By MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS, Rafu Staff Writer
Last Friday marked 77 years since the signing of surrender documents by Japan brought an official end to World War II. As the years and decades continue their indivertible crawl, the voices of those who fought and lived through that global cataclysm are fading into the silence of history.
The most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimate that 234 WWII veterans die each day. Of the 16 million who were involved in the war, only 240,329 were still living as of last September; the numbers are updated each year on Sept. 30.
With the loss of each veteran, first-hand accounts of the conflict that reshaped the world slip away, many disappearing – unheard – forever.
As president and CEO of the Go For Broke National Education Center, Mitch Maki has taken on the solemn mission of ensuring the voices and memories of Japanese Americans who served are not lost.
“We tell the story of the veterans of World War II, and one of the challenges we have is how to take an 80-year-old story and make it relevant for young people,” Maki said Aug. 27, during a gathering of high school students, teachers and journalism professionals at the Japanese American National Museum.
“We also work to find ways to make this story relevant for young people outside the JA community. Those are really important issues for us,” he added.
The event at JANM was held to celebrate the culmination of the first student projects in the Go For Broke Journalism Institute, created in partnership with the L.A. chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association.
“We came up with this idea of creating an institute where we give real-life skills to young people, but also we give them the story, and their first project has to be some kind of journalistic piece on the JA veteran experience that ties into contemporary issues,” Maki explained. “This is not just a book report, it’s much more involved.”
To plot ideas and draft a roadmap for the project, Maki turned to long-time Los Angeles Times writer Teresa Watanabe, who also sits on the board of AAJA-LA.
“Before I could even get the whole idea out, she said, ‘Let’s do this,’ and we created this institute over the summer,” he recalled. “Teresa had contacts with the Downtown Magnet High School, and the eight students we recruited are all from that school and all happen to be young women.”
Maki noted how none of the students are of Japanese heritage – their families hail from countries including Mexico, Korea, Guatemala, the Philippines and Bangladesh.
“They are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and that’s what’s been so rewarding, how that’s the level on which they connected with the story,” Maki said.
The students were tasked with creating presentations that capture their own understanding of the JA experience through their personal lenses as high school students in L.A., as well as their cultural backgrounds. The program connected them with a host of mentors from news outlets including The L.A. Times, New York Times and ABC7 News, in addition to journalism and Asian American studies faculty from UCLA and Cal State L.A.
Read More: Go For Broke, AAJA-LA Celebrate Inaugural Journalism Institute for Students