Being Japanese American during World War II: East Coast Stories

American Flag Over Barbed Wire Fence, by Koho Yamamoto.

Having grown up in California, I know some things about the West Coast Japanese American World War II experience of evacuation and imprisonment. But I know little about what happened here on the East Coast. So it was a treat to catch the eye-opening exhibit "If they came for me today...East Coast Stories," part of Community Works NYC's "Japanese American Internment Project," which (too bad for you), closes today at the Interchurch Center Treasure Room Gallery on Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights.

A series of portraits, biographies, reminiscences and artwork tells the story of seven Japanese Americans who were affected in different ways. Some were born and grew up in New York and only learned later the various ways that their parents were persecuted during the war.

Others, like Masako "Koho" Yamamoto were imprisoned on the West Coast, and then made their way east after being released. Yamamoto was locked up in Topaz, Utah, and then moved to the high-security Tule Lake prison camp, where those who refused to renounce loyalty to Japan or agree to serve in the U.S. armed forces were shunted off to. There, ignoring the deplorable conditions, she wrote poetry and studied ink brush painting under Chiura Obata, a widely admired artist and UC Berkeley emeritus professor.

Describing the above painting, Yamamoto says, "They treated us like prisoners even though we were American citizens." Recalling a time when a group of Obata sensei's students came to visit him at Tule Lake, she writes, "They were crying, saying he looked like he was in prison standing behind the barbed wire fence. He first said, 'Don't cry.' Then he added, 'From where I'm standing, you look like the ones who are in jail.' He had great wit." He coped, in other words, with the means that were left to him.

Toyo Miyatake's presence grows in L.A.'s Little Tokyo

On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I met with three people who are making a difference in the L.A Nikkei community, Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center and president of the Little Tokyo Historical Society, and Vicky Murakami-Tsuda and Yoko Nishimura of the Japanese American National Museum.

Little Tokyo is no longer the sleepy enclave of Nisei-run stores and restaurants that I remember, its whiff of modern-day Japan emanating from the New Otani Hotel. There are fewer Japanese residents now, a burgeoning Korean population, and an active night-life scene animated by hipsters of all nationalities. The wildly popular Kogi BBQ-to-go truck, which makes regular stops in Little Tokyo to dispense Korean-Mexican hybrid comfort food (kimchee quesadillas!), is emblematic of the new Little Tokyo.   

En route from Curry House in Weller Court to LTSC’s offices on East Third Street, Watanabe showed me another change, one that harks back to the even earlier time of the pre-War Little Tokyo Issei. A newly named street, Toyo Miyatake Way, and a full-scale bronze relief of the pioneering Issei photographer now draw the viewer's eye in front of the Sakura Crossing luxury apartment complex on San Pedro Street between East Second and Third Streets. Watanabe, whose passion is preserving Little Tokyo History, convinced Sakura Crossing’s developer, Related, that the street and relief would be an ideal way to give back to the community, and the new landmarks were inaugurated in February before a crowd that included Watanabe, city dignitaries, proud Miyatake family members and Related representatives.

Miyatake is most famous for smuggling camera parts into Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp where he and his family were imprisoned in April 1942. First surreptitiously (cameras were forbidden in all 10 concentration camps), then, as rules loosened and he gained the trust of the prison director, openly, Miyatake took 1,500 photographs of Manzanar. The relief, which is modeled on a photograph of Miyatake believed to have been taken right after the war, bears this quotation: “Smuggling a lens into Manzanar, this is my duty, to document camp life so this kind of injustice never happens again.”

Miyatake and his family could have relocated to Salt Lake City, Chicago, or New York, as some Japanese did to avoid evacuation and imprisonment amid the rabid anti-Japanese fervor that swept the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead, the fine art and Japanese society portrait photographer, then 47, chose to stay. He was forced to shutter his Little Tokyo photographic studio, but requested that his family be evacuated and imprisoned with the Little Tokyo residents that he felt most kinship with, rather than his East Los Angeles neighbors. It was in Little Tokyo's effervescent cultural and arts scene of the 1920s where he first made his name, and became the go-to photographer to record births, graduations, weddings—any event of note in the personal and civic lives of L.A. Japantown's residents.

