JACL-CCDC Oral Histories
In 1998, Izumi Taniguchi, a retired professor of Economics at California State University, Fresno, wrote a grant to begin an oral history project with Japanese Americans in the San Joaquin Valley. This grant was funded by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and allowed the group to purchase a video camera and get some training in how to conduct oral histories. The San Joaquin Valley Japanese American History Project, as it was named by Taniguchi, was later sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program in the School of Social Sciences at California State University, Fresno. The purpose of the project was to document “the history and contributions of Japanese Americans and their organizations in the San Joaquin Valley, [the] state, and the country” (Box 1, Release agreement, undated). Volunteer interviewers from the Fresno Chapter and the Central California District Council of the JACL videotaped interviews with Japanese Americans, primarily the Nisei (second generation) from Merced County to Kern County to make them available for research and other scholarly purposes. Izumi Taniguchi and Grace Kimoto of the Livingston-Merced Chapter of the JACL took a lead role in the keeping the project going although the goal was always to have people in every JACL chapter in the Central Valley take an active role in conducting interviews. Izumi Taniguchi passed away in 2001. To honor his memory, the oral history project became the Izumi Taniguchi Oral History Program. Some additional funding from the California State Library’s California Civil Liberties Public Education Program (CCLPEP) allowed the group to record several more oral histories and convert all of the interviews to a digital format on DVDs between June 2004 and June 2005. They have since been converted to a digital format and are made available here.
