We discovered
many amazing works of art and photography during our research
for this radio story. One can
find many illustrations, watercolors,
paintings and photographs that were done by internees during
their incarceration online. We also discovered the paintings
of Roger
Shimomura who's new work is currently on exhibition at
the Greg
Kucera Gallery in Seattle,Washington. Follow the links
to see more of Rogers' work.
Roger
Shimomura - American Infamy #2, 2006-
Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery
In
a group of 30 paintings, Roger Shimomura's exhibition, "Minidoka
on My Mind," will explore the artist's family's internment
duringWorld War II, including some works suggesting his personal
memories. The show's title refers to Camp Minidoka in Hunt,
Idaho where he and his family were detained from the spring
of 1942 until the summer of 1944.
"First
Impression of Manzanar (June 1942)" - UCLA Special Collections
Kango
Takamura depicted his surroundings
in drawings and watercolors. He also worked as a camp sign-maker
at Santa Fe and as curator for a small museum at Manzanar. "This was my first impression
of Manzanar. Oh, it's really so hot, you see, and the wind blows.
There's no shade at all. It's miserable, really. But one year
after, it's quite a change. A year after they built the camp
and put water there, the green grows up. And mentally everyone
is better. That's one year after." — Kango Takamura, Beyond Words: Images from America's Concentration Camps
Watercolor
drawings of Topaz and Tanforan by Yoshiko Uchida,
July 7, 1942 / Courtesy Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Writer Yoshkio Uchida was born
in 1921, in Alameda, California.
Uchida wrote many books for young people, among them The Dancing
Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales (1949) and The Invisible
Thread: A Memoir (1991). Like her character in "The Bracelet," Yoshiko
Uchida was taken to an internment camp during World War II.
On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, her family was split apart—her
father was taken away and interned. Yoshiko, her mother, and
her brother were taken to a camp in Topaz, Utah, where they
waited out the war. There she witnessed her grandfather’s
death; a guard who saw him looking for arrowheads assumed he
was trying to escape and shot him. Uchida recounts her internment
experience in Journey
to Topaz (1971). While in the internment
camp she also passed time by reflecting about her life in her
journals and painting watercolor sketches. — "Through
my books I hope to give young Asian Americans a sense of their
past and to reinforce their self-esteem and self-knowledge.
At the same time, I want to disper the stereotypic image still
held by many non-Asians about the Japanese and write about
them as real people. I hope to convey the strength of spirit
and the sense of hope and purpose I have observed in many first-generation
Japanese. Beyond that, I write to celebrate our common humanity
and the basic elements of humanity that are in all our strivings." — Yoshiko Uchida, 1921-1992
