From the Kickstarter page:
Good Luck Soup Interactive is one component of our transmedia storytelling project documenting and sharing stories of the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian experience after they left the internment camps. This web-based, interactive component will complement, reinforce, and encourage participation in the larger effort to preserve this history through social media, participatory storytelling and community events.
Our transmedia project also includes a feature-length documentary film. Titled Good Luck Soup, the film tells the post-World War II story of one Japanese American family that we hope encourages others to tell their own story through our interactive and participatory website, Good Luck Soup Interactive.
Here's a little more from Project Director Matthew Hashiguchi:
Growing up, I often heard my grandmother talk about her time in “camp,” and as a kid, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. A day camp? A summer camp?
As I grew older, I began to realize what “camp” was. It was the internment camps and they were incarcerated because they were Japanese and viewed as dangerous.
I was born and raised in an Irish neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, and the topics of race, culture and identity were prevalent in my life at a very young age. As I looked at my group of friends, whom were mostly Irish, I felt not that we were different but that I was different. This difference had become obvious in others around me as well. Looking somewhat Japanese and having a Japanese last name in a predominantly Irish Catholic grade school did nothing to downplay these dissimilarities. My inability to blend in translated into my own personal struggles and I rejected my Japanese heritage. I just wanted to fit in.
Throughout high school and college, I continued to hear my grandmother talk about her struggles as a Japanese American. Not only while in the internment camps but also as a Japanese American living within a society that vilified and discriminated against her. And, it was through her stories that I was able to overcome my own obstacles. Her ability to discuss these painful memories, with no resentment, gave me the courage to embrace the heritage and identity of my self and family.
I want to offer the power of storytelling to other Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, both young and old, whose lives have been impacted by the internment camps. I want to preserve these experiences, so that future generations are reminded of past struggles and adversity. And, I want to create a location where we can share these memories, so that we may educate, empower and inspire others, just as my grandmother has done for me.
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