As his reputation grew, Miyatake and his wife Hiroko became tireless hosts to a stream of Japanese dignitaries from film stars to athletes. Before and after the war, a trip to Los Angeles by a celebrated Japanese national almost inevitably involved a visit to the Toyo Miyatake Studio to pose for a portrait. “The portrait file in his studio is in itself a history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan,” wrote the Japanese photographer and editor Eikoh Hosoe; Miyatake played the role of a “private consular representative, taking care of the Japanese who visited the United States.” Miyatake also landed jobs as personal photographer to Thomas Mann and John Barrymore, and became a disciple of Edward Weston, whose work he tirelessly promoted.

Where Miyatake’s career would have gone had he not been imprisoned during World War II is unknowable, but his contribution to the documentation of the unjust and unconstitutional prison camp experience is clear cut. Happily, there seems to be a growing appreciation of Miyatake. Little Tokyo’s first tribute to him, sculptor Nobuho Nagasawa's  bronze replica of his hand-made camera, is on view in front of the Japanese American National Museum on East First Street. An exhibit of Miyatake’s photographs is showing, for a short time longer, at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. I’m glad to see the addition of Toyo Miyatake Way and the bronze relief—further assurance that one of our cultural heroes will not soon be forgotten.

David Bouley's apple foyer

In pursuit of another story recently, I had the chance to sit down with David Bouley, the brilliantly creative chef who has staked out a corner of Tribeca as his own laboratory for refined French fare, pretty patisserie products, Austrian explorations and authentic Japanese food. His downtown empire is constantly in a state of flux, so the tiny space that used to be called “Upstairs” will become Bouley Studio and the former French-Italian hybrid Secession (in an even older incarnation, it was the Austro-Hungarian Danube)  will soon open as Brushstroke, a kaiseki and sushi restaurant done in collaboration with Japan’s Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka.

The chef had just returned from Japan and was raving about the fantastic vegetables he encountered in Kyoto: turnips, carrots, daikon, cabbages and round eggplants. “Kyoto eggplants are the best,” he told me, “you can eat them like an apple.” Of course he brought back seeds and will try to grow them here in New York. We shared a moment of worry about the Tohoku earthquake, and the chef reckoned that the record closeness of the moon to the earth at the time could have been a factor in that natural disaster.

Walking through the Brushstroke as it was being readied to open felt like being in a  Japanese woodworker’s atelier: the long, narrow room was filled with rough-hewn wood set at asymmetrical angles, glowing light and busy Japanese workers. The artisans and many of the materials for the restaurant are from Japan, and the room (like the food, I hope) promises to be stunning.

But what I really wanted to show you was the famous foyer to the flagship Bouley. In the restaurant’s first incarnation of the late ’80s, a dreamy country-French maison filled with flowers, the chef placed crates of apples in the entrance. According to Bouley, they, like so much of what he does, harked back to his childhood in Connecticut. Bouley explains, “The apples and quinces smelled so good at my grandmother’s farm. My brothers and my sister and I used to hide among the quinces, and my mother and my grandmother both put quinces in with the sheets and towels. We grew up with that, and having a real connection to what was happening outdoors.”

The tradition of always having fresh apples in his restaurant foyer, however, actually began as a mistake. The chef had gone to the theater and in his haste, left some crates of apples there. When he returned, the scent was so magical that they became a fixture. At the current Bouley—more sumptuously attired in rich silks and velvets, and hung with vibrant paintings of the southern French countryside—the foyer presentation, too, has undergone a makeover. Bouley had high-tech stainless steel shelving constructed for his apples, 3,900 in all. But it is the foyer during the fall Concord grape season that really makes people stop in their tracks, says Bouley, as they take in the rich, musky scent with amazement. “They step in, they stop, and they just look around,” he says. That alone is worth a trip come October.

