FAQs

How It Works

How much time will it take? As much or as little time as you want. We anticipate most will spend 30-45 min. a week on it; some may need as little as 15 min.

 

Do I have to do the whole year? No, just let us know you want to withdraw and we’ll email you your compiled responses.

 

What if I’m busy one week? Skip it. Pick it back up with next week’s questions.

 

What if I miss 2-3 weeks? Skip 2, 3—or 10—weeks. Pick it back up when you’re ready. Let us know if you want to pause your account or rejoin another cohort.

 

What if I don’t like your prompts? You’re more than welcome to come up with your own prompt. We’ll share tips for how to brainstorm your own prompts.

 

Can I share my responses with loved ones? Yes! CC them on emails, copy or take a photo of your letters. We’ll give you a link to share with your complete responses. Feedback and follow-up questions are great motivators.

 

I don’t use email. Can I still participate? Yes! Use snail mail, work with a family partner (ages 13+) who can record or type up your responses, or ask us to find you a volunteer partner. (Students, volunteer to get community service hours.)

 

How much does it cost? It’s free! All participants get a link to their complete responses. Once finished, you also get a print copy of your complete narrative.


Eligibility & Other Opportunities

Can I participate if I don't remember the incarceration?

Yes! We encourage participation from those who were young children and babies in the American concentration camps. We have plenty of questions that aren't about camp and some specifically geared at individuals without memories of that period. Your life stories are important, regardless of whether you speak to life in camp or not. We want to know about your careers, hobbies, family, friends, activism, favorite foods/books/movies/songs, and life lessons. You also may have memories of 

We encourage you to stay open to memories, even very abstract or faded ones. Some former incarcerees have described extreme, inexplicable reactions to later events only to learn that it closely mirrored an early experience. Others have described the feeling of gaps in their memory--we hope you'll consider sharing these too.


Can I join if I'm a Nikkei who was alive during WW2 but was located outside the exclusion zone in the U.S.? You may. Many Nikkei left the West Coast prior to the restrictions on movement or lived outside the exclusion zone. Your experiences are key to understanding the Nikkei experience in the U.S. even if you were not subject to the WRA's incarceration program. We hope to create a parallel program specifically for you in the next few years, but if you don't want to wait that long, you are welcome to participate in the program as it is. Please understand that some of the questions may not apply to you. If this is the case in any given week, you may choose a different prompt, interpret one of the prompts to fit your life experience, or make your own. Please email hana.maruyama@uconn.edu to give us a heads up after you've registered.


Can I join if I'm not Nikkei but was subject to the WW2 forced removal/incarceration? The non-Nikkei spouses or dependents of Nikkei are welcome to participate regardless of whether they too were incarcerated, as are those who were imprisoned in these programs despite not being Nikkei (as was the case of some Alaska Native incarcerees or Ralph Lazo) and family members from whom they were separated. Your experiences of family separation, financial hardship, property loss, ostracization, and/or isolation in these locations are an important part of this history. We hope you will participate. Please understand that some of the questions may not apply to you--see the response above for more information.


What about if I'm Nikkei but was located elsewhere in the Americas, Australia, New Caledonia, or New Zealand during WW2? Many other countries instituted their own forced removal and/or incarceration programs. Some of these even led to the extradition of some or all Nikkei from these countries to the U.S. U.S. forced removal/incarceration policies were designed in conversation with other countries' policies, just as other countries' policies were shaped by pressure from the US and/or were modeled after its policies. As such, we hope you will participate, while also keeping in mind the same reminders as above. Unfortunately, we are not able to mail booklets/prompts internationally at this time, so if you do not have a US mailing address, participation is limited to the email program. We will compile a digital document with your responses for you. If you do have a US mailing address, you are more than welcome to participate in the mail program.


What if I'm not a member of any of the above? While this project is not a good fit for you, we encourage you to document your own experiences by following along independently with our prompts or by signing up for a program that is designed for the broader public like Storyworth. We are working to expand this program to other communities if we can find funding to do so, and are creating an open-source prototype that will allow others to create similar projects for their communities. If you would be interested in working with our team to design a similar project for your community or would like to receive updates on our prototype, you may contact us at hana.maruyama@uconn.edu. Please understand that we have very limited capacity at the moment and may not reply unless we feel that there is a potential match.

