Community Engagement Spotlight: Jack Rouse
Eliana Massey: How did you build a relationship with your community partner, Utah Japantown Advocates?
Jack Rouse: I moved to Salt Lake City in the spring of 2024 right when all of the hockey team-initiated redevelopment talks around Japantown start. As someone new to the city, I thought following this story closely would be a good way for me to understand how civic politics work in my new home. I was also intrigued by the formation of SLC Next Gen JA, which was Utah Japantown Advocates’ original name. They billed themselves as a younger generation of Japantown protectors, and they were also an inter-faith group. Their first website listed each member’s affiliation to either the Japanese Church of Christ or the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple. As a young religious person, it’s kind of hard to find other young religious people. A lot of places of worship are losing congregants as older members pass on, so seeing young people who not only were identified with religious institutions but were using those affiliations as a source of inspiration for political involvement was very unique. Additionally, there are also stereotypes about Utah being exclusively LDS folks or Asians being politically passive model minorities, so they were plenty of reasons that Salt Lake City’s Japantown immediately won a spot in my heart.
As a curious person and academic, I started researching the history of Japantown so that I could study the contemporary developments with more context. Pretty quickly I found out that the moment that is often used to define the community’s history is the construction of the Salt Palace Convention Center in the mid-1960s, which was a nearly fatal wound to the continuity of social life in Japantown. Many of the Japanese American-run businesses were displaced and the community lost its tight-knit feel and cohesion.
Since we’re seeing nearly parallel events today with the Delta Center and Sports, Entertainment, Culture, and Convention District now being the engine for displacement, I was curious how folks tried to resist and organize against the Salt Palace. But I could hardly find anything. We have incredibly rich archives at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library for studying Japanese American history in Utah, but I could find very little documentation of how the community responded to the existential threat of the Salt Palace.
I met Kenzie Hirai, who is one of the founding Utah Japantown Advocates members, through volunteering with the Food Justice Collective. At the time, she led volunteers out of the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple’s kitchen in making vegan meals to give away to food insecure folks. I talked to her about Japantown and UJA while I volunteered. I shared what I had learned through my archival work and gave her a few copies of interesting primary source documents.
In the spring of 2025, I reached out to UJA officially to ask to talk about a collaborative research project. I told them why I was interested in them and Japantown, what I had learned so far, and what I could offer in terms of deliverables, expertise, financial resources, and time. Going in, I was open to using my research to try to answer any question they felt was relevant. For example, I could have just as easily done a comparative analysis of other similar environmental and spatial justice movements against displacement, written a critical history of the forces shaping Japantown’s presence in the 21st century, or really whatever would have been of use to the movement.
Eliana Massey: Please describe your community-engaged research project. What have you learned through the process of this project?
Jack Rouse: Really quickly, we settled on collecting oral histories, both as a means of preserving stories about Japantown in its heyday, but we also wanted to use the interviews as an opportunity to talk to elders about their visions for a revitalized Japantown. The local Japanese American community has done an amazing job preserving their own history through publications like Japanese Americans in Utah and a large batch of oral history interviews done in the 1970s. UJA already had a historical preservation committee, so I joined with them and we went about setting our intentions for the project, developing our list of questions, and identifying potential interviewees.
It was important to me that we didn’t just talk to people that knew the Japantown of old. I also wanted to interview the UJA members about their experience growing up engaging with Japantown in its current state, and their understanding of the current redevelopment threat, their motivations for organizing with UJA, and their dreams for the future too. Beginning the project by interviewing UJA members helped me practice my interviewing skills and let me demonstrate to my community partner what an oral history interview was like. These conversations were critical for building trust and rapport, and I think they are just as important to have preserved as the more “historical” memories of Japantown. So there’s really two batches of interviews, testimony from the elders and perspectives from today. For every interview with a community elder, a UJA member is there with me as co-interviewer, so I feel I get amazing insight into the community from insiders and also benefit from the trust that comes from that. In the end, I’m really just facilitating meaningful conversations that are hard to have without the formal structure of an oral history interview.
