IT <i> DID</i> HAPPEN HERE : A Compelling Exhibit Reveals the Haunting Truth About Japanese-American Internment During WWII

On Dec. 12, 1942, Masua Yasui--a shopkeeper, 30-year resident and leading member of the Japanese immigrant community of Hood River, Ore.--was arrested by the FBI as a “politically dangerous alien.” At a military hearing to determine his loyalty to the United States, crudely drawn maps of the Panama Canal--made by his children as part of their schoolwork--were presented as evidence that he intended to blow up the canal.

Yasui’s store was closed, and his family was sent to an internment camp in Northern California. He was shuttled across the country three times, finally winding up at a detention center in Santa Fe, which didn’t release him until five months after the end of World War II. Resettled in Portland, he still worried the FBI would come after him again. In his 70s, he committed suicide.

A total of 120,313 Japanese-Americans (two-thirds of whom were American citizens) were banished by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 to internment camps on the West Coast during World War II. Only in the past few years have third-generation Japanese-American artists working in video, installation and other media begun to search out the details of this painful chapter of family history, so often “forgotten” or passed over in repressive silence by their parents.

Lise Yasui’s 1988 video, “Family Gathering”--which pieces together her grandfather’s bitter experience of American “justice” via old home movies, interviews and archival films--is just one of the many thoughtful works gathered in “Relocations and Revisions: The Japanese American Internment Reconsidered,” organized by the Long Beach Museum of Art (where it is on view through July 5).

The most haunting pieces in the show tend to be the most obsessed with locating a hidden history unrevealed by sparse and stagey U.S. propaganda film footage of life in the camps and blanked out by survivors blithely smiling in ‘50s-era home movies.

Although the exhibit includes sculpture and painting, most of its high points are clustered around video, film and photographic imagery. The appearance of truth that clings to the photographic image serves many of the artists well in their attempt to separate truth from fantasy, and to conjure up a largely undocumented past. Even the catalogue for the exhibit comes in the form of a tape of artist interviews that plays in one of the galleries. (It is also available for purchase.)

The videotapes are shown in five separate programs, which cycle through every day beginning at noon. Among the art videos, the most memorable is “History and Memory: for Akiko and Takashige” by Rea Tajiri (on Program 4), an eloquent and subtle meditation on her grandfather’s life and loss. While he was in an internment camp, someone jacked up his house, loaded it on a truck and drove away. The house was never located; the thief was never punished.

Tajiri sifts through evidence, fabrication and thin air, searching for the ghosts of her past. “Before, we (Japanese in the United States) were slightly ignored and out of focus,” she says. “The war brought us sharply into view and clearly defined.”

Deftly, she draws her metaphors from the language of the camera, juxtaposing scenes from Hollywood movies (“Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,”), U.S. and Japanese propaganda films, her family’s home movies and footage she shot herself of Poston, Ariz., where her family was sent in 1942, each carrying one suitcase.

In a different vein from the more personal and poetic videos, Loni Ding’s “The Color of Honor” (three 30-minute segments, on programs 2, 3 and 4) is a straightforward, utterly compelling documentary about Japanese-Americans and the military that ought to be required viewing in high schools. (Imagine being a GI in the 1940s, presumably fighting for the principles of American democracy, while the U.S. government had wrongfully imprisoned your own family.)

In an installation called “Memory Text,” Dorothy Imagire sandwiches old photographs and texts about her relatives’ experiences during the war between small pieces of glass coated with wax and wrapped with wire. (One story: “When the Imagire tailor shop was not boarded up, Grandma sent Dad to City Hall to find out why. ‘Oh, Imagire, not Maguire,’ (the official said). ‘We thought you were Irish.’ ”)

You have to hold these bundles of memory up to light bulbs to read them, an action that evokes the difficulty of locating and clearly viewing this long-suppressed portion of history.

In Imagire’s “Alien Nation,” small boxes on a shelf each hold a black-and-white photograph of an “alien species,” labeled with its date of immigration. Cucumbers came to Virginia via East India in 1609; peanuts came to the United States on African slave ships in 1619; daisies crossed the U.S. border from Mexico in 1897. Of course, all of these botanical immigrants have long since been fully “naturalized,” while many of their human counterparts are still viewed by other Americans as “aliens.”

Kristine Yuki Aono employs a Japanese saying--”Deru Kugi Wa Utareru” (The nail that sticks up the most takes the most pounding)--in her installation of the same name, to memorialize her father’s “pounding” as a presumed enemy alien forced to abandon his business and home.

Replicated pages of his testimony during the 1981 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings cover the walls. (“I had a good gift shop at the center of Fresno City . . . a nice house with big live trees . . . I’m talking about restitution . . .”). Spattering these documents are rows of pounded-in rusted nails; two sacks of nails sit in the gallery for visitors who want to create their own memorials.

In this context, the title motto (which means “don’t make waves”) represents the tension between the traditional Japanese preference for maintaining a low profile and the sudden prominence and vulnerability of all Japanese-Americans once the U.S. government began pointing its finger at them as potential troublemakers.

Various sources cited in the exhibit reveal that a tiny minority of the state’s population, Japanese and Japanese-Americans, controlled nearly half of commercial truck crops before the war--before they returned from the camps to find their lands ruined or taken over by others. Absurd official explanations for the relocation (for example, that Japanese farmers had “infiltrated every strategic spot” in California) were belied by festering concerns among Caucasian farmers that the Japanese had succeeded in cultivating tracts written off as too arid for farming.

Matthew I. Kukada’s photo project, “22 Homes,” offers a sharply focused view of power and oppression--undercut, unfortunately, by the quality of some of the photographic evidence he has compiled. His piece asks the viewer to compare crisp photographs of the modest-to-sumptuous homes where 22 California congressmen lived in 1942 with blowups of what appear to be aerial views of the relocation and assembly centers. These murky images come across only as dull, dim abstractions, however, lacking the sort of documentary detail that touches the emotions.

Qris Yamashita’s prints are equally barbed. She has “red-penciled” reproductions of evacuation orders and other documents from the internment period, adding extra texts that question and amplify official doublespeak.

By the time you see Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s video installation, “Framed”--on the museum’s second floor, near the video viewing room--some of the official images of the relocation camps will doubtless have become quite familiar: a barber cutting a young boy’s hair, teen-agers jitterbugging, a smiling woman accordionist in front of a theater curtain, kids tumbling on a playground, women and girls posing in their tidy barracks. (The internees themselves were not permitted to have cameras, although some were smuggled in.)

The Yonemotos invite you into a small room in which you watch this “documentary” footage again while looking through a scrim on which fragments of the old movies are projected. Isolated in this way, framed by silence and omission, U.S. government propaganda about its treatment of innocent civilians is exposed as a big, grinning lie.

What: “Relocations and Revisions: The Japanese-American Internment Reconsidered” (videos, installations, sculpture, prints and paintings).

When: Noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, through July 5.

Where: Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway north to 7th Street exit, turn left at Cherry Avenue and left again on Ocean Boulevard.

Wherewithal: General admission $2, free for children under 12.

Where to call: (310) 439-2119.