 

Protecting My Work

Who owns my work? You do. Anything that you share with us or produce through this program belongs exclusively to you. You own the copyright to your responses and control the terms of release/use. After writing a response, you have options to keep it private, share it with other participants, or make it available to the public for educational purposes. You may also decide to release your work in part or in full after completing the program.


How will my responses be used? We will not use your responses without permission. You can choose to make your responses available to other participants and/or the public but are under no obligation to do so. You will always have the opportunity to review the material before releasing it.


What options do I have for sharing/publishing my responses? A lot! We want to make sure you are comfortable with any use of your responses so we provide a lot of options along the way. Share a response with individual friends and family members by forwarding the confirmation email we send you. This is a great way to get follow-up questions and ideas from your loved ones about what they’d love to hear from you.


You can also give us permission to share your responses:

You can decide this on a response-by-response basis or, after you withdraw from/complete the program, for the whole collection. If you do share something, you can choose whether to do so: 

You also get to decide whether to allow non-commercial, educational reuse or not. Any reuse would be subject to a Creative Commons license (see below) and anything outside of that would require your permission.


What is a Creative Commons license? We use a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED, also known as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license to share responses that participants wish to make available to the public. This license allows others to use, excerpt, or adapt your response as long as they 

For-profit projects must still get a signed release from you, the copyright holder. While a CC license cannot be retroactively revoked, we can remove the response(s) from our website. However, if it has been shared elsewhere, you will have to negotiate with those parties if you wish to have it taken down in those places.


How will my private responses be used? You will receive copies of them in your book and your email. We will not disseminate your responses without your permission, though we may refer to them in a general, non-identifiable way in journal articles, conference presentations, and donor materials to discuss the program's impact. 


If all my work belongs to me, why do you need me to sign a release? Your sign-up form includes a brief agreement that allows us to store and compile your responses for you. This is necessary for us to run the program. It does not let us share the responses beyond the staff of the Fudeko Project and Densho, which will act as the permanent repository for the project.


I released a response under a Creative Commons license but I regret it now. What can I do? If the response hasn't been published yet, just send an email to hana@fudekoproject.org and we’ll change the release setting. If it has been published, we can take down the post. A CC license cannot be retroactively revoked but taking it down can help prevent further dissemination. If the response has been shared elsewhere though, you will have to negotiate with those parties to get it taken down. If you have concerns/doubts, we encourage you to keep the response private or only share it with the group for now.


I released a response anonymously but I have decided I would like to receive attribution. What can I do? If you decide you would like to be named with the response later, just email us at hana@fudekoproject.org and we will update the attribution information accordingly.


Can others use my responses if they have been published on the Fudeko website?

Not necessarily. If you gave permission for a Creative Commons license, they can use it under the terms of that license (see above) but they can’t use it outside of that without contacting you. We may forward requests to you if we receive them but we will not share your contact information.


I have more questions about the privacy of my responses. You are not required to share your responses with anyone if you don’t wish to. We encourage you to keep your responses private if you don’t feel comfortable sharing them. You can always decide to share them later if you change your mind–it’s much harder to “unshare” them if they’ve already been shared. Likewise, if you're concerned about attribution, it's much easier to claim attribution later than it is to retroactively make something anonymous. When in doubt, choose the option that protects your rights. If you have additional concerns about the release of your materials, please contact us at hana@fudekoproject.org and we will talk through your options with you.


I asked for feedback but I just got a page of red markups. Can I take it back?

Tell your loved one that upon further reflection you've decided it's too early in the process to get feedback. It's fine to change your mind--you're figuring out what works for you. You can follow this up with a request to 1) refrain from commenting altogether, 2) stick to the useful feedback guidelines we've provided above, or 3) save their comments for later. Or tell them you've decided to keep your responses to yourself for now but will share them when you're ready. If you don't think they're capable of keeping their comments to themselves, that last option may be the way to go. Getting to read your work-in-progress is a privilege. If they can't respect that, you don't need to share it with them--ever (though you may decide to later). These are meant to be rough drafts, not a published memoir. 


