LAUSR

Around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry was forced to remove into internment camps in the United States during World War II. Densho Digital Repository curates a collection of oral histories, which mainly includes 904 filmed interviews about “Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it”. This study uses web scraping techniques to collect 904 narrators’ bio information and analyzes their demographic information, including race, age, and location. Nisei counts the most of the Japanese American narrators (78.82% of all narrators). 279 (39.35%) of narrators were minors (born between 1926 and 1942) in the year 1942, when the incarceration happened, with over half of them (58.78%) being teenagers (age between 12 and 17). The majority of narrators (82.09% of the total) are from the west coast, namely, Washington State, Oregon State, or California State. This study also constructs a scheme for incarceration oral history, based on which the incarceration historical texts can be manually or/and automatically processed. The annotation scheme includes seven categories: (1) pre‐war background to the incarceration; (2) government's decision to remove ethnic Japanese; (3) life after removal and during the incarceration; (4) military services; (5) returning of ethnic Japanese after WWII; (6) legal challenges; (7) redress movement.