Los Angeles, California – Few people may recall the incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942. A new generation now seeks to use modern technology to rediscover the story, amid rising hate crimes against Asian Americans and pushback against educating students about racial injustices.

As shown with this weekend's 80th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, signed on Feb. 19, 1942 which authorized the incarceration of Japanese Americans as a supposed threat to national security, the ranks of survivors are thinning.

Many went to their graves without sharing their experiences with their families.

Akemi Leung knew her grandfather had been incarcerated at Heart Mountain in Wyoming during World War II. But he never spoke much about it.

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Only when she read and watched a video of his testimony at a congressional commission hearing did she learn more about what he suffered as one of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry forced to leave their homes and live in concentration camps in the Western US.

"I just knew him to be a quiet person who liked to observe more than talk," Leung said. "Seeing the testimony helped illustrate how he was a leader."

The hearing happened decades ago. By the time she watched the tape in 2017, her grandfather, Hiroshi Kamei, had already died.

As Japanese Americans mourn the passing of a generation, they are trying to preserve the memory of what their elders went through, sometimes using modern technology like podcasts, AI, and virtual reality.

"Every generation has to rediscover the story, understand it and tell it in their own way," said Tom Ikeda, the founding executive director of Densho, a nonprofit in Seattle educating the public about the Japanese American incarceration.

At Densho, Ikeda and his staff spent decades collecting oral histories.

Now, with only a few thousand survivors left, the focus is shifting to how to tell those stories creatively, Ikeda said.

In 2020, Densho launched a podcast, Campu, from the perspective of a brother-sister duo talking about their great-grandparents. The organization also helped create an exhibit at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington, with Japanese American farmers describing their incarceration through augmented reality on visitors' smartphones.

At the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, a survivor who also served in the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team speaks with visitors. The survivor, Lawson Sakai, died in 2020. But the previous year, the museum had recorded him answering more than 1,000 questions.

With the help of artificial intelligence, a lifelike video image of him can respond appropriately to visitors' queries.

The AI survivor exhibit was modeled after a similar one at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. The Jewish community faces similar challenges of preserving memories as fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust remain.

The exhibits are "about inquiry, using technology to provide a way into an interrogation of the testimony that allows people to be curious," said Kori Street, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which created the exhibit.

The "wow" factor of new technology appeals to younger generations. But simply displaying historical artifacts, like those from the life of a Japanese American teenager killed in combat in Northern Italy in 1945, is important, too, said Clement Hanami, JANM's art director and vice president of exhibitions.

"As a museum, real objects for us are very important," Hanami said. "Trauma of the whole experience is a fragile thing, and it can be overshadowed by the spectacle ... It's important for us that the analog is not overlooked by the entertainment."

Activists also want to ensure the preservation of the 10 concentration camp sites in remote locations around the Western US.

They notched a victory this week when the US Senate voted to designate Camp Amache in Colorado as a historic site. The bill still needs to be approved by the House and signed by President Joe Biden.

"The significance is that we are moving toward telling a fuller story of our country," said Tracy Coppola, the Colorado senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "Just knowing the Amache site will be protected in perpetuity, for the current and future generations, brings a lot of hope to our country."

In Northern California, a proposal to fence off the Tulelake Municipal Airport has activists up in arms. The airport is built on the site of a camp for Japanese Americans who did not swear loyalty to the U.S., and the activists would like to relocate it. The fence is designed to keep out wildlife but would also deter visitors.

"We feel like this would be equivalent to putting a fence around Gettysburg," said Barbara Takei, a member of the Tule Lake Committee.

Preserving the legacy of the incarceration and educating people about it remains an uphill battle at times. Bruce Embrey, who chairs the Manzanar Committee, worries about the controversy over critical race theory.

If school districts ban lessons about the country's racist past, teachers might not be able to discuss the Japanese American incarceration and its legacy.

"It's one thing for the victims not to speak about it," Embrey said. "It's another thing for the US government's education system to completely whitewash what they did."

Preservationists are using all the modern day tools they can to combat the erasure, as calls for justice over Wold War II's Japanese American internment continues.