The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 93–100

The Journal of Modern Craft

Volume 4—Issue 1March 2011pp. 93–100DOI: 10.2752/174967811X12949160068695

Reprints available directly from the publishers

Photocopying permitted by licence only

© Berg 2011

Exhibition Review

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC, March 5, 2010 to January 30, 2011.1 Curated by Delphine Hirasuna. Design by Claire Larkin and Eunice Park Kim.

Reviewed by Bibiana Obler

Bibiana Obler is Assistant Professor of Art History, George Washington University, Washington, DC.

“The Art of Gaman” provides an extraordinarily vivid account of life in the camps set up by the US government during the Second World War to incarcerate persons of Japanese ancestry. Figurative portrayals in a variety of media (oil paintings and watercolors but also wood reliefs and embossed leather) convey the endlessness of identical barracks nestled in grimly beautiful mountainous desert landscapes. Domestic objects allow the viewer to conceive in great detail what everyday life must have been like. Basics like chairs, cupboards, and knives were in such short supply—generally non-existent—that residents devised their own from whatever materials were available, including car springs and scrap lumber. But the “evacuees” (euphemisms are rife when discussing this chapter in US history) were also assiduous in transforming their bleak surroundings into homes—with pipe-cleaner flower arrangements, hand-painted playing cards, and personalized nameplates for doors (to ward off accidental visitors, confused by how all the houses looked the same).

One could imagine this display in the context of a history museum (and indeed an earlier version of the show made a stop at the Oregon Historical Society). However, unlike

94 Exhibition Review Bibiana Obler


installations in many history museums, where objects tend to serve as illustrations of wall texts and do not carry the tales on their own, the works of art and craft in “The Art of Gaman” are the story. Gaman, the admittedly helpful wall text explains, means: “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” The objects are tangible evidence of this mentality—not signs or symbols of endurance but its embodiment.

I left the exhibition feeling remarkably satisfied. My sense of the show as an important work of preservation was confirmed by the fact that this iteration of the exhibition is more extensive than previous stops because various people have come forth to the curator, Delphine Hirasuna, with relevant possessions as a result of the accompanying book, which was the first stage in this project. I also learned of Hirasuna’s personal investment in the subject when I read the caption accompanying a small wooden elephant standing on a globe: the trinket had been carved by her grandfather, Seitaro Sasaki. Her family’s story is paradigmatic of many of those in the camps: her grandparents, mother, and two older siblings were incarcerated while her father was in the US army, a cruelly ironic situation that some of the paintings in the exhibition explore, portraits juxtaposed with photographs in the background of sons and husbands in uniform (Figure 1). The story of the internment camps is an important one, and the exhibition tells it powerfully.

I was a little disturbed, though, by how satisfied I felt. Like my fellow visitors, I had delighted in the virtuoso craftsmanship manifest in the pipe-cleaner bouquet and exquisite brooches made of tiny shells and

seeds. I had gained a detailed sense of this dark period in US history, the hardship suffered and the strength and resourcefulness with which the internees maintained their dignity. There were a few times when I would have appreciated additional explanation. For example, I would have liked to know more about censorship at the camps as I looked at a book of linoleum-cut prints compiled from a high-school class at Minidoka, Idaho. How much oversight was there? Hirasuna explains that artists tended toward landscape for fear of censorship of genre scenes, but to what extent was this preemptive self-censorship, to what extent tested?

Even more curious, I thought, were the numerous representations of the camps on everyday, functional objects such as purses (the barracks made picturesque on the wooden handle) and wallets (embossed in leather) (Figure 2). Paintings, prints, and sketches were valuable means of documentation in lieu of photography, which was not allowed, but why would people want to remind themselves of their bleak surroundings every time they reached to pay for something (especially with money in short supply, due to obscenely low wages and frozen bank accounts)? Do these objects reflect a certain pleasure in the experience of the camps (the young, especially, reminisced about a sense of liberation from the racism of everyday life on the West Coast)? Were these choices of subject matter typical, or do the examples in the exhibition disproportionately favor barracks scenes? If the latter, are these choices a result of the curator’s fascination with these novelty items, or are they simply easier to identify as made in the camps, as opposed to still lifes

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and animal scenes that might be harder to locate as coming from a specific time and place?

I left hoping that the exhibition draws copious visitors and that it continues to travel, accumulating more objects and sources of oral history as it proceeds. To my knowledge, it is the first major exhibition to feature the crafts produced in the camps so prominently—an exhibition in the 1990s focused on fine arts, and various small-scale local shows have displayed crafts, including several in the camps themselves.2 “The Art of Gaman” bears a striking resemblance,

however, to an exhibition that never came to pass. In 1952, Allen H. Eaton, a handicrafts scholar and activist, published Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps. He wanted to organize a show featuring these arts and crafts, but he failed, he explains, because when he asked to buy objects to display, people inevitably refused him because they wanted to keep them or give them away as gifts (including to him, but he did not accept their offers).3 Instead, he compiled a richly illustrated book documenting the diversity of arts in the camps and outlining the injustice

Fig 1 Henry Sugimoto, interned at Jerome, Arkansas, Mother in Jerome Camp, 1943, oil on canvas. Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum.



of internment. Unlike Hirasuna, he only includes a few examples of embroideries and paintings representing the barracks, but many examples of traditional Japanese arts such as kobu and ikebana. Eaton is occasionally painfully patronizing, as when he asserts that the evacuees must have surprised themselves at their artistry, even though wise westerners had long realized the unusual gifts of the Japanese people.4 He also performs some awkward gymnastics in order to laud the fine work of the War Relocation Authority,

perhaps a necessary political move (the book features a foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt, who employs the passive voice to discuss this injustice that occurred under her husband’s presidency). But what Eaton conveys, which Hirasuna fails to achieve, both in the exhibition and in her book, is a sense of the ongoing political importance of recognizing what happened, not simply to honor the people who went through this experience and condemn that period in US history, but to guard against repetition.

