3 | From Confinement to Containment | Temple University Press and North Broad Press

IN 1981, the Issei artist Henry Sugimoto appeared before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a federal entity designed to assess the effects of the mass confinement on Japanese Americans. Sugimoto and his family were incarcerated at the Fresno Assembly Center in California in May 1942, and then several months later at the Jerome and Rohwer camps in Arkansas, where they remained until the war’s end in August 1945. During this time, he and other artists rendered scenes of their trying circumstances, from the harsh and distant landscapes to everyday life within the barracks and barbed wire. Now, decades later, Sugimoto bore witness to this injustice as part of the larger efforts to attain redress. He even brought some of his paintings to his testimony, hoping to accentuate for the committee the distressing impact of the wartime imprisonment. “Forgive me if I should at times sound emotional,” he began. “On this occasion I am recalling the bitter experiences of all the 110,000 Japanese in this country who suffered at the outbreak of . . . World War II.” The commission’s findings from such evidence eventually led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered reparations of $20,000 to each living survivor. It also included apologies from federal officials, with a formal statement from President George H. W. Bush when the first redress checks were allocated in 1990 (the year of Sugimoto’s death). These events sharpened public awareness about not only the ordeal of confinement but also Sugimoto and his paintings. In 1987, a sampling of his work appeared in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History exhibit A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution. In 2001, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles assembled the largest retrospective showing of Sugimoto’s art, gaining him further nationwide attention.¹

This commemorative endpoint arose from a long and uneven career spanning prewar renown to postwar disregard to renewed appreciation. In the 1930s, Sugimoto was a promising, internationally recognized artist, with exhibitions of his impressionist-inspired landscapes and still lifes occurring in the United States and abroad. But the war disrupted his further development as a professional painter, and he struggled to regain his reputation afterward, having been almost forgotten. Once released from the camps, Sugimoto and his family relocated to New York City, where he worked for textile design companies, among other jobs, to make ends meet. He also began revising his realist versions of camp life throughout the 1950s to the 1970s, often resorting to bigger canvases and brighter color schemes. Important as well, the artist broadened his range of interests by exploring the pre- and postwar presence of Japanese Americans in the United States. Despite his near obscurity in these later decades, Sugimoto managed to show several pieces in small exhibits. Few galleries, however, wanted to display his paintings on the mass imprisonment, selecting instead his scenes of the French countryside or of New York City street life.² But a shift in sentiment was underway. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the rising interest in Asian American studies amid ongoing civil rights activism and new ethnic minority-centered programs in colleges and universities. In 1972, the California Historical Society sponsored an exhibit, Months of Waiting, 1942–1945, which featured the wartime works of six Japanese American artists, Sugimoto’s among them. Community advocates such as the Japanese American Citizens League, U.S. congressmen of Japanese ancestry, as well as other groups, individuals, and institutions, also began pushing for further recognition of, and recompense for, the wartime incarceration. This drive to confront the legacies of confinement led to the establishment of the federal commission before which Sugimoto appeared, placing him and other Japanese Americans back in the public spotlight.³

This chapter examines the war years to the mid-1960s as a noteworthy period in the development of Sugimoto’s work on the mass imprisonment and on related Japanese American topics. Similar to other artists confined in the camps, such as Miné Okubo, Chiura Obata, Hisako Hibi, Tokio Ueyama, Gene Sogioka, and many more, he left an important visual record of the incarceration and an account of his alienation, adaptation, resistance, and survival. Yet no other painter of Japanese ancestry matched Sugimoto’s sizeable body of work (with more than one hundred extant pieces) or the decades-long time span in which he continued to depict these themes.⁴ Most Japanese American artists either stopped painting after the war, or they moved into abstract art when it became the predominant style of the 1950s cultural scene in New York. Sugimoto, however, kept refining his realist images of the mass detention over the ensuing decades. Thus, despite national and communal efforts to forget a wartime past in which Japanese Americans endured imprisonment without just cause, he persisted in resuscitating it with renewed vigor and imagination. The postwar era reveals as well the evolving breadth of his creativity, from which he produced an epic vision of Japanese American life throughout the twentieth century. As Sugimoto grappled with the tormenting aftereffects of his own incarceration, he also gazed beyond national borders to consider the histories of Japanese emigration to the United States, the Pacific War, and the mass confinement as intertwined events. By the mid-1960s, for example, the artist implicitly linked immigration and incarceration in a series of large-scale works, in which human figures not only traversed the Pacific but also were blocked from entering the United States, or were contained within the country by mass confinement and other acts of racial prejudice. His three-year imprisonment in the camps consequently stirred a more expansive imagining of the spatial and temporal experiences of Japanese Americans, ones shaped by the racial tensions within the United States and in U.S.-Japan relations.

