Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Poston Community Alliance has received a grant of $50,000 from the Aratani Foundation to help support our current projects, which include: our historic assessment; stabilization of the adobe classrooms; interpretive map of the Poston camps I, II and II; and our documentary film - For the Sake of the Children. These funds enable us to begin a process to develop a Master Plan for Poston's long-term goal of creating an interpretive center. 

 Please consider making a donation to help us complete our current and long-term goals. 

About the Aratani Foundation

George Tetsuo Aratani was an entrepreneur and successful Los Angeles businessman, who was incarcerated with his family at the Gila River concentration camp in Arizona. Before world War II, he met his future wife, Sakaye Inouye, through friends and she was incarcerated at the Poston Arizona concentration camp apartment 318-5-D.  According to Mrs. Aratani, she visited with George Aratani when she was sent to the Gila camp for dental work.

George Aratani was a generous contributor to Japanese American educational and cultural causes.  Together with his wife, Sakaye, the Aratani Foundation endowed the nation’s first academic chair at UCLA to study the World War II incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry and the postwar efforts to redress the injustice. The Aratani Foundation have sustained Japanese American cultural centers and museums, retirement homes and sports programs, Japanese American religious institutions, and supported Nikkei politicians of Japanese.