Friends With Differences: Lange and Adams at the Oakland Museum of California

When you are researching a topic, somehow relevant stories seem to appear all around you. So it was with this Wall Street Journal story today, on two photography sections in the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California. One is on the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, and one on Group f/64, a group of Bay Area photographers that included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

The two exhibitions highlight two opposing currents in the fertile Northern California photographic scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Lange, who learned her craft as a studio photographer, was radicalized by the poverty she witnessed during the Depression and the migrant farm workers she photographed for the Farm Security Administration. She viewed herself as a documentarian; technique was secondary to her attempt to honestly portray the dispossessed.

Adams and his group argued for a move beyond the romantic, gauzy Pictorialism of the nineteenth century, and for photography as a pure art form. It could be abstract, reflecting the modernist themes emerging in the fine art world at the time, or realistic depictions of nature that, like Adams’ work, reflected the timeless and the sublime through subtle and exact calibrations of framing, aperture, light and developing techniques.

William Meyers’ Journal article discusses the sometimes prickly friendship between Adams and Lange, described by Sandra S. Phillips, the senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as “a friendship with differences.” These differences were most obvious in Lange’s and Adams’ treatment of the World War II California concentration camp for Japanese Americans, Manzanar. Lange portrayed the sorrow, loss and injustice of the mass imprisonment (an example of her work above, left), while Adams (portrait from Manzanar, below)fashioned a positive image of the Japanese as “loyal Americans” displaying their mettle through obedience and elevated by the majesty of their high desert surroundings.

Meyers notes that the differences between the two photographers live on in their treatment of their photographic legacy. Lange wanted to make the personal archive she donated to the Oakland Museum—including 6,000 prints and 25,000 negatives—available to the public. Adams’ archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, but is tightly controlled by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Although Adams donated his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress, he omitted several iconic images he took on his Manzanar trip: Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine California 1944 and Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California. These images had become a valuable source of income that Adams sought to protect.

In 1944 Adams published a cheaply printed, two-dollar paperback book of his Manzanar photos, Born Free and Equal. Featuring 64 photos and text he wrote himself, it was among the top-ten books sold in San Francisco that year, although it was poorly distributed beyond the Bay Area. In his later years, Adams claimed that the military had confiscated a large number of copies and destroyed them because of its perceived anti-Americanism. At the time of publication, some critics praised Adams for his moral courage while others vilified him for sympathizing with the enemy.

Perhaps as a result of the criticism received by Born Free and Equal or to keep the highly lucrative Adams’s legacy free of political taint, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust refused to approve the re-publication of Born Free and Equal in 2002 by the small California press Spotted Dog. This caused much anguish for publisher Wynne Benti, who recalled that the months she fought to complete the project as among the most difficult of her life. “I remember being at the UCLA book festival,” Benti told me. “People walked away and refused to buy the book because it was not approved by the trust.” In the end, Benti was forced to leave out Born Free and Equal’s powerful nature photographs.

Stay tuned. I am putting the finishing touches on my piece on Adams, Lange and Manzanar prisoner/photographer Toyo Miyatake and hope to make it available soon!

Historian Linda Gordon’s new Dorothea Lange bio

I attended a fascinating discussion recently at the New York Public Library, featuring NYU history professor Linda Gordon in conversation with New Yorker writer Ian Frazier. The topic of discussion was Gordon’s extensively researched and beautifully written new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W.W. Norton & Co.).

Lange was a force of nature, a fiercely determined and ambitious woman who overcame a physical disability—a lame leg—to become a titan of documentary photography and a lifelong advocate for the dishonored and the neglected. Most famously, she chronicled the plight of migrant farm workers, southern sharecroppers and other victims of the Great Depression.

