Artist Depicts Ordeal of Internment Camp

Artist Roger Shimomura vividly remembers the day in 1942 when a friend came to visit him at the internment camp.

Shimomura was 3 years old, and his family had just been transported from Seattle to the Minidoka Relocation Center northeast of Twin Falls, Idaho, during World War II.

The camp was one of 10 sites where 120,000 West Coast Americans of Japanese origin were held during the ethnic hysteria that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

“They were not set up to have guests,” Shimomura remembers. The camp had just been built, he said, and the visitor area was yet to be completed.

The scene is recorded in Shimomura’s 1997 lithograph “Memories from Childhood,” which depicts a small Japanese boy separated by barbed wire from a young white visitor holding a ball. The work is part of Shimomura’s “An American Diary” exhibition, which appears through May 6 at the Boise Art Museum.

Fifty-six years after the so-called Hunt Camp’s last detainees were released, only remnants of a stone guard tower and a visitors’ waiting room remain. But the exhibition, partially funded by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, offers an intimate perspective of camp life and the events leading up to internment.

Since 1998 the paintings have appeared in several museums and art galleries, including Philadelphia’s Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The works are based on what Toku Shimomura--the artist’s late grandmother--recorded in her diary.

In Seattle, on Dec. 7, 1941, she wrote:

“When I came back from church today, I heard the dreamlike news that Japanese airplanes had bombed Hawaii. I was shocked beyond belief. I sat in front of the radio and listened to the news all day. They said that at 6 a.m. Japan declared war on the United States. Our future has become gloomy. I pray that God will stay with us.”

The painting with which her grandson accompanies the passage shows a Japanese woman listening to a 1940s-style radio, gazing out a window. Nearly half her face is covered by shadow as the sun sets for the evening.

In 1912, Toku left Japan to meet and wed Yoshitomi Shimomura, the artist’s Japanese American grandfather, as part of an arranged “photo” marriage. That year she began keeping a journal, a habit she maintained until her death in 1968.

Her grandson later had the journals translated into English.

The pop art images and flat, comic book-style characters outlined in black that Shimomura uses to illustrate her entries recall traditional Japanese imagery. The exhibition of 11-by-14-inch paintings progresses chronologically, showing the everyday realities of Japanese Americans in the concentration camp.

“I wish to forewarn my fellow Minidoka internees that while all of the events depicted are true, architectural and physical details may not be,” wrote Shimomura, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Fine Arts.

His grandmother arrived at the Minidoka Relocation Center on Aug. 17, 1942. Part of her journal entry that day describes traveling by bus in 112-degree heat to the desolate location.

“Barely alive we continued on,” she wrote. “Though the camp was still unfinished we could see the grand scale of this city near the mountains. We stared in amazement.”

The painting to illustrate that day’s entry highlights a thick barbed wire fence in the foreground with rows of nondescript tar paper barracks in the background. A guard tower is visible in the distance.

Barbed wire is a recurring theme. It’s present in several individual paintings, and a painted barbed wire fence encircles the exhibition, running along the wall and above each painting.

“It was a harsh existence,” said historian Bob Simms, who is writing a book about Idaho’s internment camp. “There were military guards on the outside.”

Simms, an emeritus professor of history at Boise State University, said entire families lived in spartan 16-by-20-foot apartments.

“The sewer system was not operating,” he said. “They had to use latrines for the first six months.”

Yet Toku’s journal indicates one of the worst aspects of the camp was the lack of activity. On August 14, 1943, she wrote:

“As usual I have idled away the time without doing anything special. Papa [her husband] sympathized with me over the fact that I am not involved with anything special. I wondered how anyone in this camp could live here without a deep sense of boredom.”

Her grandson captures that sentiment with the image of a woman ironing clothes--a barbed wire fence in the distant background.

“It’s painful to see,” said Lois Siebe, a Washington state resident, as she viewed the exhibition. Siebe grew up in Pocatello and recalls watching Japanese American college students she knew being sent to the camp.

Writing in the exhibition’s comment book, one observer wondered why the government didn’t also imprison Italian and German Americans.

Shimomura cites racism. Japanese Americans made easy, obvious targets because they were not Caucasian.

“They were very mysterious, and that becomes a threat,” the artist said. “The Japanese farmers were coming from Japan with advanced technology, and they could take rejected land and make it productive.”

In January, President Clinton named the Minidoka Relocation Center one of seven newly selected national monuments, putting 73-acre areas of the former concentration camp under National Park Service jurisdiction.

Shimomura said the designation was long overdue.

“Still a lot of people do not know about it,” he said. “It’s still not in the history books. For 40 years people didn’t want to talk about it.”

*

Boise Art Museum:

https://www.boiseartmuseum.org/