Japanese American

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s A Guide To Modern Camp Homes So Different, So Appealing?

The whole thing was unexpected, tbqh, but one of the surprise bonuses of the Rabkin Foundation writers award situation was meeting artist/photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki when he came to make my portrait. I asked him to bring a copy of his 2013-and-counting artist book, A Guide to Modern Camp Homes.

Modeled after Sears brochures for selling kit homes, Miyazaki’s Guide combines quotes from official notices and chirpy marketing with bright archival photos and renderings, as if racially segregated detention camps in the desert were the next step in the American Dream:

Customize Your Home
Your new home is unfurnished, aside from your bed frames, mattresses, and stove. You may wish to customize it with room partitions made from hanging sheets, and optional handmade items such as chairs, tables, shelves and window curtains. At some centers, large piles of discarded, green wood may remain from the home building process…

Where Sears would have run blurbs from satisfied customers, Miyazaki quotes the testimonies of former detainees, firsthand accounts of the sort gathered by Densho. In 2013 when he first conceived the Guide, I imagine the juxtaposition of deadpan form and horrible content was meant to foster a meaningful reflection on the wrongs that had been perpetrated by the US government against its own citizens.

The next dates on the Guide, though, are 2017 and 2024, when Muslim bans; refugee children imprisoned and separated from their families; genocide; and campaign promises of industrial-scale detentions and deportations were back. And the guy behind it all just compared the jail sentences of the rioters convicted in the 2021 coup attempt to the WWII detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

And so now Miyazaki’s Guide functions, not as a gentle appreciation of the experience of the artist’s family and the Japanese American community, but as evidence in itself. That even just a few years ago, we held the truths of the deep, unjust, racist, violations of peoples’ fundamental rights and liberties to be self-evident, and that was reason enough to never let them happen again.

Read Kevin J. Miyazaki’s A Guide to Modern Camp Homes [kevinmiyazaki.com]
Previously, related:
2003: I mean, just look how happy they were!
2010: Ansel Adams’ Japanese American Internment Camp Photos at MoMA [Shhh!]
2011: I Am An American
2015/18: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X

Some Objects At Topaz Internment Camp

Workers Wanted sign made from scrapwood at the Topaz Internment Camp, image: UofU Library

While reposting those old Daddy Types entries about the US’s imprisonment of Japanese American citizens, I came across a couple of images of Topaz, Utah that were new to me. They were added to the University of Utah Library’s collection in 2012, and originated in a 1987 documentary about Topaz produced by KUED, the local PBS station.

The top image is sort of mundane, but the form of this make-do scrapwood sign just sticks with me. That might be an actual blackboard, or maybe not.

1944 photo from the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah showing the prison’s service flag. Each of the 325 stars represents a detainee serving in the US military. image: UofU Library

It doesn’t stick with me like the object in this image, though. Four unidentified people standing in front of the Service Flag for the “community” of Topaz, which included one star for each detainee serving in the US military. 325 at the time this photo was taken. Soldiers serving while their families were in prison because of politicians’ racial bigotry and fear.

KUED Collection of Topaz Camp photographs at the University of Utah Library [lib.utah.edu]

A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the family prisons. image: ICE

I’ll be honest, when I first heard that the ICE immigrant family detention centers full of Central American refugee kids and moms had animal-themed cell blocks like red bird and blue butterfly, I imagined they were using Eric Carle drawings, and I got a dark, blogging thrill.

But no. The South Texas Residential Center in Dilley, the largest family detention center in the world, run by the for-profit prison contractor, Corrections Corporation of America, was too cheap to license Carle’s work, and just used random clip art instead.

Also, the government’s punitive detention of these people is shameful, and it can’t end soon enough. Most of these families are fleeing war, violence, and abuse in their home countries and have already qualified for refugee hearings the US, but remain in these remote prisons, guarded by actual prison guards, temping in khakis and polo shirts, as a feeble deterrent to other refugees.

Home of the free, land of the brave. image: Bob Owen for San Antonio Express News

I resisted comparing ICE’s outsourced prisons to the desert detention centers Japanese-American families were forced into during WWII, even when I saw Bob Owen’s photo in the San Antonio Express News, which is a damningly straight-up evocation of Dorothea Lange’s photos of the War Relocation Authority’s internment camp at Manzanar, California.

Dorothea Lange, flag and barracks at Manzanar internment camp, July 1942

Ansel Adams also took photos at Manzanar, which he published in a book, Born Free And Equal, alongside a text that reads today as disturbingly upbeat in its praise of the gumption and loyalty of American citizens forced into desert prisons. I’ve always viewed Adams’ project as a protest, a condemnation of the injustice visited upon Americans because of the racist fears of their neighbors and political leaders. But that is over-optimistic hindsight. Re-reading Adams’ text now is pretty depressing. To think that it’s all the Constitution and fundamental principle that wartime white America could handle at the time.

