Chapter and ASU APAS.

Updated May 30, 2008

Dr. Daryl J. Maeda is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has taught college classes on Japanese American incarceration at Oberlin College and previously served as Associate Research Director at Densho: Japanese American Legacy project.

Updated January 30, 2008

Eric L. Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He is the author of American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (2007 University of North Carolina Press) and Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (2001 University of Chicago Press). He graduated from Brown University in 1984, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa member. He received his J.D. from Yale University in 1987.

Updated May 2008

Martha Nakagawa has worked in the Asian American press for the past two decades, and has been on staff with Asian Week, the Rafu Shimpo, and the Pacific Citizen. She frequently contributes to the Nikkei West, Hawaii Herald, Nichi Bei Times, and the Hokubei Mainichi. She passed away in July 2023 at the age of 56.

Updated August 2023

Debra Jean McCabe Redsteer is a full blood Navajo, whose clans are Red Bottom born for Bitter Water. McCabe Redsteer was born in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were among the thousands of AmerIndians relocated to the Los Angeles area and other big cities during the 1950’s in the federal government’s controversial relocation program. A Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, graduate of History in 2007, McCabe Redsteer currently works as administrative support assistant in the Department of History at California State University, Fullerton.

Updated June 2008

Andrew (Andy) Russell teaches history at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Arizona State University and has published several articles on Japanese Americans of the Interior West.

Updated April 2008

Jill Shiraki, a community organizer, is the project manager for the Preserving California’s Japantown Project.

Updated October 2008

Nancy Taniguchi, of Washington, D.C., earned a B.A. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona, then lived in Mexico City and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She moved to Utah with her husband (a Utah native), where she earned her graduate degrees. She is now Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus.

Updated February 28, 2008

Thomas (Tom) Walls has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently Chief of Staff for the Oklahoma State Senate, where he has worked for the past nineteen years.

Updated March 2008

Hideo Yonenaka was born in San Jose, California in 1926 and grew up on a strawberry farm. From May 8, 1942 to May 13, 1946 he was incarcerated in the following concentration camps—Tanforan Assembly Center; Topaz, Utah; Tule Lake Center; Bismarck, North Dakota; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Yonenaka earned a B.A. in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley; a M.A. in Bacteriology; and a Ph.D. in Microbial Physiology from the University of Southern California. He served in the United States Army at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland. Yonenaka was a Microbiology and Biology instructor at San Francisco State University until his retirement in 1994. Happily married with two children and two precious granddaughters, Dr. Yonenaka likes to use his spare time to do watercolor and Sumi-e painting, read novels, watch sporting events, travel, and attempt to play golf. He is an active member of the Konko Church of San Francisco.

Updated August 22, 2008