“I grew up in a home where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was revered. We loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
It may come off as a little odd to profess love for a U.S. president who interned over 100,000 people of Japanese descent in a room in Tokyo, to an audience made up of Japanese and Japanese American listeners. But U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel pressed on. “We loved what he did,” he said. “But this doesn’t go down as one of his great moments.”
Emanuel was speaking at a private reception in honor of Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum (JANM) held in his home, with reproductions of works by interned artists on display.
“This is not a great moment for America, and we have to own it,” he told The Japan Times. “This is an act of accountability by the United States dealing with a history that’s shameful and, in my view, a black mark on America.”
Emanuel and his office believe this is the first time a U.S. ambassador to Japan has held an event related to the internment of Japanese Americans. Asked if internment could ever happen again, the ambassador answered quickly that he didn’t think so. Still, he mused, as the grandchild of Jews who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, “Did I ever think anti-Semitism would rise like this in the United States (either)? No.”
The works on display show a wide range of expressions from their professional and amateur makers: “Morning” by Hisako Hibi is a harsh and dystopian depiction of central Utah, the rising sun setting the sky ablaze with a bloody wash; an untitled watercolor by Kango Takamura is a serene scene of people working industriously to clear snow outside barracks; Mine Okubo’s ink on paper illustration of her and her brother, from her graphic memoir “Citizen 13660,” is unsettling in its bold lines and detail.
The illustrations show a bare-bones existence, hastily thrown together walls around one light bulb and a stove to keep an entire family warm. The internees weren’t allowed cameras and made their pigments from what they could find, so these illustrations offer a rare first-hand glimpse of life in the concentration camps. (However, photographer Toyo Miyatake smuggled a camera lens in with his belongings and fashioned the rest of a camera himself, allowing him to surreptitiously photograph the Californian camp called Manzanar.)
What’s striking is how many of the artists had their creative paths interrupted or derailed all together by the incarceration policy. Taneyuki Dan Harada studied under the interned artists who formed the Tanforan Art School, and he had his first solo show in an ironing room at Tule Lake Segregation Center. His oil on canvas “Barracks huddled together” is a colorless, stark scene of the barracks at night, the black roofs resembling graves in their neat and somber rows. Still, lines of light emanating from the houses emit a dim hope. Although it’s not clear why Harada had to give up his art career, he switched to computer programming after the war and didn’t return to painting until after retirement.
Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt forcibly sent an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, to 10 detention camps around the country. “Although it’s American history, not everyone in the country knows about it; it’s not necessarily taught in schools,” said head of JANM, Ann Burroughs.
Robert Fujioka, a fourth-generation Hawaiian Japanese American and the vice chair of JANM’s board of trustees, said there is reticence within the community to talk about the years of internment. Though his mother was sent to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas, as a child, he said, “We never heard anything about it at all.” Only decades later, when his own two sons were doing a project in high school and asked their grandmother about it, did he hear about her experiences for the first time. “It was an awakening for us.”
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