As of today, we’ve done fifteen interviews, which will be preserved in the Marriott Archive (and almost certainly made available digitally) and made the UtahJapantownStories.com website which will be included in the upcoming People’s of Utah Revisited project led by the Utah Historical Society.
This whole project has been an amazing opportunity to see something through from conception to completion. Oral histories may seem simple—and at their core, they are—it’s just a few people talking. But there’s so much that happens before and after the interview. For example, a major task for this project was developing legal paperwork for the interviewee to sign that would allow Utah Japantown Advocates to use the interviews however they wanted, including potentially commercially, while allowing the Marriott Library to also be able to store and disseminate copies, but without someone of the same privileges. This was critical to making sure that these interviews can continue to be tools for UJA as they try to raise public awareness about the history of Japantown and try to affect the best outcome they can in the present comment.
Every single time I go into an interview, I’m so anxious and scared. And every single time, folks have been so kind, generous, and patient with me. Within fifteen minutes of sitting down together, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and a sense of purpose. Central to this project is an ethic of care, which even extends to me too. This project would be impossible without the access to the community that UJA has afforded me and I’m deeply aware that UJA members donate so much time to support me.
One way of paying that back has been being proactive about seeking out grants and community partnerships. We’ve been able to pay interviewees $50 for their time and we’ve gotten funding to purchase archival quality recording equipment so that UJA can continue interviews after I graduate. Additionally, partnering with Utah Historical Society has been a major boon for our project. Preserving people’s life stories is great, but you need to make sure people know they’re out there. So teaming up with UHS for the People’s History in Utah Revisited project was an amazing way to get the word out there about the work we’ve done.
Eliana Massey: What impact do you hope your community-engaged research will have?
Jack Rouse: I’m not sure what Japantown will look like in 5, 10, or 50 years. No one is. Japantown just does not have the same collective power that the Smith Entertainment Group has. So, as a community, Japantown has had to be flexible and reactive to what’s going on since they’re aware they’re not fully in control of the outcomes. To me, the oral history project is something worthwhile regardless of its ability to influence outcomes. It’s a way of communicating to the person I’m sitting across from that their life and story matters. So at a very local level, I hope that these interviews become important community documents and family heirlooms. I hope future researchers find some use in them, but what matters the most to me is that doing community outreach and fostering conversations in the midst of potential displacement shows that the care that members of Japantown have for one another is unconditional. Whether or not Japantown is revitalized, the care will be there and I think these interviews are both a manifestation of that and a way of carrying that forward into the future.
Eliana Massey: Where do you plan to present your research?
Jack Rouse: This semester, I’ll present my research, with an emphasis on the UtahJapantownStories.com site, at the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference in San Francisco, California in March. I’m part of a session titled “Archives and Libraries in Practice: Applications in Geography and GIS Education,” which will provide me the opportunity to meet with other academics who are thinking critically about the interconnections between memory, place, and the tools of the digital humanities.
Additionally, I’ll present virtually at a conference entitled “Where Do We Grow from Here? Environmental Justice and the Politics of Hope” hosted by Colorado State University where I’ll discuss the worldmaking possibilities of oral history as a tool for spatial justice activists.
Eliana Massey: What advice do you have for other students who are interested in community-engaged research?
Jack Rouse: For me the key to this project has been relationship building. I just tried to be up front about as much as I could: I’m probably not going to be able to continue interviewing after I graduate, I’ve never done oral histories before but I’ll do my best to figure it out, and it’s unlikely these interviews have any material bearing on the events impacting Japantown today. I think that honesty went a long way and helped UJA understand how I was approaching the project; transparency has consistently been key. Another way of building trust has been to do a lot of work. I’m in a privileged position of this project being my profession. So, I have to take it seriously, and I enjoy doing so.
I’ve done my best to show up for everything I can, even if I’m not officially recruiting for oral history interviews. Never underestimate “deep hanging out” or the impression that being willing to help put away chairs after an event will make on a community partner—every movement needs people to set out and put away chairs and you can probably do that! I am asking people to share a lot of themselves with me in the interviews and I think that is probably less psychologically weird if they have seen me around at church or community events, too.
Jack Rouse with JeanetteMisaka, a local Japanese American elder.