LOS ANGELES — As traditional monuments are graffitied, toppled, and removed left and right, what does it mean to create a new one? One answer is the Ireichō, a book on view at Los Angeles’s Japanese American National Museum that bears the names of Japanese Americans systematically incarcerated by the United States government during World War II.

Monuments based on names are nothing new. Precursors include Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names and its Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names commemorating millions murdered during the Holocaust. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial bears the names of the 58,318 US servicemen and women who died in the Vietnam War. More recently, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, inscribed the names of lynching victims in the American South onto 800 steel columns.

Compared to these efforts, the Ireichō seems modest, but its relatively small scale belies the research and care that went into its making and its outsized significance to the Japanese-American community. For one thing, it represents the first definitive count of those incarcerated. Despite being one of the most documented populations in US history, the number of Japanese Americans imprisoned during WWII has always been something of an abstraction, with most accounts estimating it anywhere from 110,000 to over 120,000. The 25-pound tome contains 125,284 names — finally an exact number! — each carefully researched and vetted against a range of archival records by a team led by Buddhist priest and University of Southern California professor Duncan Ryūken Williams.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.