Sharon Yamato and Stan Honda continue their collaboration which we first featured in Moving Walls: Remembering an American Tragedy in 2018 with the launch of forcedassemblycenters.com, a multimedia website that provides a focused look at the little-documented temporary so-called WWII “Assembly/Reception Centers.”
The project debuted May 10, 2025, with a launch event at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles entitled Temporary Detention: A Guide to the Forced “Assembly Centers.” The 15 euphemistically named “Assembly Centers” and single Owens Valley “Reception Center” operated by the U.S. Army’s Western Civil Control Administration provided immediate, hasty, and particularly harsh detention for approximately 92,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as the 10 permanent camps were being built. They join former Santa Anita Assembly Center detainee June Aochi Berk, Pomona Assembly detainee Bacon Sakatani, and Archaeologist Koji Lau-Ozawa in a project at the former Tulare Assembly Center in an effort to create a memorial.
“We wanted to do this project to increase knowledge of the assembly centers, which are much less familiar to most people than the 10 larger camps where Japanese Americans were eventually incarcerated,” Stan Honda said. “I had never seen an assembly center site until we started on this project. The sites are part of both Sharon and my family’s history so it was moving to see all the locations and hear stories from the few survivors.”
Sharon Yamato, a writer/journalist, TV producer, and independent filmmaker with more than four decades of experience in media and TV/film production. Her most recent film, One Fighting Irishman, tells the little-known story of attorney Wayne Collins, who spent 23 years working to regain citizenship for more than 5,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned at the infamous Tule Lake Segregation Center during WWII. For more, see sharonyamato.com.
Stan Honda is a New York-based photographer and worked as a photojournalist for 34 years, most recently for Agence France-Presse (AFP). Stan’s parents were two of those relocated, sent to the Poston, Arizona, camp. His current personal projects include documenting the U.S. concentration camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.
His images from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center were featured prominently around the world, and three of his photos are in the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York.
Stan Honda’s night sky landscapes are another aspect of his work. He has worked as an artist-in-residence at seven national parks producing photographs that underscore the importance of preserving our view of the night sky. A night scene of an original barracks donated from the Iowa State University geological field camp in Shell, eastern Wyoming, now on the site of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center is featured in Moving Walls: Remembering an American Tragedy on our site in 2018.
His website, StanHonda.com, presents “Photographing the universe, one frame at a time”
