Painting by Japanese internment camp artist

I had seen the oil painting of a lush green landscape hanging on the wall, but it looked so much like the tourist art I see at auction that I didn’t stop to take notice of it. But as soon as the auctioneer identified it during the bidding, I perked up.

It’s a landscape by a Japanese internment prisoner, she said.

How could you tell, I wondered? It was a landscape of a rolling river with a bridge flanked on one side by trees growing from the river’s edge up a mountainside. The painting gave no notion that it came from the mind of a man or woman detained.

Looking at it from my seat in the auction house, I could only assume that the artist may have been remembering a different life – where hope was ever-present and the future was as fertile and open to possibilities as this painting. Maybe it was a place where he or she had gone to paint near a home somewhere in California, Oregon or Washington state – from where Japanese-Americans were removed during World War II. I doubt that it was a scene viewed through a window inside a camp, or a place frequented by a detainee.

After the painting was sold, I was curious about why the buyer had bought it. I figured that he must have been touched by its history and was curious about the artist. So, I watched as he took it from the auction staffer, sat there for a moment to examine it and then left his seat. I followed behind him.

Did you buy it because of its provenance, the history behind it? I asked. No, he said. He bought it because he thought it would go well in his bedroom.

Even if he wasn’t curious, I was. I studied the artist’s signature but could not decipher it. That’s not unusual; a lot of artists scratch their names on canvases as if they wanted to remain anonymous. There was also no way to determine which camp the artist was detained in (that info may have been printed on the back of the painting behind the paper backing) or whether the painting was authentic.

He or she was likely one of the bevy of artists of Japanese ancestry – many of them Japanese-Americans – who were snatched up by the government right after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan’s navy in 1941. The U.S. government, the military and even some ordinary citizens questioned the loyalty of Japanese-Americans.

There was no evidence that these people were spies, enemies of the state or disloyal to the country, but this was an era of hysteria in a country where racism and prejudice were always swirling against some “other.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 authorizing the relocation of Japanese residents to camps organized and managed by the War Relocation Board. About 110,000 to 120,000 people – depending on who you read – were removed from their homes in California, Oregon and Washington, and taken to 10 camps – which the government called “relocation centers.”

Most of the camps were in the West, but two were as far away as Arkansas. Most of the Japanese-Americans were given only 48 hours to leave their homes, and they were allowed to take only a few possessions.

The camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences with guards. People lived in barracks – with or without walls, running water or insulation in a camp in Idaho, according to one site. Another site mentioned a camp in Utah where housing was later made to be a little more livable.

Photographer Ansel Adams chronicled the people and life at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California in 1943. His collection of more than 200 black and white photos included artists C.T. Hibino and Akio Matsumoto, workers in a field, a fashion design class, a high school biology class and a man in a laboratory. Most of his works were portraits of the internees.

Adams donated the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, along with a letter stating that he wanted to show “how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair (sic) by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…”

Ironically, Japanese-Americans fought for the country during the war, despite their relegation to second-class citizens (a similar disposition suffered by African Americans). The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, some of whose members were from the internment camps, was among the most decorated regiments in the war.

The camps were dismantled starting in 1945. In a bill passed by Congress in 1988, the government offered an apology and compensation of $20,000 to Japanese citizens who were interned.

One of the more famous of the detainees was Kamekichi Tokita of Seattle, who had established himself as one of the finest artists in the Northwest. In the camp, Tokita kept a detailed diary, and painted in both art and poetry what life was like in the camp. Only a handful of his war-years paintings are said to have survived. A collection of his papers is in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.