Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor launched World War II, 120,000 ethnic Japanese on the West Coast, more than two-thirds of whom were American citizens by birth, were ordered interned for the duration of the conflict. A “unique combination of factors †American racism, the upward mobility of Japanese Americans, their geographical concentration and the external threat posed by Japanese militarism †created the essential preconditions for the relocation decisions,” historian Roger Daniels has written.
The victims of these circumstances were given one week to settle their affairs and report to camps with what they could carry. The camps were located on government-owned sites. Living quarters, built in haste, were barely habitable at the outset.
Internees imprisoned in these remote camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guarded by armed soldiers in watchtowers. They were housed in tar paper-covered barracks furnished with little more than metal cots and potbellied stoves. Typically, barracks were divided into six one-room family units, measuring 20 by 20 feet.
While incarcerated in these spartan sites, internees sought solace in art, turning wood from discarded scrap lumber and found materials into artworks and furniture to civilize and beautify their bleak surroundings.
In practicing the art of “gaman” †a Japanese word that means to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity †the arts and crafts they created became essential both for simple creature comforts and emotional survival. Internees turned all sorts of found objects into an array of paintings and watercolors, ornamental displays, pendants and pins, purses, tools, musical instruments, toys and games, teapots and furniture. Their artistic expressions included fashioning furniture from scrap lumber, weaving baskets from unraveled twine and making floral arrangements from shells dug up from ancient seabeds.
These achievements and the difficult circumstances under which they were created are showcased in a fascinating exhibition, “The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942‱946,” on view at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) through January 30. It features more than 100 objects that are placed in historical context through archival photographs, artifacts and documentary films.
The exhibition is guest curated by Delphine Hirasuna, a San Francisco-based author and activist, with the cooperation of the Japanese Citizens League. It is based on Hirasuna’s 2005 book, The Art of Gaman .
The display, says SAAM director Elizabeth Broun, “is a beautiful and powerful exhibition that opens a window into a poignant aspect of the American experience.” Hirasuna observes that “The exhibition provides an amazing opportunity to put a human face on the internees who were literally reduced to a serial number while held behind barbed wire fences&The objects they made in camp represent a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. We can’t help looking at these beautiful things and thinking of the individuals who made them.”
At the outset, internees made objects like chairs and racks to hang clothes on as a way to furnish their bare living quarters. No metal was allowed in camps, so their creations were crude from the start.
More creative work followed as a way to pass time and to promote a spirit of community. “During a time of struggle under difficult circumstances, the impulse to create art emerged as a strong force in developing a sense of community,” notes Renwick chief Robyn Kennedy.
Each camp became known for artwork made from local materials. Objects on view reflect stories of perseverance, from the small bird pin that belonged to Hirasuna’s mother, which is the starting point of the exhibition, to toys created for children to the portrait of a mother whose son was serving overseas in the Army.
At every camp, arts and crafts were taught in classrooms by internees with professional backgrounds as artists and craftsmen, as well as by talented amateurs. Others learned by experimenting on their own.
Few were professional artists; shopkeepers, gardeners, farmers (who made up more than half the internees), commercial fishermen and homemakers relied on innovation and ingenuity to create most of the objects on view. They did not see themselves as artists, but regarded their efforts as a pleasant way to make useful things. Items as varied as peach pits, dried seeds, onion-sack strings and old toothbrush handles became materials for art.
As the war progressed, the realization that the internees posed no threat, particularly in their remote locations, caused rules to be relaxed so that internees could search vast empty spaces outside the barbed-wire fences for useful vegetation, rocks and other indigenous materials. If financially able, internees were allowed to order art supplies by mail, and eventually they were supplied with surplus shop equipment and tools.
The camps and their surroundings were frequently depicted. George Tamura, 15 years old, created accomplished, detailed watercolor views of Tule Lake camp on the back of a discarded Army evacuation notice, while Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani painted a skillful Japanese-style evocation of Tule Lake itself. S. Kawamoto painted a detailed vignette of the Santa Fe, N.M., detention camp and its surrounding mountains on a slab of wood, while an unknown artist captured the tar paper-covered barracks and looming Heart Mountain in Wyoming in a painted bas-relief that is one of the exhibition’s highlights. A Mr Toshima ingeniously assembled a miniature replica of a barracks at Rohwer, Ark., out of scrap wood and toothpicks.
