A FAMILY HERITAGE CAPTURED ON FILM : EXHIBIT FOCUSES ON PHOTOGRAPHER’S GRANDMOTHER

To photographer Mihoko Yamagata, her familial heritage can be summed up in one person--her 83-year-old grandmother in Japan.

It is the grandmother who has held the family together since World War II and acted as arbiter in both personal and business matters. It is the grandmother who has handed down family stories that are as much about Japan’s wartime devastation and postwar upheaval as they are about the quiet flow of ritual and kinship.

And, fittingly so, it is the grandmother who is the subject of Yamagata’s “Kaiso” exhibit, a poignant blend of photographic images and oral history that runs Monday through March 13 at the Photo Gallery at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

“My grandmother is a most remarkable woman--a very strong person. With her, I feel closest to my Japanese identity,” said Yamagata, 37, who left Japan in 1971, earned her master’s degree in art at Cal State Fullerton and is now married to Carl Steiner, an attorney.

“Kaiso”--which was started in 1983 with a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts--is the latest one-person show for Yamagata, whose works have also been shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

Stylistically, “Kaiso” (meaning “to reminisce”) is akin to Yamagata’s richly impressionistic earlier studies of her cultural encounters between East and West. The composition is formal and spare, the colors elegantly understated, the emotions measured and gently suggestive.

But while her other one-person shows, such as “Kukan” and “Diary,” dealt mostly with her bicultural conflicts as an immigrant in the United States, “Kaiso” is pure recall: the societal evolution of her grandmother, Aiko Yamagata.

For years, Aiko Yamagata has passed on stories of her coming of age in a traditional, family-centered society, her World War II widowhood and, finally, her emergence as a key figure in the family’s postwar real estate and philanthropic interests.

“We had heard these stories many times. But we were children, and we did not really listen,” Yamagata recalled in a recent interview in her San Juan Capistrano home. By 1983, however, when she returned to the family home in Kushi (near Tokyo) to begin the “Kaiso” project, she felt a sense of urgency.

“My grandmother had become very ill (from a blood condition). It was important that I help preserve the stories as best I could and while there was time. It seemed also a most appropriate time for me to try and understand more of my Japanese self,” Yamagata said.

“When I brought over the finished portfolio for her, she was very quiet, commenting more on the (photographic) techniques. But I know she was very pleased.” Then Yamagata added: “I know my grandmother wants me to return and stay in Japan. But she has always been supportive of whatever I have chosen to do.”

Each of the 20 “Kaiso” color photographs are accompanied by one of the grandmother’s own recollections. Some of the image-and-text pairings are clearly related, such as those depicting the grandmother during her long recovery in the hospital. Others are almost ethereal in their memories of long-ago tea ceremonies, calligraphic sessions and other facets of the traditional culture.

There is no question of Aiko Yamagata’s most dramatic story. This is the wartime death of her husband, Seigo Yamagata.

In her narrative, Aiko provides this fateful prologue: “(He) came to my father to request permission to marry me. . . . During our wedding ceremony, (he) was so nervous that he dropped the cup with which we exchanged ritual sips of sake. This is an important part of the wedding ceremony, and I felt the accident would mean bad luck.”

So it seemed. In 1945, the seaplane carrying Adm. Seigo Yamagata was attacked by an American aircraft and forced down near the China coast. Adm. Yamagata survived the crash but committed seppuku to avoid capture.

Recalled Aiko: “The day I expected (him) to return home . . . he did not return. I waited a month, and still he did not come home. . . . (He) died March 17, 1945. Only his hat and picture are in his grave.”

Mihoko Yamagata’s pictures for these tragic recollections are characteristically implicit. Her image for the story of the 1945 crash and ritual suicide shows her grandmother, her face barely visible, her hands holding a book opened to illustrations of airplanes.

For the wedding ceremony story, the image is even more indirect and seemingly commonplace. The grandmother and the youngest granddaughter, Chiemi, are seen lying on a bed--the eyes of the matriarch closed, those of the younger woman open and staring. But the scene carries a subtle power: It has both stillness and intensity.

“These are meant to be sad images,” Yamagata explained. “But war is not the only theme. These pictures are also about the closeness, warmth and unity of a family--no matter what may happen to it. This, too, is a universal condition.”