On a hot sunny recent Saturday, The Nikkei Widowed Group of Los Angeles held its thirty-second annual installation luncheon. About 120 smartly dressed Nisei members, both widows and widowers, filled the VIP room of the Quiet Cannon Restaurant in Montebello, California for an annual ritual that takes hours of planning …
I happened to speak with Chef Bill Telepan yesterday, who was full of news about his recent trip to Japan. He was one of eight New York chefs who traveled to Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas most devastated by the March 11 Greater Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The …
I happened to be in Portland, Oregon, recently, and dropped in on the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. The center’s permanent exhibit features wonderfully detailed recreations of barracks at the Minidoka prison camp in Idaho and a pre-war general store, as well as maps and displays that evoke the pioneering spirit …
Read Part 17 >>Post-scriptMy exploration of the Mananzar photographs of Adams, Lange, and Miyatake, along with my readings of the historical, memoir, and fictional accounts of the Japanese-American concentration camps brought me a deeper understanding of the hardships, both physical and psychic, my own family and all of those incarcerated …
Read Part 16 >>Miyatake and AdamsPhotography also provided Miyatake an introduction to Adams at Manzanar. Introduced by Merritt in 1943, their shared passion for photography and the discovery that Edward Weston was a mutual friend forged the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Miyatake and Adams. Archie remembered the day …
Read Part 15 >>The Post-War Years: Coming to Terms with ManzanarOf course once freed from the concentration camps, the Japanese did congregate in clusters, many settling not far from the Los Angeles Little Tokyo they had inhabited before the war. Decades of pre-war racial prejudice followed by the mass illegal roundup …
Read Part 14 >>In Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Jasmine Alinder described how the U.S. military and government used photography as a tool of power and control over Japanese Americans during World War II:
Read Part 13 >>Back to Japan, 1933-1936When Miyatake’s father fell ill in Japan in 1933, Toyo was selected to represent the family and returned to Japan to pay his respects. By the time he and his family had completed the two-week passage, however, Toyo’s father had died. As the de …
Read Part 12 >>While Lange and Adams photographed Manzanar from the outside, Toyo Miyatake was the ultimate insider. Imprisoned at Manzanar almost from its opening to its closure, from 1942 to 1945, Miyatake witnessed and photographed, at first surreptitiously, then with official permission, a much broader range of scenes and …
Read Part 11 >>“Everything Is Propaganda”Lange’s outlook on life informed the pictures she took at Manzanar. Where Adams saw the rugged natural setting as spirit-lifting and awe-inspiring, Lange saw it as brutal and oppressive. Where Adams saw opportunity and triumph of spirit at Manzanar, Lange saw suffering and a gross …
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