Sugimoto interpreted this Japanese American history through a cosmopolitan aesthetic that relied on French Postimpressionist and Mexican muralist influences, along with social realist and folk art elements. Attracted to Western styles since his student days in the late 1920s, he adapted these approaches to create a new wartime and postwar sensibility in his paintings. Although he conveyed little prewar interest in Japanese American subjects (aside from occasional portraits of family members), the camp populace and the surrounding landscapes dominated his work throughout his incarceration. After the war, his desire to connect the historical developments of the Japanese presence in the United States to a transpacific point of view took strong hold in his work, in which muralist forms and methods are readily apparent. What fascinated him was how the Mexican muralists emphasized human figures on a monumental scale with flattened perspectives to present larger, multipart narratives. His coopting of modern European and Mexican styles when rendering accounts of Japanese American life lent a distinct visual quality to his work that transformed over time. Yet the art still revealed a consistent urgency to illuminate sweeping events and their impact on an ethnic community.

I consider Sugimoto’s achievements and circumstances within the broader outline of a “Japanese/American” formation, which changed in meaning and intent from the time of his early career to the period of the war and its aftermath. This framing helps to mark the transitions in his sentiments and identity as an artist, in his portrayals of Japanese American history, and in the public reception of his work. Here, the relationships between “Japanese” and “American” indicate three different processes that expose the fluctuating interactions between the signifiers: his prewar reliance on Japanese and Japanese American support for his art, a wartime separation and confinement of people enacted by a state suspicious of anything Japanese, and, finally, a resuturing and a redefining of relations between “Japanese” and “American” in his postwar identity, when a comprehensive shift occurred in U.S.-Japan affairs that enlarged his artistic views.

In the 1930s, Sugimoto was a Japanese national who literally pictured himself as a cosmopolitan artist in the western European mode, as seen in his self-portraits and photographs. We see in these works the ideal of a well-traveled citizen of the world who exuded curiosity about other cultures and places without being wholly defined by them.⁵ Sugimoto, a Japanese national living in the United States and studying in France and Mexico, fit this mold, and as such he hoped to transcend political ideologies, racial barriers, and state boundaries. But, in doing so, he submerged himself specifically in western European notions of art, fashion, enlightenment, and worldliness. Still, he relied on the Japanese American community in California and on Japanese expatriate contacts in France and Mexico in order to create, exhibit, and sell his art. His embodying of cosmopolitan ideals and the worldwide attention he received for his work was thus made possible by the financial and structural support from these two groups, even though the still lifes and landscapes he sketched and painted at this time had little to do with Japanese or Japanese American subjects. Sugimoto’s embrace of a Eurocentric version of cosmopolitanism to frame his identity and his art, however, was challenged during his wartime confinement, when Japanese Americans became his central thematic focus.

During the war, Sugimoto became in the eyes of the United States an “enemy alien” whose sympathies were assumed to align with imperial Japan. Regardless of their nationality or their feelings of loyalty to the United States, the Issei and Nisei were considered “Japanese, not American.” The federal government placed those on the West Coast into prison camps as an apparent military exigency, a condition arising from a distrust of their loyalties and from longstanding white racial prejudice. Nevertheless, the artist contested these sentiments, composing scenes of incarcerated families and communities who asserted their own ideas about being or becoming Americans. In this light, we can regard him as a “racialized cosmopolitan” once the Pacific War erupted and derailed his plans to become a full-time professional artist.⁶ Retaining the ideal of cosmopolitanism, Sugimoto aspired to create forms of modern representational art that defied rootedness in particular approaches or places, a longing that remained with him throughout his life. He did so by positioning himself above any partisan fray, when chronicling his subjects’ emotive responses to the mass confinement as an aesthetic choice. But this stance emerged from, and was shaped by, the realities of the wartime incarceration that defined him as an enemy alien through a constructed racial Otherness. Concerning his style then, the phrase “racialized cosmopolitan” also captures the tensions between the artistic possibilities he sought and the structural pressures he negotiated in his work. In response to such demanding circumstances, the artist began with a much-traveled outsider’s perspective looking in, painting scenes of the camp terrain and a displaced people’s imprint on it. He portrayed this Japanese American presence through a transnational aesthetic crafted from Postimpressionist and muralist modes of painting to record, as well as to confront, the injustice of confinement. Seeing Sugimoto as a cosmopolitan in this way highlights how he not only created a new style while in the camps and afterward but also countered his own racialization by the state, even as he navigated around it in order to produce and gain notice for his paintings. He was able to secure white liberal patronage, for instance, to exhibit some works at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and elsewhere while he was still imprisoned in the camps, small recompense for a career that he feared had ended.

