WRA Form 26
This dashboard was built to explore historical records about the Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. The original data comes from a survey conducted by the War Relocation Authority (WRA).
This data was decoded according to the WRA and NARA documentation and codebooks, then cleaned in Excel and visualized in Tableau.
Source: National Archives Catalog, Densho Encyclopedia, Fraser, Wikipedia
May 2023
Introduction
In exploring potential topics for my future capstone project, I came across official government historical data from the Japanese American concentration camps during WWII.
This data set comes from the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which was responsible for the forced removal of over 100,000 Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Initial Survey
In 1942, the WRA developed Form 26 to survey those incarcerated throughout the camps via personal interviews.
While 120,313 total Japanese Americans were reportedly taken into custody by the WRA, there are only 109,400 records in the NARA’s data set. Form 26 surveyed only those individuals sent to the 10 “relocation centers” and did not account for those sent anywhere else. The survey also did not include any children born in the camps.
Punch Cards & Codesheets
The information from the interviews were sent to the Tule Lake camp to be coded onto machine-read punch cards created by IBM (fun fact). In the 1960s, the cards were cataloged onto magnetic tape at the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley), and eventually the data was digitized and released for modern public access in 2003 by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Deciphering the Codes
Each individual was recorded into an 80 character code, with each space representing a particular piece of information that can be decoded using the documentation and WRA codebook included in the NARA archive. (Apparently the the last 5 characters are “an additional identifier for which no information is known.”)
Final Thoughts
It was wildly fascinating (and at times upsetting) to page through the historical documentation from the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and early 2000s in order to clean and decipher the coded data. By the end, I had 109,371 records after processing the information in Excel, which I then visualized in Tableau.