The portion of Lange’s work that initially interested me most, however, was the 800 or so photographs she took of the evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Included are pictures of the California camp Manzanar, where my father spent part of his boyhood. The photographic documentation of Manzanar by Lange, Ansel Adams and a Japanese prisoner and photographer Toyo Miyatake, is a topic I have been writing about; I hoped to learn more from Gordon about the nature of the professional and personal relationship between Lange and Adams.

Lange made a name for herself with her work in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and believed wholeheartedly in the FSA’s goal of creating a democratic agricultural policy. Yet when another government agency, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, hired her to document the uprooting and incarceration of the Japanese Americans, she could not support the government’s actions. She was highly critical of what she saw, and her photographs reflected those views. Instead of circulating Lange’s photographs, the government impounded them during the war, later slipping them without fanfare into the National Archives. Gordon and co-author Gary Y. Okihiro wrote about these photographs in their 2006 book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

In a slide show presentation before the Q&A, Gordon described how, despite her “enormous love and admiration for [President] Franklin D. Roosevelt” (with whom she shared the physical ravages of polio), Lange became convinced that the President’s treatment of Japanese Americans was “an atrocity.” The photographer and her husband, UC Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, were vocal critics of the Japanese imprisonment at a time when few whites spoke publicly against F.D.R.’s decision.

Gordon showed some of Lange’s photographs of the concentration camps, including a grizzled-looking Manzanar prisoner with his young grandson [Lange had a talent for showing the bonds between fathers and children], and others that captured the harsh conditions, sadness and despair of prison life. She compared Lange’s portraits to those of Ansel Adams, whom she described as “not an opponent of internment.” Adams wanted to portray the Japanese as “unthreatening” and “to prettify, to disguise the real meaning of the internment,” Gordon explained.

The relationship between Lange and Adams was not always a smooth one. “They fought a lot,” said Gordon, who shared examples of the type of lively insults the two friends and rivals often traded. Lange once commented that Adams, most famous for his heroic landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and the West, “made rocks look like people.” Adams, in turn, sniped that documentary photographers “were social scientists with cameras.” Yet despite their open arguments, the two shared a deep and lasting friendship, Gordon said. Adams visited Lange when she was sick, wrote admiring and complimentary letters to her, and even did darkroom work for her occasionally. In its volatile ups and downs, explained Gordon, their relationship was “almost familial.”

In Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, Gordon writes that “Adams and Lange quarreled all their lives,” as one observer noted, like feuding standup comics or the bickering partners on cop shows. Their political disagreements were “fundamental,” too. Lange was a natural champion of the oppressed. One-third of her photos, said Gordon, were of people of color, although government censorship hid this fact for years. Adams had a knack for befriending the rich and the powerful, and lived a life of what Lange considered unseemly luxury. His Manzanar photographs were his only professional foray into charged political or racial territory. Yet at the same time, Gordon writes, “Adams deeply respected, championed and promoted her photography.”In 1954, when Lange was asked by U.S. Camera to name the 25 greatest photographs of all time, she included an Adams’ photograph of an Alaskan mountain scene.

For me, knowing how differently their photographs of the World War II imprisonment have been accepted and interpreted over the years, Adams’ with intermittent hostility, and Lange’s with increasing admiration, the idea that these two photographers were lifelong friends is somehow touching, attesting to an artistic and professional bond that was deeper than the choices they made in the political and material worlds.


Although Gordon and Frazier covered many other facets of Lange’s life and work during the Q&A, I will briefly mention only one here: Lange’s most famous image, “Migrant Mother,” and the issue of Lange’s own role as a mother. Although this portrait of a migrant farm worker, Florence Thomas, and her three children has come to symbolize the hardship of the Dust Bowl “Okies,” Thomas was actually a Cherokee Indian. Lange “felt her anxiety,” said Gordon, “because it was hers as well.” The tale of Lange’s own “fraught motherhood” to two sons and a step-daughter, Gordon admitted, was one of the hardest parts of her life to write about. The photographer’s ambition and drive led her to put her two sons, Dan, 7, and John, 4, into the equivalent of foster homes while she traveled the West on photo assignments. Both sons, said Gordon, had “a store of bitter memories” of their childhood, “but also tremendous admiration and pride” for what their mother had accomplished.

