I grew up with a surprising amount of family archives. Photographs, scrapbooks, and even my Japanese grandparents’ passports, once nestled in old fruit packing boxes in closets and basements, now occupy space in my own home. As a third-generation Japanese American, the fact that I have so many of my family members’ materials is both surprising and poignant. My father and his family were among the more than 125,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Like many, they were forced to burn most of their possessions that had Japanese writing, including my grandfather’s collection of books and most of the family baby pictures—anything that could tie them to the then-enemy nation of Japan. Among the archives is my father’s unpublished memoir, Daruma: The Indomitable Spirit , a chronicle of his imprisonment and release from Tule Lake, an incarceration camp in Northern California, where he spent nearly four years, from the age of 10 to 14.…