About Us
Coming to you from the University of Connecticut's Greenhouse Studios and Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, the Fudeko Project is a year-long online remote journaling program for survivors of Japanese American World War II incarceration. The project was initially dreamed up in 2022 by Hana Maruyama after seeing her grandmothers' struggles with talking about their experiences: Fudeko, a Japanese American survivor of incarceration at Jerome and Heart Mountain, and Lou, the daughter of English/Irish immigrants who felt her life wasn't important enough to do an oral history. When Hana's mother began participating in Storyworth with Lou, Hana noticed that Lou also started talking about her past more organically in conversation too. Always an educator, Hana started to wonder if something about the year-long process with its bite-sized prompts helped participants learn how to speak about their experiences—and how a trauma-informed, community-specific program might offer an alternative to people who were unable to do oral histories or wanted another mode of communication.
Who was Fudeko?
Fudeko "Fudge" Tsuji Maruyama (in the plaid skirt on the right) was Hana's grandmother. She was twelve years old when her family was forcibly removed from their grape farm to Fresno Assembly Center, then to Jerome concentration camp in Arkansas. When Jerome was converted into a POW camp in 1944, she and her family were sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. After the war, her father, mother, and younger brother lived in a shed on an employer's farm until they could find long-term housing. Fudeko, then a rising high school senior, worked as a student helper for a family. She studied biochemistry in undergrad at UC Berkeley and went on to earn her doctorate in nutrition science there too. She taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Kentucky and was a lifelong student: she took Osher classes, read voraciously, took piano lessons, and participated in ikebana classes up until her death in December 2020. She never became comfortable speaking about her life in camp but she made sure her family knew about our past—organizing trips back to Heart Mountain and doing short interviews with her grandchildren. This program is inspired in part by the responses she wrote to Hana for a high school project. In Japanese, the name Fudeko refers both to the powder used for making ink to write and to students from Terakoya schools—a fitting name for a writing project.
Hana Maruyama
Hana Maruyama (she/her) is a yonsei descended from Heart Mountain, Gila River, and Jerome concentration camps. An Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, she researches Japanese American incarceration and its entanglements with Indigenous dispossession and representations of race and indigeneity in public history. Her writing has been published in KCET, the Kartika Review, and the Asian American Writers Workshop's The Margins. While completing her PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, she co-created/produced Densho's Campu podcast and worked as a research fellow on American Public Media's Order 9066. She formerly worked for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.
Tom Scheinfeldt
Tom Scheinfeldt is a leader in the field of software development for online collecting of historical materials. Dr. Scheinfeldt formerly led 911, HDMB, the Bracero History Archive. He has also advised on the Marathon, April 16, and many other online collecting efforts. He was the original Principal Investigator on Omeka, a software platform that facilitates the collection, display, and preservation of born-digital collections currently in use by tens of thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and public historians. He is the director of Greenhouse Studios, an interdisciplinary research unit at UConn that uses art and technology to expand the boundaries of humanities scholarship and learning.
Tom Lee
Thomas Lee (he/him) is a Technology Strategist at UConn’s Greenhouse Studios. He draws from a range of experience in the arts, engineering and design to generate and apply creative approaches to the domain of scholarly communications. Tom enjoys working with web, interactive and digital art technologies to create informative and engaging experiences that deliver innovative forms of scholarship to new audiences.
Brooke Foti-Gemmell
Brooke Gemmell (she/her) is a Design Technologist at UConn's Greenhouse Studios, an interdisciplinary research unit which aims to reframe the workflows of collaborative scholarly production. With a background in design, Brooke is a creative director and visual problem-solver on collaborative projects, and also manages the branding and outreach of the studio at-large. Though she is trained as a creative generalist, Brooke believes that her greater calling is in the development of the people around her, and is wholly energized by the successes of her mentees and peers alike. She holds an M.A. in Digital Media & Design and a B.F.A in Studio Arts.
Our Advisors
Our project advisors bring expertise in Japanese American intergenerational trauma and oral history, as well as the diversity and wide geographical span of the former incarcerees. Others have experience in digital journaling programs,
Dr. Lisa Nakamura is a sansei clinical psychologist who wrote her dissertation on the Tule Lake pilgrimage and its role in intergenerational healing.
Barbara Takei is an oral historian, educator, community organizer and racial equity trainer, working with Densho, Everyday Democracy, and more. Her M.Ed. from the University of Washington focused on multicultural education.
Shō Yamagushiku is an independent filmmaker and poet who does public history work on Uninanchu and mixed Alaska Native families' experiences of the incarceration.
Dr. Sarah Willen is a PI with the Pandemic Journaling Project and an associate professor of medical and sociocultural anthropology at UConn.
Dr. Fiona Vernal is the director of the Engaged Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) at UConn and an associate professor of history and Africana Studies.