Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps
1952
No matter how many books I examined on the subject of Japanese-American internment, each one offers something different and from time to time there will one that will be quite different from most of the others. Such is the case with this book which shows the arts and crafts done by the people in the internment camps, trying to produce beauty even in the midst of the ugly reality of their imprisonment.
The first thing that sets this book off as being different is that it has an foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The author quotes a governor of one of the western states at the time as saying "A good solution to the Jap problem...would be to send them all back to Japan, then sink the island. They live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats."
The author wanted to organize an exhibition of items made by the Japanese Americans while in the internment centers and also photograph the items. It took until 1945 before he could undertake the photographing portion, and by then one of the camps was already closed. Various arts exhibitions were held at the camps during their existence, though, in which the author was not necessarily involved.
Keep in mind that the items were made in what were essential prison camps under oftentimes bad weather conditions and with the objects at hand, stretching imagination and creativity to the limits. Still, the things that were made were oftentimes of incredible beauty.
Miniature landscapes from the Granada (Amache) camp.
Gardens made by the barracks at the Tule Lake center.
It's also interesting to note that different camps were noted for different art products. The Poston camp was noted for bird carvings, although the Gila River camp also did some. The Tule Lake center was noted for its flowers that were actually made out of sea-shells found in the area. The Rohwer center was noted for its weaving.
A Buddhist house temple made from the wood from packing crates.
One actual advantage for some of the women in the camps was that the amount of daily work they had to do actually went down since they no longer had their own homes and/or jobs, so there were many opportunities for them to develop artistic creativity that they otherwise would never have had time to work on, so even in the darkest of times it's possible for something good to arise.
Dramatic plays were performed and musical instruments made as other forms of artistic expression.
Ceremonial dolls made for the Girls' Day Doll Festival.
Another thing that the author notes is how in the various camps people skilled in various crafts would then teach others the craft, whether it be working with wood, embroidery or the Tea Ceremony itself.
(Time for odd thought here. One of the things about Star Trek that is problematic is how, in the future, the matter duplicators pretty much eliminated the need for most jobs since most foods and other materials could be duplicated. I wonder if a rebirth of the arts, like there was in the internment camps, would occur under such a situation where most people would no longer have to work for a living at a "regular" job.)
Towards the end of the book the author goes into the history of the internment camps.
This is another very fascinating and different look at the internment camps and something positive that managed to come out of them.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
|