Interned : A UCLA Exhibit and a Memoir Evoke Japanese-American Life Behind Barbed Wire in World War II America.

Fifty years--half a century ago. We are speaking of another time, another life. We are returning to that era of war, divided loyalties, betrayal and incarceration. If the median age of Japanese-Americans in 1941 was 17, then my contemporaries and I were the average Japanese-American of the time. We were seniors in high school. * War was raging in Europe. Every month was another scare of war with Japan. Yet we were the America of the melting pot. In spite of the evidence, we did not doubt our country and the principles of democracy we read so much about--lessons on slavery, greed and chicanery were yet to come. But suddenly, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, we were no longer Americans. * I had gone to see “Sergeant York” at the Oceanside Theatre that Sunday, and I’d spent almost two hours watching Gary Cooper shoot Germans. I came home full of rah-rah. My mother met me in the yard. She whispered, “America is at war with Japan.” Her face was white; my heart sank for her. On Dec. 7, we became the enemy. * With Executive Order 9066, my family was forced to cram our lives into suitcases and leave Oceanside for Poston, a camp in Arizona, where everything was communal. No secret was safe. Only the trauma of the betrayal continued silently. But in the spirit of shikataganai , or making the best of it, we bounced back. We published a mimeographed bulletin called the Poston Chronicle. We formed softball teams, produced talent shows, set up libraries and beauty shops, art and drama departments. * Four of us worked as artists at the Chronicle. We were young, inexperienced kids cutting mastheads, lettering and sometimes drawing caricatures and cartoons. I took a course in cartoon drawing at the Poston Art Department with Howard Kakudo.

Howard had worked at Disney for two years on the Blue Fairy character in “Pinocchio.” His friend, mysterious, half-Japanese Isamu Noguchi, was already an acclaimed artist. He tramped the desert collecting ironwood, and in his pith helmet, high-top shoes and dusty denims, he sometimes dropped by to see Howard. Much later, Howard told me Noguchi took the masks he made of ironwood to New York and sold them for thousands of dollars.

Long after Poston, I learned of other camp artists, of the tragic life of Estelle Ishigo, the loneliness calling out from her drawings. And of Henry Sugimoto, who painted on the woven blue stripes of mattress ticking.

When I was a grown woman, I studied painting and met Hiroshi Abiko, who was in his late 80s. He was working with geometric shapes and basic colors, a little like Mondrian. One day I persuaded him to show me his collection. Among the abstracts, I found a camp painting carefully wrapped in tissue paper. It was a piece of Mr. Abiko’s history--the years of his life in a barrack home, the flowers he’d potted, set on the splintered porch. He had caught the morning light that slipped past another barrack and lit the flowers. “I will never paint like that again,” he said. I wanted to cry.

Each of us wants to leave a stone that says, “I have been here.” These works speak of a time gone, stir memories of the experience that still colors us. And beyond the paintings, the sky turns dark. We feel the pain and go on, stronger.

After the war, Ueyama (1889-1954) opened a store in Little Tokyo; Ishigo (1899-1990), a white woman who chose to be interned with her husband, a Nisei, published her camp drawings in “Lone Heart Mountain” (1972); Takamura (1895-1990) returned to his job at RKO Studios; artist Hibi (1886-1947) outlived the war by only two years; Sugimoto (1900-1990) worked as an artist in New York.

“The View From Within,” Japanese-American art from all 10 internment camps--with 135 pieces, the largest and most comprehensive such exhibit--is at UCLA Wight Art Gallery through Dec. 6, organized by Japanese American National Museum, UCLA Wight Art Gallery and UCLA Asian American Studies Center. This essay is adapted from “Poston, Arizona: A Personal Memory,” which appears in the exhibition catalogue.