Digitally preserving these letters would not have been possible without the hundreds of hours of volunteer and intern work carried out by the Japanese American Museum of Oregon (formerly known as the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center). You can help this project and others like it by donating directly to the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. I must also acknowledge Denshō, the online digital repository that hosts the high-quality (TIFF and JPEG) versions of these letters for academic use and public interest. —Weston Koyama

Author Key and Percent Contribution

The emboldened letters in the table below are Japanese.  They have not yet been translated or transcribed.  Letters in that table that are marked with an asterisk (*) are especially impactful to me (Weston) for cultural or emotional reasons.

See also "Terms of Use" and "Caution Page."

Below you will find my typed transcriptions of the English letters, which is helpful for people who might have difficulty reading old style cursive on paper that is deteriorating. Water damage and ink stains make reading them especially difficult at times; the transcriptions took me over 100 hours to type up.  You will also find a text summary of the English letters, created by the staff, volunteers, and interns at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon.


Lastly you will find monochrome versions of these letters that I formatted.  The B&W versions include the text summary and the transcription which appear before the actual letter.


In my opinion the B&W versions are more readable than the color versions, and they are objectively much smaller than the tiff photos— usually less than 150 kilobytes including the summary and transcript. This should be sufficient for most academic work where the readability of the text is of primary concern.


You will find that some of the letters contain sensitive or oppressive language used in ways that would not be acceptable in mainstream discourse today.  Some letters also contain uncharitable remarks about specific Japanese Americans acquainted with Teru.  For more information about both of these concerns, please see the Caution Page.