After the war, Sugimoto moved with his family to New York City, which had become the modern art capital of the postwar world. He also became a U.S. citizen as a result of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which allowed foreign-born Asians to apply for naturalization. This period reveals his interest in depicting the transpacific movements of Japanese coming to the United States and in connecting these migrations through a succession of works about the discrimination and legal restrictions encountered, which eventually led to mass incarceration in World War II. But these pieces, together with his wartime art depicting the camps, never attracted much public attention until the 1970s and 1980s, when mounting institutional recognition of the Issei and Nisei’s prior sufferings began in earnest.

Assessing Sugimoto’s works portraying prewar immigration and wartime confinement from a postwar perspective reveals that he was not simply rendering “American” experiences of loyalty or citizenship. Several observers have claimed that Sugimoto’s travails in the camps made him more appreciative of his civil rights and of the cherished principles of freedom and democracy that contributed to his developing an American mind-set.⁷ Indeed, many of his portrayals of camp life disclose the patriotism and patience of Japanese Americans that suggest them as unjustly maligned model minorities. He often played on this status not only to combat their dehumanization by the state but also to garner white support for his art. Sugimoto’s desires for being known as a cosmopolitan artist, however, coexisted in tension with these notions of national belonging. Although Sugimoto became a U.S. citizen in 1953, he attained a sense of artistic renewal when he returned to Japan in 1964 and during further trips there in the years to come. The initial visit made him realize how American he was by then, noting the tremendous changes to his birthplace since he had left more than four decades before.⁸ But the recurring journeys across the ocean also helped foster his epic vision of Japanese Americans in a transpacific context. Given these events, his was not quite a unilateral “immigrant to American” success story of overcoming obstacles, achieving recognition, and becoming assimilated. It was instead something more intricate and developed that arose in part from reconnecting with his ancestral land. Sugimoto’s artistic sensibilities altered to the extent that his worldliness became informed by a growing awareness of the larger structural workings of white racism and the history of Japanese movements across the Pacific. For him, then, becoming an American—as a citizen and as a painter—also meant revisiting and embracing his Japanese past.⁹

Sugimoto’s efforts were validated throughout the 1970s and 1980s in interviews and other news coverage that reconsidered his body of work, during which he expressed hope in his publicity notes that his art “would be able to contribute to both Jap[anese] & Ame[rican] culture.”¹⁰ This sentiment emerged from the renewed attention he received in not only the United States but Japan as well. The city hall in Wakayama, Sugimoto’s hometown, wanted to acknowledge his artistic feats by commissioning a mural from him, which he completed in 1978. Measuring almost thirty feet in length and seven feet in height, the work displayed part of the New York City skyline that focused on Washington Heights, featuring the Cloisters and the George Washington Bridge. Sugimoto’s choice of subject was telling, in that he claimed himself as “a native son” of Wakayama and as an adopted New Yorker, using the visual prominence of the bridge as a metaphor for his life and for his relations to both cities.¹¹ Other opportunities in Japan soon followed. In 1980, the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun sponsored an overview exhibit of his work since the 1930s. Sugimoto also self-published a collection of his art for Japanese audiences, Hokubei Nihonjin no shuyojo: kiroku kaiga (1981), from which he produced an English version, North American Japanese People in Relocation Camps (1983). In the book’s introduction, the art critic and educator Kubo Sadajiro observed: “I surely believe that Henry Sugimoto will leave his name . . . on Japanese art history as [a] camp scene artist. On these works were carved into history . . . the sufferings of the Japanese people.” Kubo regarded Sugimoto as part of a larger diaspora of Japanese artists, including Kitakawa Tamiji, Eitaro Ishigaki, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who were linked by their transpacific migrations and by the sorrowful memories and reverberations of World War II. For each of these figures, art as a cosmopolitan practice and as a human endeavor transcended national loyalties and boundaries, as seen through their merging of genres and other cultural components in their work.¹²