Dilley want to build a playground? image: Will Weissert/AP via themarshallproject.org

At least it helps make sense for how this country could get so cross-wise with its own professed ideals today; we really have not changed that much at all. And when I tried to put some evolved distance between the ironies of Adams’ treacly government-reviewed-and-approved fluffing and this account from inside Dilley, I couldn’t. So here it is:

While children wait for their mothers to talk to lawyers and legal aids, they are usually watching kids’ movies dubbed in Spanish, namely Rio or Frozen. The children of Dilley, like children everywhere, have taken to singing Frozen’s iconic song “Let It Go.”The Spanish-language refrain to the song “Libre soy! Libre soy!” translates to “I am free! I am free!” It’s an irony that makes the adults of Dilley uneasy. Mehta recalls one mother responding to her singing child under her breath: “Pero no lo somos” (But we aren’t).

Do you know the chorus of “Let it Go” in Spanish? I did not, but it is one helluva song for kids to be singing in a corporate prison in 2015:

Libre soy, libre soy
No puedo ocultarlo más
Libre soy, libre soy
Libertad sin vuelta atrás
Y firme así me quedo aquí
Libre soy, libre soy
El frío es parte también de mí

I am free, I am free
I can’t hide it anymore
I am free, I am free
Freedom without turning back
And I’m staying here, firm like this
I am free, I am free
The cold is also a part of me

‘Drink more water’: Horror stories from the medical ward of a Texas immigration detention center [fusion.net]
which is basically a re-reporting of this: Immigrant families in detention: A look inside one holding center [latimes]
Ansel Adams, Born Free And Equal, 1944 [loc.gov]
Related: Translating “Frozen” into Arabic [newyorker]
“Let it Go” in 25 languages [youtube]

[Originally published on Daddy Types on July 23, 2015 as Libre Soy, Libre Soy]

A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 5/X

Dave Masaharu Tatsuno ran the dry goods store at Topaz Mountain, where Japanese Americans from the Bay Area were imprisoned during WWII. And he took a bunch of 8mm home movies, using color film which he’d pick up on buying trips back east. And then he edited the movies together into Topaz Memories [or Topaz, which is how it was listed when it was accepted onto the National Film Registry], a film/presentation which he gave at organizations around the country after the war.

Or maybe beginnin the 1990s, I haven’t watched the end of the local PBS documentary on Tatsuno, produced after his death in 2006, to figure it all out yet. I was so amped up by these detainee-made sleds at 20:05, I had to post them right away. That’s Bill Fujita, Tatsuno’s brother-in-law, pulling David Fujita and Tatsuno’s oldest son Sheldon in 1943.

The Tatsunos were expelled from their home when Dave’s wife Alice was nine months pregnant, and their second son Rod was born at the Bay Area assembly/processing center at Tanforan race track. Their daughter Arlene was born at Topaz.

Dave Tatsuno: Movies & Memories [kqed’s youtube channel via kqed.org]

COMMENTS:

Brian | March 30, 2013 8:58 PM

My grandfather was a teacher in central Utah and volunteered to help teach the children there. He was appalled that these good people were interned (imprisoned) and admired them for how hard working and intelligent they were, and also for the patriotism to put up with this. I never knew this until I read his journal after he passed.

Ironically, he was a German immigrant whose travel to America was sponsored and encouraged by his Jewish employers who seeing the infant Nazi movement told him that if they were his age they would go to America.

They lent him the money on his word that he’d pay them back, which he did. I don’t know what happened to them.

Back to Topaz, that place is literally in the middle of nowhere desert.

[Originally published on Daddy Types on March 29, 2013, as Topaz Mountain Sleds by Dave Tatsuno and Bill Fujita, with a relevant comment included here.]

A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 4/X

You’d think that as a parent, I’d be less surprised by now at the constant discoveries of the extent of my own ignorance.

And yet.

Last night, while surfing through the archive of the War Relocation Authority’s nearly 7,000 photos of WWII Japanese American internment camps for “furniture,” [right, I know.] I was confused by the number of search results that included George Nakashima and his daughter Mira.

Mira spends a lot of time with her father in the workshop, has learned to use a hammer, drill, end plane, scorns miniature tools.” image, Gretchen Van Tassel, via UCB

The internment camps only imprisoned Japanese Americans on the west coast; Nakashima, modernist woodworking master, lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, so he should’ve been totally unaffected.

But then, these Nakashima photos, which are all from 1945, have captions like, “The Nakashimas, formerly of Seattle and Minidoka.”

As if anyone is from Minidoka.

