A new art exhibit at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon features artists whose grandparents were interned by the U.S. government during World War II, bringing hope and healing from generational trauma.
“Resilience — A Sansei Sense of Legacy,” a traveling art exhibit curated by Gail Enns and Jerry Takigawa, is open to the public at the Portland museum until Dec. 22.
“The art in ‘Resilience,’ in many different ways, is about a single common event — the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry because of their race and not because of anything they did,” Takigawa, curator and one of eight featured artists, said.
Each of the artists expresses their point of view as a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, using traditional Japanese methods in their work. The exhibit features art by critically acclaimed artists Kristine Aono, Roger Shimomura, Wendy Maruyama, Reiko Fujii, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Tom Nakashima, Na Omi Judy Shintani and Takigawa.
Admission is free for “Friends of JAMO,” $8 for adults, $6 for seniors, $5 for students and free for children 11 and younger.
“Essentially, it’s pretty much glossed over with limited exposure and euphemisms in a lot of ways that it’s pretty much dismissed as nothing of importance,” Takigawa said of Japanese American internment in the United States. “But it kind of is a big deal because it’s something that is repeating itself in other forms today. So you need to know that, like a lot of the things that this country has done, we’re not quite as ‘the good guys’ and as great as we think we are.”
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 for the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps, stating it was in response to the Japanese military’s December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
In turn, more than 125,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were born in the United States, were displaced from their homes and imprisoned at 10 large internment camps and dozens of smaller incarceration sites — including the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, now known as the Portland Expo Center, in which more than 3,500 Japanese Americans were incarcerated. Additional Japanese American Portlanders were relocated to the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho among more than 13,000 prisoners.
The final Japanese American concentration camp was closed in March 1946 — more than six months after the official end of World War II.
Before internment, Portland had one of the largest Japanese American populations on the West Coast. Portland’s Japantown once spanned from Northwest First Avenue to Northwest Sixth Avenue and Northwest Glisan Street to Southwest Ankeny Street. Most Japanese Americans never returned to their businesses or homes, which were repossessed by the U.S. government, and Portland’s Japantown was no exception.
“The Japanese American Museum of Oregonx is the only remaining Japanese American-run organization that connects to the history of a thriving community,” Mark Takiguchi, interim deputy director at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, said.
Now, that final remaining Japanese American-run organization hosts an art exhibit shedding light on what caused the area and many others like it to change so much, while highlighting the strength and healing of the families left to pick up the pieces.
Jerry Takigawa
Takigawa, a heralded photographer who also is a curator of the exhibit, most recently received the LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award. Takigawa’s photography series within the exhibit is called “Balancing Cultures.”
“These images add humanity to the historical record — facts require testimony to be remembered,” Takigawa’s artist statement reads. “I seek to give voice to the feelings my family suppressed; reminding us that hysteria, racism, and economic exploitation are still a force in our country today. The camps designed to assuage these reactions were transformed into a shadow legacy for a Japanese American generation and their descendants. If silence sanctions — documentation is resistance.”
Takigawa’s photography piece, “Traces of Misconduct,” shows a group of four Japanese Americans. Within the group, one woman is smiling. The four people are blurred behind Japanese writing called kanji, written in red. There is a small piece of paper in the foreground that reads:
“We, a group of 174, left memorable San Francisco and arrived State Capitol Sacramento at 7AM, Feb. 23, 1942. After 3 days and 3 nights on the train, we arrived at Bismarck City, North Dakota (Fort Lincoln Relocation Center) at 1PM Feb. 26, 1942. — Shigeo Kita at Bismarck, May 26, 1942“
“The little piece of paper really was a page from my grandfather’s address book and somebody, a friend of his that he met in prison, in military prison, wrote that in his address book and I think what it was was essentially kind of documenting what had happened to them in a way that if we disappear there would be some kind of record of what happened,” Takigawa said of “Traces of Misconduct.”
Roger Shimomura
“Barbed wire fences and armed guard towers surrounded the camps, with soldiers ordered to shoot on sight anyone who tried to leave,” Shimomura, a Higuchi Research Award and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award winner, wrote in his artist statement. “Official government rhetoric emphasized that this was for the protection of Japanese Americans. But if these measures were there to keep hostile people out, why were the machine guns pointed inward towards the incarcerees?”
Shimomura’s painting, “American Infamy,” illustrates this contradiction.
Tom Nakashima
In “Barrier Against The Wind,” Nakashima, a multitalented award-winning visual artist, uses a byōbu folding screen — an item used for design and room separation in Japanese culture. One side of the folding screen shows a story of internment and how it has affected him.