It was only after Lange left her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon (Gordon describes him as “the husband from hell” who took little interest in his children and turned them over to Lange for tending) and married Tayolor that she was able to cease being the bread winner for the family and achieve greatness as a photographer, Gordon noted.

My initial interest in Lange was for her documentation of the Japanese evacuation and imprisonment. I now see her as a role model for any woman wrestling with the traditional roles of wife and mother and at the same time trying to make a difference, to leave a mark.

Reclaiming Photographs of the WWII Japanese-American Resettlement

I recently picked up a fascinating book, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi’s, Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943-1945. Hirabayashi teaches in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, where he holds an endowed chair dedicated to research on and teaching about the Japanese American World War II internment, redress and other Japanese-American issues.

In Through the Lens, which Hirabayashi wrote with researcher Kenichiro Shimada, the authors brings to light the work of Hikaru Carl Iwasaki, a 19-year-old Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) photographer who was plucked out of the Heart Mountain, Wyo. internment camp in 1943 to take a job with the War Relocation Authority’s Denver, Colo.-based Photographic Section (WRAPS).
Iwasaki was one of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West coast of the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 who were summarily rounded up and placed in 10 so-called “internment camps.” The role of the civilian War Relocation Authority was to oversee the evacuation and internment, which took place between 1942 and 1945.

WRA photographers meticulously documented this process, both for historical record-keeping and for public relations purposes. All photos were subject to military oversight and those that did not depict the treatment of the Japanese Americans in a positive light were censored.

Hirabayashi divides the WRA’s photo documentation into two phases, first the evacuation and internment, and second the process of resettlement. This second phase began in 1943, the year that Iwasaki was hired. During this period, WRAPS’ goal, Hirabayashi explains, was to pressure “loyal” imprisoned Japanese Americans to return to society as quickly as possible. Although the anti-Japanese hysteria that led to internment had lessened somewhat, prisoners, who in many cases had lost all their possessions and savings, knew they would face hostility and few job options.

WRAPS (which by this time had consolidated its photo operation from scattered locations to the one Denver office where Iwasaki was employed) skillfully combined image and text to create what Hirabayashi calls “photo-narrative public relations packages” designed to convince fearful camp residents that fulfilling educational experiences, satisfying careers and happy roles in American communities awaited those who were brave enough to leave camp and settle in communities far from the still militarily sensitive and largely unwelcoming West coast. At the same, the photos were meant to quell anxiety among the people seeing Japanese former internees move into their neighborhoods, and to show that the decision to evacuate, imprison and then resettle the Japanese Americans had been the correct one.

As a WRAPS staff photographer, Iwasaki traveled through broad swaths of the Midwest and East coast documenting the success stories of Japanese American resettlement. He took over 1,300 pictures for WRAPS before going on to an illustrious career as a photojournalist.

Among his WRAPS photos, we see Kosaku Steven Tamura, described in the caption as a lawyer, a member of the California bar in private practice in Santa Ana, now doing graduate work at Harvard. There is group of fresh-faced college co-eds from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and Shin Tanaka, a 16-year-old Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) and aspiring doctor, working at as a lab assistant at Mt. Sinai hospital in New York City. Tanaka’s father, the photo caption tells us, was educated in the U.S., and held degrees from Duke, Clark, and Yale Universities. Photo captions were not written by the photographer, but by WRA officers.

“Naturally,” Hirabayashi writes, WRAPS did not document stories of Japanese Americans “in difficult or impoverished conditions.” Designed to further the WRA’s goal of resettlement, the photos depict former prisoners as “smiling, happy, free, confident about their safety,” eager to contribute to the war effort through their compliant and successful resettlement.