But even as Sugimoto took heart in the changing relations between his ancestral and adopted homelands, he refused to recoil from depicting the wartime frictions that had placed the Issei and Nisei in such dire straits. This is not to say that he surrendered his dream of becoming a renowned artist invested in illustrating the more urbane aspects of the human condition or the beauty he found in nature. Sugimoto continued to paint still lifes, landscapes, and portraits until the end of his life. But he admitted from the hindsight of a 1986 interview that his work on the wartime imprisonment and its relation to the broader issues regarding Japanese Americans was his central legacy—“My major achievement as an artist,” as he put it.¹³ As such, his work depicting scenes from Japanese American history represents an ambitious and unrivaled rendering of war, immigration, and incarceration through a racialized cosmopolitan style.

A Prewar Art Career

Yuzuru “Henry” Sugimoto was born in 1900 in Wakayama, Japan, where he spent most of his youth until immigrating to the United States in 1919. His father moved to the Central Valley farming community of Hanford, California, when Henry was still an infant. His mother then left for Hanford in 1909 to join her husband, later giving birth to two sons. The Sugimoto parents made their living through farm work and managing a boarding house for other Japanese laborers. In the meantime, Henry and a younger brother were left in the care of his maternal grandparents in Japan. During this period of his childhood, he began drawing by mimicking Japanese scroll paintings, with his grandfather’s encouragement. When he and his brother reunited with their parents and the other siblings in Hanford after years of separation, Sugimoto recalled how he initially felt distant from a patriarch of whom he had no recollection, but how he promptly embraced his still recognizable mother. He later enrolled in the local high school, improving his English and converting to Christianity along the way. He then went to the University of California at Berkeley but realized that pursuing an initial interest in medical studies there did not suit him. Following a friend’s advice, Sugimoto decided to attend the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he developed a passion for oil painting. The young man became enthralled with the Postimpressionists, studied the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Millet, among other favorites, and adapted their styles and approaches when depicting still lifes and the California landscape. The atmosphere at the school also proved exhilarating for him because he could paint alongside other students from different parts of the country and the world who were committed to their art. He graduated with honors in 1928 and then enrolled in several classes at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1929 to continue honing his skills.¹⁴

Sugimoto’s education was noteworthy in that the arts scene in California at that time remained more open to accepting an Asian presence than other organizations in the state. Although some Asian students attended segregated schools in certain communities, art institutions in particular, such as the ones Sugimoto attended, admitted anyone with potential talent regardless of their ethnic background. Places to exhibit their pieces were also readily available. The Painters and Sculptors Annual Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Oriental Artists Group, and the San Francisco Museum of Art Annuals, for example, presented several venues, even for beginning artists, to show their work.¹⁵ The Bay Area also offered an array of exhibitions for Sugimoto to visit, especially the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, both in San Francisco. Yet, as much as these sites provided new artistic avenues to explore, Sugimoto felt the need to see and learn firsthand from the European masters and other influences.¹⁶

Significant to the artist’s development were his travels abroad in the 1930s, first to France and then to Mexico. Arriving in Paris in 1930 with no particular plan in mind, Sugimoto made contacts with already settled Japanese expatriate artists, who housed and fed him and guided him to museums. He later ventured into the countryside to sketch and paint landscapes. The artist Fujioka Noboru, who had lived in New York City, and the journalist Inoue Isao, who, like Sugimoto, came from California, were some of his closest associates in appreciating what France had to offer. Sugimoto also attended the Académie Colarossi in Paris to refine his abilities and took language classes at the Alliance Française to improve his French. That same year, he submitted work to the prestigious annual exhibit the Salon d’Automne, but was rejected. In 1931, still feeling distraught over this setback, he followed his colleagues’ suggestion to revisit the French countryside, where he befriended and stayed with the Japanese artist Ogi Moto, who lived in Voulangis, a village near Paris. The two spent their time painting the local landscape and conversing about their art, a relationship that proved fruitful to Sugimoto’s development. Later that year, he learned that the Salon d’Automne selected a different landscape painting of his for exhibition, a major breakthrough for the young artist.¹⁷

