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