Despite the smiling faces and rosy captions, we get glimpses of the genuine fear that the Japanese Americans must have felt reentering society, and the hostility they faced. Toshihiro Masada grins into the distance as he holds up a beautiful cluster of Thompson seedless grapes. He was released from the Rhower, Ark. camp, and was lucky enough to return to the family’s California farm. The caption reads, “The Masada home was a target of one of the shooting incidents in the Fresno district on the night of May 19, 1945. Five rifle shots were fired into their home, none of which caused any injury or damage. In spite of the incident, the family is glad to be home again.”

George Yamamoto, an Issei farmer who was imprisoned at Gila River in Ariz., is pictured carrying a bushel of tomatoes, smiling widely and standing beside his boss, farmer Herman S. Heston of Bucks County, Pa. Yamamoto is described as “leader of the group of five Issei who were obliged by neighbors’ protests to leave another farm at Great Meadows, New Jersey shortly after arriving there from Gila River.”

Heston’s comment about his Issei employees is typical of those found in the WRAPS captions: “I have found them loyal, hardworking, clean, and pleasant to work with.” At the time, these words were no doubt considered complimentary, an endorsement of a people many hated and feared. Today, they bring to mind Sen. Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff description of Barack Obama as “articulate and bright and clean,” for which he was widely criticized.

There is no sense of irony behind the beaming smile of Mrs. John M. Sakai, shown holding up her husband’s picture in one hand and the Purple Heart medal he won in battle in Italy in the other. She is quoted as saying she is “proud that he is an American fighting for America,” and adding, “I also know my mother-in-law in the Gila River Relocation Center is just as proud.”

Despite the transparent agenda of these relentlessly and at times absurdly cheerful photos, Iwasaki told Hirayabayashi, who interviewed the photographer, now in his eighties, that he does not remember any overt censorship. Instead, the photographer attributed the upbeat nature of his WRAPS work to his youthful optimism, and his own successful experience of leaving camp early and finding fulfilling work with a bureaucratic arm of the government.

Hirayabayashi acknowledges that “critics might fault [Iwasaki] for not assertively seeking out cases that might damage WRA claims of resettlement success,” but defends the photographer, noting that those that did defy authority were not released from camp, and that prisoners like Iwasaki who were released early were the most capable and likely to succeed.”

In the final, most powerful section of his book, Hirabayashi tells readers that there is a way to reclaim these photographs, to shake off their original purpose as propaganda and view them in a more positive or honest light. “There is no reason the photos cannot be appropriated and redeployed for new purposes and with new visions in mind,” he writes.

To illustrate what he means Hirayabayashi selects a handful of the 1,300 Iwasaki photos (available on line online at JARDA, the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive) that assert the humanity, resourcefulness and perseverance of the imprisoned, including a touching close-up of handmade zori (straw sandals) and geta (raised wooden sandals), which prisoners made out of scavenged materials. The traditional footwear was not only functional, it was a reminder and a connection to the prisoners’ homeland. There is a beautiful wood carving of a mother hawk attending to her chicks, and another of creatively carved wood nameplates that were hung outside barracks, all beautiful examples of native Japanese crafts.

Hirabayashi also counters the image of all resettlers as upwardly mobile professionals or highly respected laborers by poring through WRA archives and uncovering photographs that depict another side to the story: a desolate, Burbank, Calif. trailer park and housing project where Japanese Americans were temporarily resettled, squalid quarters in rural Colorado and elsewhere that Hirabayashi writes were “hardly different from those found in the camps.”

Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens ends on a poignant note, with a photograph of a group of elderly Issei at a nursing home in San Francisco. The five men, looking haggard but stoic, pose with a nurse in uniform. One is in a wheelchair, one on crutches. Hirabayashi recalls his own, early, memories of his grandfather’s nursing home for elderly Japanese American resettlers in Spokane, Wash. “The plight of these Issei—single, elderly, infirm, poor—is something that I have not found discussed in any detail in the official WRA, or even in the scholarly literature,” Hirabayashi writes. This single Iwasaki photo, he adds, “has to represent the thousands of Issei whose lives were ruined by federal policies and who did not have the energy or the resources to recover after they were released from camp.”