The organization was founded in 1996 with a primary goal of collecting personal testimonies from Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.

[5] Densho is a 501(c) 3 organization, with tax-exempt status, founded in Seattle in 1996 as a project of the Japanese American Chamber of Commerce of Washington State.

Densho continues to interview survivors of the camps and others who can describe how the forced removal and detention affected people's lives.

The broader goal is to inform the American public about the false basis for the mass incarceration, so that a similar injustice would not affect another minority group in the future.

These efforts expand and enrich Densho’s mission by drawing connections with the Japanese American experience and other little-recorded and seldom discussed stories of discrimination, racism, and stereotyping faced by many ethnic communities, both in the past and today.

In the unit "Dig Deep", they explore the media and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II by asking the question, "How do members of a democracy become fully informed so that they can participate responsibly and effectively?"

The Densho Encyclopedia is a free, publicly accessible resource that covers many key concepts, people, events, and organizations relevant to the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans.