Japanese-American Outside Space: Memory and History

In the wake of the 1941 Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor the United States Government established Japanese Internment Camps and required the relocation of all people of Japanese decent living on the Pacific Coast. On February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which provided the guidelines and rational the subsequent internment of roughly one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans. In the far reaching deserts of the West rough military–like internment camps were constructed using military barracks organized into rows and blocks. For an undetermined amount of time these camps were to become the homes, businesses, school and church for most of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of the United States during World War II. Though their circumstances may have been bleak and many if not most were harshly treated the stories they share and the art work created provides evidence for the resiliency that any group of people can choose to have when placed under difficult conditions. This essay will examine the visual aspects of a traditional Japanese garden created in the Manzanar Camp located in central California and compare this garden with an acrylic on canvas painting by Roger Shimomura from 1978 as a later response to internment camp experience to show the importance of personal memory and the role of cultural traditions in the historical reconstruction of Japanese Internment Camp period.

In her book Visual Account of Loss, author Jane Dusselier examines the art made within the American-Japanese internment camps and the culture, and their trials, they represent. The author presents the American’s (of Japanese descent) as honest, respectable and hardworking people who were wrongly interred but still managed to make the best of the what they had. From this book figure 20 shows a monochrome photograph of modest yet traditionally arranged Japanese rock garden; similar gardens were common place throughout the ten internment camps. The interned gardener, though photographed, is undocumented by the photographer Dorothea Lange. Evidence for the location of the garden, Japanese internment camp, is provided by the tar paper clad military barracks stretching the whole width of the picture plane. The walls of the barracks show the exposed evenly spaced vertical wooden strips that hold up the long horizontal sheets of tar paper. Though unintentional on the part of the United States Military who constructed these barracks, this interplay between the vertical wooden strips and horizontal bands of black tar paper is visually reminiscent of the wooden lattice framework with translucent white paper panels of the Japanese shoji screen. The rocks and desert plant life is arranged in a pyramidal composition with a large Y shaped tree stump at it apex. The remainder of the composition consists of ten to fifteen large round and angular boulders with some in smaller clusters and some on their own. Intermingled in the boulders are a handful of desert vegetation and gnarled dry branches. In contrast to the rough edges of the dry shrubbery and rough rocks stands a pond of glassy water that provides a mirrored foundation for the overall composition. In the memory of a young Nisei fisherman, Mas Tanibata remembers his first views of the Manzanar Camp a “miserable place” however in time camp artists changed the landscape with such traditional Japanese gardening techniques, adapted to the dry desert climate that Tanibata would later say “these gardens made the camp beautiful.”¹

The memory of the internment camp experience that this photographed gardener or Mas Tanibata lived is far different than that of artist Roger Shimomura. Though Shimomura was interned as a toddler with the rest of his family the memories he embeds into his art are supported by the written histories of his grandmother.

Roger Shimomura's Minidoka, No. 1 (Notification) from 1978 depicts a traditional patriarchal Japanese, in this case Japanese-American, family as they receive the notification from the United States Governments ordering them to forsake their belongings and be transported to relocation camps. A wide range of emotions are presented in the forms of the family members. The fleshy limbs of an innocent toddle, Shimomura himself, cling to the billowing folds of his mothers salmon and lilac colored kimono. The shocked mother's loose limp body, while hidden in clothing, is evident by her bent knees and upward arching arms held up by her two female, similarly curvilinear, companions. In contrast to the downtrodden women the rounded forms of the men, particularly the two foremost, present emotions of both anger and the sturdiness of a family patriarch. The largest figure in this acrylic on canvas painting is an elderly Japanese man, who's aged eyes are deeply focused of a large white paper scroll. The wrinkles in his round face are constructed from thin black lines, to create a wavy aged brow, crowfeet eyes and low sagging jowls. These simple black line details not only help in the patriarchal narrative but also harken back to the traditional art of Japanese wood block printing. Behind the wrinkled face of the grandfather stands a smooth faced mature male, possibly Shimomura's father, his shoulders are angled and his right arm shoots to the sky it fury over the notification. Other characters in the painting, such as a mature man looking fore-longingly at the iconic Mount Fuji in the distance or the woman on a simple geometric wooden patio while another peeks out from a shoji-like glass sliding door, instill the concept of the family unit and this lives displaced as a result of the War Relocation Act. Much on the constructed space in this painting is made up of grid-works, the yellow and brown tatami floor mats and the wooden patio balustrade are not unlike the tar paper background in the image of the Mazanar Garden. This historical aesthetic is made even more evident in later paintings by Shimomura as the tar-papered barracks actually take the form of a shoji screen such an Enemy Alien #2 from 2006 providing further evidence of the revived interest of later generations of Japanese-Americans toward the internment camps through the process of art. In the essay Internment and Identity in Japanese American Art by Kristine Kuramitsu the author explains that though Shimomura had no direct memories of his time in camp the process of interpreting his grandmothers dairies into acrylic painting helped him understand his own history.²