Supporting Your Storyteller

I don't want to be that person (above). How can I help my relative? Read the materials they share and regularly offer specific positive comments and follow-up questions. This will help your loved one build positive associations with storytelling, figure out future directions for their responses, and bring you closer together. Think about when you write a social media post and get a ton of likes or shares--it makes you come back and want to share more. Tell your relative about the parts that resonated with you, offer comments about what you hope to hear more of, and ask follow-up questions. It's important to stay positive though. The last thing we want is for your loved one to feel self-conscious as they are writing--feeling self-conscious makes it harder for us to think creatively and may impede their ability to respond to prompts. Let them know how much you appreciate the work they are doing and how much value it brings to you. At the same time, try to be specific. Praise can start to ring hollow if you just say "I loved it" over and over again. Here are some ways you might frame your thoughts:


What kind of feedback is useful? This is a learning process and we are all developing our voices as writers. But even the most hardened writers sometimes bristle when receiving feedback--especially when they're not ready for it. Please don't offer feedback unless your relative asks for it. If they do and you assess that they are ready for constructive feedback (some may ask without considering if they are ready for it), focus on what they should do rather than what to avoid: talk about what jumped out at you, what you'd like to see more of, or what you thought they did really well. This lets your loved one know what's working and what they should do more of in the future. If a loved one explicitly tells you they are looking for ideas for improving their writing, try to stick to one or two concrete suggestions that will help them get at the bigger picture: "I'd love to see you elaborate on this" or "I thought this section was really important. I wonder if you could bring it to life even more by painting the scene for us." Remind them that you're only one voice too and others might disagree with you--at the end of the day, they should follow their judgment as the author. Don't copy-edit/proofread just yet though. There's a reason copy-editing is one of the last stages of the publishing process--it can really stop the creative part of your brain in its tracks. You're so focused on not making mistakes, you can't think of what you should do.


My relative asked me to proofread but I don't think they're ready for it. What should I do? Tell them you'd be happy to do so after they are finished with the program. This will let you see the work as a whole when you do and help you make your edits consistent: you'll remember whether you used an Oxford comma in the last response or if you capitalized/italicized "Nisei" the last time since you're doing it all at once.


I'm really good at grammar. All those typos are going to drive me nuts. Please refrain from copy-editing/proofreading your loved one's writing. Remember: the important thing isn't that they conjugated the present perfect continuous correctly or know the difference between "lay" and "lie." It's that they tell their story in their own words. The meaning of those words won't be lost in a few typos, but it will absolutely be lost if they decide to stop sharing (see above) or stop writing altogether.


I'd like to help but I don't know any eligible participants. What can I do? We welcome volunteers who would be interested in getting matched with a storyteller to help them with their narrative. You can record or transcribe their responses for them or bring their weekly prompts to them. We are also looking to translate our prompts into Japanese and Spanish to make the program more accessible for Japanese language speakers and Japanese Peruvian and Japanese Panamanian participants. If you'd like to help with that effort, please let us know at hana@fudekoproject.org.


I have a loved one who is eligible but is not interested in participating. What can I do? Please do not pressure someone to participate if they do not wish to. If you feel that they might be open to sharing their stories with you but are intimidated by the structure of the program as a whole, you might suggest that you could run a similar program with just the two of you: you could send them letters with a prompt each week (or once a month) and respond to their letters or sit down together once a week and record your chat about a question. We provide our question list to give you some inspiration but you might have your own ideas since you will have likely heard some of their stories growing up. If they're still not interest, consider volunteering to help another participant (see above).


Republishing Responses

May I republish a response from your website? Our storytellers own the rights to their responses and any content they submit with their responses. Any responses that have been published on our website state the terms under which it has been shared and whether the storyteller has approved reuse. If they have, released it under a Creative Commons license, you are more than welcome to use it as long as you follow the terms (see above). We'd appreciate it if you'd link back to the original post and mention that the response was created through the Fudeko Project, but you are under no obligation to do so.


I’m an artist, writer, researcher, or educator who would like to use a response in one of my projects. How do I get in touch with the author? Please send an email to hana@fudekoproject.org addressed to the author (please include their full name) that includes what response(s) you would like to use and a description of how you propose to use them/what permissions you need from them to do so. We encourage you to include a postal address and telephone number where they can reach you as well. We will pass along this email to them. If they are interested, they will contact you. Please do not send follow-ups. If you do not hear from them, the answer is probably no.


Can I get access to the private responses? No. You may use what is publicly available on the website under a Creative Commons license but we do not share private responses.


How to Sign Up

When can I start? We plan to launch our first cohort on February 13. We hope to launch new cohorts quarterly, although this will be subject to staff capacity. Sign up at fudekoproject.org.

 

Contact me at hana.maruyama@uconn.edu to donate or volunteer today. Thank you for your interest and support.