Fig 2 Purse, crochet and painted wood. Reproduced by permission from The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946, by Delphine Hirasuna (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005). Photo by Terry Heffernan.



Eaton points out that the relocation camps were a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is supposed to guarantee due process for US citizens. Hirasuna also emphasizes that two-thirds of those incarcerated were US citizens by birth, yet the events documented seem safely in the past. If discussions of the camps were avoided after the war in order to maintain a clear-cut distinction between the victorious Allied Powers and the evil Axis, now visitors can potentially assume that the US is no longer what it was in the 1940s, that we would no longer make such racist mistakes. The exhibition, “presented under the patronage of the Honorable Norman Y. Mineta,” a US congressman who was interned at Heart Mountain, uncontroversially resides across the way from the White House. Of course, the moral is implicit: don’t let this happen again. And in all fairness, especially given the location, some visitors will make comparisons with the present. On my second visit, I read two new entries in the visitors’ book by tourists from Virginia and Kentucky who urged their fellow exhibition-goers to guard against “hate and fear that will cause history to repeat itself.” I also watched the accompanying video, hidden away past the gift shop, which included an interview with Jimi Yamaichi, director and curator of the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, California, who talked about his response to 9/11, of speaking with Muslim groups, of the fact that when he was interned, his “face was [his] crime.” The current political stakes of the exhibition are available for those who want to find them, but Hirasuna, as evidenced also in her interview in the video, concentrates on the work of reconstruction: she wants

to ensure that the evacuees are considered not as statistics but as individuals. Eaton was more polemical. He was outraged that the camps represent “the first time in which any citizen had ever been condemned without a trial, or a hearing, upon preferred charges.”5 Half a century later, it is clear that it was not to be the last time. “Military necessity,” which Eaton condemned, is again a familiar excuse.

One could argue that it is precisely the strength of “The Art of Gaman” that it does not equate the particularity of this Japanese-American experience with any other. Still, some acknowledgment of the ongoing volatility of the material would be helpful. In a recent essay, historian Roger Daniels argued that the term “internment” is misleading and inaccurate. Internment technically refers to a process regulated by the Geneva Convention by which countries can designate citizens of enemy nations as “enemy aliens” and keep them at detention centers. The incarceration of 120,000 permanent US residents of Japanese ancestry in what Daniels would call concentration camps, on the other hand, occurred without any due process and was arguably a war crime. For various reasons, “internment” continues to be the most common terminology, not least because it is largely preferred by former internees. Hirasuna’s adherence to this terminology stands in contrast, though, to an exhibition that would have referred to the camps as concentration camps, cancelled in 1998 because Jewish groups protested the association with the Holocaust.6 Attention to semantic questions might bring out the continued difficulty of the issues involved, but to obtain representation in the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian, and to attract as many lenders and future lenders as



possible, it may well be right to avoid pushing buttons.

There is room, however, whether in this exhibition or future scholarly writing, for further historical research and critical analysis of the role of art and craft in this situation of duress. Jasmine Alinder provides a model in her book Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration. Drawing on theories of photography developed in the 1980s, she attends to the non-transparency of photographic representations of the camps, which can be disturbing in their apparent normalcy. Evacuees often appear cheerful, which some scholars have used to argue away the brutality of incarceration. Alinder considers the subtleties of photography’s role, the desire Japanese-Americans had to counter the media’s portrayal of them as innately criminal.7 Comparable ambiguities arise when it comes to the arts and crafts in “The Art of Gaman.” Was keeping busy with craft a sign of compliance, or a means of subversion or resistance? Alinder deconstructs photography’s reality effect in order to excavate the dynamics of violence undergirding the apparent ordinariness of so many of the photographs of internment. I would suggest that Hirasuna has fewer resources at her disposal to unpack the reality effect of craft. Like photography, we could say, craft is fundamentally indexical: our fascination with both often lies in the direct link we experience as viewers with the moment of making, our link with the person photographed via the connection of light, our link with the craftsperson through our relation to the material so carefully worked. But whereas we have become much more sophisticated readers of photography in

the last few decades, the process is only just beginning when it comes to craft. How do we evaluate, for example, the range of craft on offer here, from mail-order Sears Roebuck projects to traditional Japanese arts to inventive uses of the materials at hand? Hirasuna allows us to appreciate these as all equally worthy of aesthetic contemplation; is there a way to retain that nonjudgmental framework even as we consider further the varying implications of making as an amateur, as an “outsider” artist, or as a professional? I look forward to future exhibitions and scholarship on the art of gaman, building on Hirasuna’s archive, as well as Eaton’s, and contending with arguments by scholars such as Daniels and Alinder.

Related publicationHirasuna, Delphine. The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this exhibition was on display at: the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, November 2, 2006–February 25, 2007; the Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon, October 19, 2007–January 4, 2008; and the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, January 22–March 30, 2008.

2 Karin M. Higa, The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).

3 Allen H. Eaton, Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952), 6. Also see David B. Van Dommelen, Allen H. Eaton: Dean of American Crafts (Pittsburgh, PA: The Local History Company, 2004).



4 Eaton, Beauty, 18.

5 Eaton, Beauty, 177.

6 Roger Daniels, “Words do Matter : A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans,” in Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura, eds., Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest:

Japanese Americans & Japanese Canadians in the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Wash Press, 2005), 190–214; Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 8–9.

7 Alinder, Moving Images, 15–17.

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946

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Transcript of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946