          In comparing these two mutually exclusive works it is important to consider the time gap between the creation of each. While one depicts the interned Japanese making the best of life though surround by the conditions of the bleak camp and the other depicts a time just before the creation of the camps but created long after their closing both attempt to reconcile the memory of the tragic period.³

          This idea of the links and gaps between history and memory is again seen in Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660, a compilation of sketches drawn during the artists time in camp and then later captioned with her memories of this time. Like Shimomura, Okubo's ink-and-pen drawings use humor and graphic narration to smoothly integrate the larger themes that surround the interment camps.⁴ The visual aspects of the documentary style photograph of a traditional Japanese garden and Shimomura's Minidoka, No. 1 (Notification) both demonstrate the importance of personal memory and the role of cultural traditions in the historical reconstruction of Japanese Internment Camp period.

1Jane Dusselier (2008), “Visual Account of Loss,” pp. 1-13; “Remaking Inside Places,” pp. 14-50; “Re-territorializing Outside Spaces,” pp. 51-88

2Kristine Kuramitsu (1995), “Internment and Identity in Japanese American Art,” pp. 619-658

3Marita Sturken (1997), “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment,” pp. 687-707

4Xiaojing Zhou (2007), “Spatial Construction of the ‘Enemy Race:’ Miné Okubo’s Visual Strategies in Citizen 13660,” pp. 51-73

Southwest Christian Seminary - Part 3

The relationship between the interior and exterior continues in the web-like garden, with a grassy arbor on the east side and garden on the west side of the chapel section. Acting as a mental extension of the interior chapel the outdoor space is made up of ten more triangular columns, now fully circumlocutory. The shape of these unique columns in plan view is that of geometrically triangular star polygons, or concave equilateral hexagon, that tapers towards the ground. Each column is adorned with concentric triangular forms, continuing the trinity motif. Each of the exterior concrete columns is connected in a web-like pattern by horizontal concrete slabs for a roof-like structure for the arbor. This roof-life structure acts as a continuation of the stepped blue roof that dominates the composition.
            The space created by these heavy concrete columns and roof-like structure is both intimate and free-flowing, both spacious and human scale. One can feel both the security and firmness of the structure and also easily look beyond the structure to the heavens above. The grassy arbor to the west is uniform and almost maze-like, while the east side garden, not part of the original design, is structured around a water fountain which faces toward the chapel wall. This water feature and large concrete paving stones create an enclosure to the otherwise exterior space.
            To Wright Organic-Architecture did not simply means "of nature," but rather that the design feels natural in the space. The principles of Organic-Architecture are embodied into the design of the First Christian Church of Phoenix through the building’s relationship to its landscape, in the variety of ways the building harmonizes with the nature of its materials, natural and geometric form and the use of a natural spectrum of colors. Like his own beloved Taliesin West Wright utilized locally harvested natural materials, dramatic roof lines and a playful interaction between inside and outside space to create a space which is aesthetically completely different from his earlier Prairie Style, yet both clearly reflect his architectural philosophies that would make him one of the celebrated architects in history.