One of the best records of daily life in camps was supplied by a pro, Chiura Obata, a former University of California at Berkeley art professor, who kept a visual pen and ink diary. Ruth Asawa, who went on to a career as a sculptor, picked up drawing from watching former illustrators, now fellow internees, practicing drawing. While interned in Rohwer, she created a delicate watercolor, “Lake Bayou,” in 1942.
Notable woodworking objects displayed range from a plain chair to an elaborate Japanese-style display cabinet made of scrap wood and shellac to Buddhist family shrines. At the Topaz, Utah, camp, Kenji Fuji astutely wove twisted crepe paper around wire that was then stiffened with starch to make a delicate basket, and Homei Iseyama carved teapots out of slate stones found in the area.
The preeminent artist in the camps was celebrated sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904‱988), who was born in Los Angeles, and apprenticed with Gutzon Borglum and Constantin Brumidi before launching a distinguished sculpting career in which he synthesized his Japanese heritage and European Modernism into a form of personal expression.
In 1942, he voluntarily entered the Preston, Ariz., camp, where he oversaw the art program. Finding conditions unbearable, Noguchi was able to leave after six months, since his permanent residence in New York was outside the evacuation zones. Before leaving, he completed a smooth, appealing marble bust of actress Ginger Rogers, who had posed the year before.
Another notable internee-artist, Henry Sugimoto, was already well-known internationally when he was interned at Jerome, Ariz., His moving portrait of his mother, surrounded by patriotic artifacts, reflects her concern about another son serving overseas with the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
In a similar vein is a traditional Senninbari vest made by the mother of George Matsushita as he entered the US Army from the Amache, Colo., camp. Bearing the image of a snarling tiger, symbolic of courage, it contained 1,000 French-tied knots, each made by a different person as an expression of good luck and long life. Matsushita wore the vest while serving with the 442nd Regiment in Italy.
Three particularly eye-appealing objects have caught the eye of many viewers. First and foremost: a meticulously detailed “Model Ship” made of carved wood, scrap metal, screws, nails, wire and string by an unknown artist interned in Jerome, Ark. The freighter is believed to be a replica of the vessel that brought the craftsman to America.
Among the many animals in the show, the standout is “Cow,” roughly and accurately carved out of pine wood by Akira Oye, a farmer from Lodi, Calif., interned at Rohwer.
Tiny, attractive bird and animal pins were carved out of scrap wood, sanded and painted by numerous internees, who then glued a safety pin onto the back. Especially notable are nearly a score of precise and colorful pins crafted by internees at Amache, Colo., and Gila River, Ariz.
Also suggesting a high degree of ingenuity as well as sophistication are attractive brooches and corsages made by women at Tule Lake, Calif., and Topaz, Utah, out of shells gathered from nearby dry lake beds. When internees were transferred to other camps, they frequently took their boxes of shells with them and introduced the craft there.
From 1942 to 1945, photographers for the War Relocation Authority, which oversaw the internment camps, documented the evacuation and relocation of Japanese Americans. Internees were barred from having cameras, and government photographs were tightly controlled. The objective was to produce optimistic views of camp life that suggested internees were leading happy lives. Some well-known photographers, notably Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, bucked the system, on occasion recording dark sides of camp life.
After the war, most internment camps were disassembled, but a few have been preserved and are open to the public. They stand as both reminders of a misguided government policy †in 1988, the United States officially apologized for the internments, acknowledging the program was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” †and the indomitable spirit of artistic creativity.
Some 90,000 of those evacuated returned to the West Coast; the remainder dispersed elsewhere in the United States. As Hirasuna puts it in her book, “The lives they knew before the war had disappeared.”
Largely resuming their prewar occupations after the war, “Japanese Americans chose not to talk about it [life in camps] because it stirred a sense of shame and humiliation, the sorrow and remembrance of justice denied, and fear of arousing anti-Japanese backlash,” says Hirasuna.
In spite of the high quality of items made in the camps, many Japanese Americans tossed them aside when they were released from internment. For decades, these objects remained largely forgotten.
Hirasuna contacted dozens of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to gather items for her book and exhibitions. As she accurately describes, she found “lovely objects, folk art, Americana with a Japanese twist” that were “made by prisoners in concentration camps.” They are, she concludes, “testaments to their perseverance, their resourcefulness, their spirit and humanity.”
Hirasuna’s book, The Art of Gaman , 2005, published by Ten Speed Press sells for $35, hardcover.
The Renwick Gallery is on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW. For information, www.americanart.si.edu or 202-633-7970.
