After Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America's leaders chose to lock its Japanese American citizens behind barbed wire in internment camps. Imprisoned Nisei (Japanese Americans citizens born in the United States to immigrant parents) were then paradoxically asked to fight and die for the country that interned them. The Nisei of the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, former internees who volunteered to fight for the United States, became the most decorated combat unit of their size in Europe. In the Pacific, the Nisei shadow warriors of the Military Intelligence Service provided vital battlefield information to their commanders. These impressive military and espionage accomplishments have largely gone unrecognized. And after the war, Nisei families rebuilt their lives and continued to make a difference by confronting social injustice. 

Project Torchlight was founded by a Japanese American Army officer and allies to tell the full story of the Nisei and their families—from immigration to internment, to battlefields in Europe and the jungles of Burma, to the political struggles that reshaped civil rights in America. Tomes will discuss his team’s journey to develop Project Torchlight and continue to build it into an important multi-part historical dramatic series that will share the under-told WWII and civil rights stories of Japanese American betrayal and heroism, and how Nisei redefined the meaning of American loyalty, identity and justice for generations.  

Tomio "Tomes" Toyama is an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel with two decades of military service who now works at Apple managing its national security sector business. Tomes holds degrees in Arabic and systems engineering from West Point and history from the University of Hawaii. 

This program is free to attend, but pre-registration is suggested. Seating capacity is limited to 100.