Art and Internment

For this week’s blog posting I looked at Kristine Kiramitsu’s “Internment and Identity in Japanese Art”. Kiramitsu closely examines art produced during Japanese internment and art created a generation after, from the descendants of the interned. I will be focusing mostly on the former. The rest of the piece is interesting, but not very useful to our project. Despite still and motion pictures being banned from the camps, other art forms were not only allowed, but encouraged. The War Relocation Authority used selected pieces of this art, along with photographs by Ansel Adams and skewed documentary footage of happy Japanese internees, to create a very different image of realities of internment. The WRA portrayed internment as for the safety of the Japanese-Americans and, also, as simply a stepping stone towards citizenship. The art community in the Topaz internment camp was the largest out of the ten relocation centers, largely due to the influence of Chiura Obata, an interned Berkeley art professor, who set up an art school. Kiramitsu argues that art allowed internees to pass the time, document the experience of internment and “spiritually empower” the artists. My biggest problem with the piece is the level of detail that Kiramitsu places on dissecting the artwork itself, while I think a little of this is important, she does too much and in some places might be over-reading the art. It led me to believe that she is probably more specifically an art historian, but I found the parts discussing the role of art in the camps, and what it meant to the internees and the WRA, to be a lot more interesting.