Southwest Christian Seminary - Part 2

The church's dominating diamond-shaped stair-stepped ridged blue roof, triangular pillars and the use of a construction method that Wright called “desert masonry” combine to make the First Christian Church a rare example of Wright's Organic-Architecture in the Arizona desert. Awarded Wright's red signature tile upon completion, the First Christian Church sits on the corner of Glendale and 7th Avenue. As with the highly stylized flower motif in the Hollyhock House of 1922 and the round motif found at the Johnson Wax Administration Build of 1939, Wright repeated a triangle, and diamond, motif throughout the design for the First Christian Church. The triangle motif was used to represent the Holy Trinity and to encourage worshipers to look to the heavenly realms. The largest section of the building houses the congregation chapel. This section's exterior is dominated by a sprawling diamond-shaped roof, painted blue-green to mimic the appearance of the oxidized copper roof of Wright's original design. This section of the roof is almost tortoise-shell or scale-like with large triangular or saw-tooth clerestory windows along one ridge that increase in size and culminate at an angular spire at the roof's center. These clerestory windows are infused with stained glass, which at midday shine in a variety of blues, reds, and greens. Though still ridged, copper-like and low pitched, the other roof sections over the two-story classrooms and auxiliary space are not nearly as dramatic and help to emphasize the chapel section. The triangle form continues as a decorative motif along the thick fascia of the deep roof overhang.

Below the dominating mass of the roof structure are angled walls made from the large string of smooth curtain windows, flat unadorned concrete and rough stone walls making the body of the structure. The large curtain windows allow natural Arizona sunlight to flood the chapel. between these sets of glass are twenty large triangular columns, these columns start the pattern that moves toward the exterior garden and arbor spaces. The remainder of the structure is a steel frame clad in Wright's own technique called "desert masonry," unique in that the twenty tons large slabs of flat-faced stones were harvested from the 600 acres that surround the Taliesin West complex. These rough walls were created by methodically adding each stone into the makeup of the concrete forms as the concrete was poured. The desert masonry walls are also used to create jutting triangular second story patios, stairways, and the angled bell tower.

Photo Copyrights: Ben Pearson

Southwest Christian Seminary - Part 1

In 1949 Frank Lloyd Wright designed a large complex using his own principles of Organic-Architecture and building technique learned in the construction of his own Taliesin West (1937, Scottsdale, AZ) for the Southwest Christian Seminary in Glendale, AZ. Because of financial hardship on the part of the Seminary, the complex was never constructed in Wright's lifetime. Reverend William Speas Boice of the First Christian Church in Phoenix was a follower of Wright's architecture since his days as a soldier in World War II, and though Wright had been dead for over a decade Reverend Boice wanted his new congregational building to be built using the plans for the Southwest Christian Seminary. After a rigorous petition to the architect' s widow Olga Lloyd Wright and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Reverend Boice and the First Christian Church broke ground for the new building in 1970. It was completed in 1972 and the bell tower added in 1978, twenty-nine years after it was originally designed.

Photo Copyrights: Ben Pearson 

Frank Lloyd Wright

In a 1952 article for Architectural Record magazine the self-proclaimed “greatest architect of all time,” Frank Lloyd Wright discusses, in his own cryptic way, Modern Architecture and that manner in which it is, or was at the time, falling into the “gutter of fashion.” Wright argues that the contemporary version of Modern Architecture is merely an offspring of his own Organic-Architecture and deviations run the risk of becoming styles—like the symmetrical brickwork of countless Georgian homes or the white stucco with dark brown half-timber of the Tudor homes.


Wright revered the American experience and believed that democracy was the best form of government. Throughout his life, he endeavored to create a new architecture that reflected the American democratic ideal, an architecture based solely on America's democratic values and human dignity. For Wright Organic-Architecture was far more than an aesthetic style, rather a new way to look at the structures in which society thrives. In a 1908 article for Architectural Record Wright lays out the integral parts of Organic-Architecture. One important attribute of Wright's principles of Organic-Architecture is a building’s relationship to its landscape, the nature of its materials, the use of a natural spectrum of colors.

The Aline Barnsdall Hollyhock House. East Hollywood, Los Angeles, California

Photo Copyrights: Ben Pearson

Modern Architecture

Modern Architecture is a term used to describe architectural factions that were developed from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day. These styles could include Bauhaus, Art Moderne, Art Deco, Craftsman, Brutalism, International, Neo-historicism, Postmodernism, the Prairie Style and Organic-Architecture. The advancements of the Industrial Revolution, as well as global social and cultural changes, had brought to a growing and expanding world new ideas that contributed to the conditions of modernity. Technological advances including the locomotive, the automobile, structural steel, large panel glass, electricity, photography, new forms of politics and the urbanization of modern cities helped to produce a modern mindset.

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