In 1994, the Japanese American National Museum staff and volunteers organized a project to travel to Heart Mountain, Wyoming to take apart and bring back to Los Angeles two fragments of original barracks buildings built by the U.S. government to house Japanese Americans unfairly imprisoned during World War II. The project was part of the National Museum’s landmark exhibition, America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience, and the display of the Heart Mountain barracks building became the symbol of the unconstitutional mass incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry.

The project, organized by Museum staff member Nancy Araki and former Heart Mountain inmate Bacon Sakatani, included dozens of former inmates and interested parties who traveled over 1,000 miles or more to take part in the dismantling. To recall the historic events, the program will include the screening of the award winning documentary, “Legacy of the Barracks”, produced by Mark Mohr for KABC-TV Channel 7 in 1994.

Also on hand will be other key participants, including Ron Mukai, whose father Tomo lived in the barracks fragment still on display at the Museum; Sakatani; Araki; contractor David Honda; author Sharon Yamato, who, along with her cousins, took part in the dismantling, and then wrote a book on her experiences, Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps; and, preservation architect Jim McElwain, who oversaw the logistics of the dismantling and the reassembly in Los Angeles.

Following the program, a reception will be held adjacent to the Heart Mountain barracks in the National Museum’s Pavilion.

[Purchase a copy of Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America's Concentration Camps at the Museum Store Online]