The other side of the screen shows the article “Concentration Camps: US Style,” written by his uncle, Ted Nakashima. The article is about the true conditions of the concentration camps. Ted Nakashima and his wife, Masako Nakashima, were moved to the infamous Tule Lake concentration camp as punishment for writing that article.
The U.S. government sent “no-no boys” — a term used for Japanese Americans who said they wouldn’t denounce the Japanese emperor or go to war for the United States in a questionnaire internees were required to fill out — to Tule Lake.
Wendy Maruyama
“No-no boys” are discussed at further length in Maruyama’s piece in the exhibit, titled “A Question of Loyalty.”
Maruyama, a National Endowment for the Arts grant winner, uses images of Tule Lake transferred on either end of a piece of ash wood. The word “YES” is imposed over one photo, and the word “NO” is imposed on the other. A sliding piece of wood bearing the two questions regarding loyalty to the U.S. government is used to cover one photo or the other.
Maruyama’s piece illustrates that for internees, the answer to the questions did little to change their situations — the U.S. imposed internment on them all the same.
Na Omi Judy Shintani
Shintani’s “Deconstructed Kimono” shows that while the garment has pieces cut from it, it retains its lovely structure.
“The process becomes a strange and wonderful paradox, that by cutting away, I feel closer to my Japanese heritage,” Shintani, an Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Sponsorship Award winner, wrote in her artist statement. “As a descendant of a family who endured the trauma of incarceration, my art is my process of transforming, healing, and journeying on my path. Each artwork was created with a healing intention — for my family, my ancestors, my culture, America, and me."
Reiko Fujii
Fujii, a filmmaker and visual artist, also worked with a kimono, using stained glass with photographs of internment camp survivors sewn together with copper wire.
“The kimono is designed to be worn and to make the sound of wind chimes when the glass frames strike against one another,” Fujii, a Susan Seddon Boulet Award winner, wrote in her artist statement. “After making my first Glass Ancestral Kimono, I learned that during the Obon Festival in Japan, the ancestors are often called back with the sound of wind chimes.”
She wears the kimono in her documentary, “Detained Alien Enemy,” where she interviewed survivors of the camps.
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
Nakashima Degarrod’s “Mending the Past” features prints on handmade cotton bolls.
“I am a Japanese Chilean Sansei,” Nakashima Degarrod, an accomplished ethnographer and artist, wrote in her artist statement. “I am a descendant of parents who lost their families in the bombing of Hiroshima, and of a Japanese Peruvian father who was forced to leave the country or face deportation to the (United States) and incarceration in a U.S. concentration camp due to his Japanese heritage.”
Nakashima Degarrod, a former Harvard fellow and Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Research grant winner, said her piece, including the process itself, represents healing.
“The handmade 100 cotton bolls I have created for this exhibit express the feelings of being scattered and displaced as they were conveyed to me by my family,” Nakashima Degarrod wrote in her artist statement. “They are also derived from stories I have gathered from descendants of Japanese Peruvians who were taken to camps in the United States, then compelled to stay in the (United States) or return — not to their South American countries of birth — but to Japan. Each petal of the boll tells fragments of stories to serve as a catalyst for the release of more memories and reflections.
“The process of making the papers used for the cotton bolls became a ritual for healing and releasing my family wounds by merging the fibers from the herb yerba, known for its healing qualities in Latin America, and the mulberry fibers used traditionally in Japan for paper-making.”
Kristine Aono
Aono’s piece “Daruma of Resilience,” offers an interpretation of Daruma dolls, which symbolize perseverance, among other things.
Daruma dolls are sold with blank spaces for the eyes for the owner to paint on. The first eye is painted on when setting a goal, and the next one is painted on after the goal is achieved. Aono’s “Daruma of Resilience” is shown adorned with documents from camp survivors and their families. One eye is painted, but there is hope in the empty space.
"I am a Sansei, born to parents who experienced (World War II) as children incarcerated with their families for three and a half years in Minidoka, Jerome and Rohwer,” Aono, a former MacDowell Fellowship recipient and National Endowment for the Arts grant winner, wrote in her artist statement. “Raising their children in Middle America, my well-meaning parents tried to bury the shame of their incarceration by alluding to “camp” as a benign place from their childhood. Eventually, we civil rights-era Sansei would unearth the truth, and that knowledge of our family histories would shape who we are and how we approach issues such as justice, racial prejudice, and civil rights.
“I address these topics in my art as a way to keep these stories alive and highlight their relevance to our present day.”
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