And it’s only then that I looked at Nakashima’s bio, and sure enough, the architect, his wife Marion, and his newborn daughter were expelled from Seattle and detained at Minidoka, Idaho in the Spring of 1942. It was only through the protracted petitions of Antonin Raymond, an architect and former employer, that the Nakashimas were able to leave the camp for Raymond’s farm in New Hope.

The picture above, by WRA photographer Francis Stewart, shows George Nakashima at Minidoka in the Fall of 1942, “Constructing and decorating model apartment to show possibilities using scrap materials.” Which, just. Wallpaper made from bookpages and blueprints and a proto-Conoid table made from prison scraps. This room should be in the Smithsonian.

The irony, if that’s the right word, is that it was at Minidoka that Nakashima met Gentaro Hikogawa, an issei hotel manager three years older than he, who’d immigrated from Shikoku to Tacoma. Hikogawa was also a master carpenter, who taught Nakashima Japanese joinery and rural handtool techniques that formed the foundation for Nakashima’s philosophy and later innovations.

Speaking of which, here are two photos of 3-yo Mira Nakashima posing next to two beds her father made, one for her, and one for her doll, in her bedroom in New Hope.

War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945 [oac.cdlib.org]

[Originally published on Daddy Types on September 3, 2012, as George Nakashima and His Family Moved To New Hope in 1943]

A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 3/X

Japanese American children imprisoned at Tule Lake Segregation Center playing on a scrapwood playground, image: WRA/Archives

In WWII, Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the west coast, stripped of basically everything they couldn’t carry, and imprisoned in inland internment camps, rows of tar paper barracks in the desert surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers.

Everything else, they had to build themselves. Here are a couple of photos from the War Relocation Authority collection at the National Archives of the preschool playground at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Newell, CA.

Looks like they had better scrapwood at Tule Lake than at Topaz Mountain in Utah. Or maybe better carpenters. Still, I’d add that unfinished wood slide to the list of injustices perpetrated against loyal American citizen children by their government.

Previously from Tule Lake: Depressing Caption, meet Awesome Chairs
DIY Preschool & Playground, Topaz Internment Camp, Delta, Utah

COMMENTS:

Jan Morrill | November 28, 2011 2:30 PM

It was a very sad time in our history. My mother was interned at Tule Lake, and to this day, she can’t talk about it without crying. It impacted her life, and therefore, the lives of her children and our children.

[Originally published on Daddy Types on November 28, 2011 as Scrapwood Playground at Tule Lake Internment Camp. I also brought over a comment for this one.]

A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 2/X

the whole point is the caption, people, read below. image: NARA via The Atlantic

The photo blog on The Atlantic has been running extended looks back at images from World War II. Today’s theme: Japanese-Americans forcibly removed from their homes and businesses and shipped to internment camps in the middle of the freakin’ deserts.

The caption on #39 just bummed me out: “Nursery school children play with a scale model of their barracks at the Tule Lake Relocation Center, Newell, California, on September 11, 1942.” Their barracks.

On the bright side, check out the sweet little pine plank nursery chairs they’re standing on. How many civil right’s a brother gotta give up to score a few of those, I wonder?

World War II: The Internment of Japanese Americans [theatlantic]
Previously, and also September 11, 1942: DIY Pre-school Playground, Topaz Internment Camp, Delta, Utah

[Originally published on Daddy Types on August 22, 2011 as Depressing Caption, Meet Awesome Chairs

A Brief History Of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 1/X

America’s imprisonment of its own citizens because of racial bigotry during World War II has been of great interest to me since discovering Born Free and Equal, Ansel Adams’ self-published photobook of Japanese Americans detained at Manzanar, in the early 1990s. It always felt like important history that must be faced and not forgotten. Now, of course, it is a crime being surpassed and magnified, with families being torn apart and children fleeing for their lives being subject to state-sponsored terror at a scale this country hasn’t seen in almost a century, and all for the accumulation of Mautocratic political power.

It is not a sufficient response by any measure, but I am republishing a series of blog posts here which I made over the years at Daddy Types, the weblog for new dads, which I ran from 2004 until my CMS broke late last year. On DT I often wrote about the overlooked or forgotten histories and objects of parenting, with a focus on modernism, design, DIY, and dad-related projects. That included frequent posts on the material lives of Japanese American children imprisoned in detention camps during WWII, including the attempts to provide kids an approximation of a normal environment through schools, playgrounds, and domestic spaces built out of scrap lumber.

Here they are in chronological order. The first is a January 2009 post on the pre-school and playground at Topaz Internment Camp outside Delta, Utah. [2009 is when I learned my grandfather had helped build the Topaz detention center as part of the CCC.]

Continue reading “A Brief History Of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 1/X”