Throughout this period, Sugimoto began accruing international renown for his landscapes and still lifes by adapting the style of the French Postimpressionists, with Maurice de Vlaminck and André Dunoyer de Segonzac as his foremost influences. Vlaminck in particular had started his career painting scenes in the Fauvist mode, resorting to unnatural, bright colors and an expressionist approach in his work at the turn of the twentieth century. In the following decades, especially after World War I, he shifted to impressioniststyle landscapes that sought to capture a darker, more isolated mood.¹⁸ His impact is evident in not only Sugimoto’s early pieces portraying French fields and villages but also the later works of wartime camp buildings and landscapes, many showing a similar mixing of blues, greens, and browns applied freely with quick and broad brush strokes. We see, for example, how Sugimoto adapted the perspectives and forms of Postimpressionism from Vlaminck’s winter village scene Saint-Maurice-Les-Charencey (1928) in his own depiction, Village of Villiers (1930). Here, farm dwellings and other structures occupy both sides of the canvas, with a row of buildings on the right extending at an upward angle from the lower corner into the painting’s center. A central dirt road between the edifices starts from the bottom foreground and continues in a parallel rising slant into the picture’s middle horizon. A few small human figures also appear, as they do in Vlaminck’s work, walking on the road into the background. This scene has a lonely feel to it, heightened by the dark coloring and the overcast skies. But Sugimoto offered a different take on Vlaminck’s style, one that was contemplative, rather than gloomy, as the Issei artist embraced a more extensive palette. Visualizing the landscape through Postimpressionist eyes would then provide Sugimoto with a useful artistic vocabulary, reappearing in slightly different ways in his renderings of the wartime camps.

Henry Sugimoto, Village of Villiers (1930). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.76].)

Also during his time in France, Sugimoto cultivated a more self-conscious cosmopolitan persona that originated from his art school days in California. In 1931, a self-portrait and photographs reveal his adherence to cosmopolitanism as a universal concept derived from modern European culture, where intellectually minded persons, as citizens of the world, desired to engage humanity in its wholeness and to detach themselves from specific loyalties, locales, and other limitations. In these pictorial forms, Sugimoto wears his signature black beret, which evokes his identification not only as an artist but specifically with Paris and its standing as the cultural capital of Western society. In the realist-mode portrait, Sugimoto sits before a blank canvas to his left, as he looks off slightly to his right beyond the viewer, a somber and somewhat enigmatic expression on his face. The background behind him is also bare, with only the unadorned wall and a small black stove in sight. His spare use of colors, with reds, browns, and yellows the most apparent, heightens the simplicity of the scene. The resulting depiction gives the impression of an artist at the beginning of his professional promise, the blank canvas signifying the possibilities yet to be discovered and rendered. A photograph of Sugimoto and his friend Ogi, however, offers a different outlook. The two artists, dapper in their berets and white shirts with dark neckties, pose outdoors in front of a French farm building, each with a palette and a brush in hand. Sugimoto stands, and Ogi crouches alongside their impressionist village scenes, the canvases leaning on easels that face toward the viewer. Ogi sports a slight smile, already confident in his well-being. In contrast, Sugimoto’s upright posture, serious demeanor, and finished product (unlike the blank canvas in the self-portrait) suggest an artist growing in assurance and accomplishment.

By 1932, however, the Great Depression took tighter hold of the world, and Sugimoto’s parents beckoned him home to help the family. Back in California, the artist applied what he learned in France to works depicting the local landscape—from the rivers and mountains in Yosemite Valley to ocean views and mission scenes in Carmel—that gained the notice of several art dealers and museums.¹⁹ The California Palace of the Legion of Honor offered him his first solo exhibition in June 1933, describing the young man as a “rising artist, whose achievements are the results of unceasing endeavor, strong will power, and perseverance.”²⁰ Other gallery invitations from Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego followed. One even came from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. But Sugimoto thought that, because he had already committed to other gallery showings in California, he had to decline the request from the esteemed institution. He later lamented this decision, when realizing the greater potential impact the New York exhibition would have had on his career.²¹

Nonetheless, the Japanese American press in California was especially keen on promoting his exhibitions, touting Sugimoto and other Issei and Nisei artists as new “Oriental” talent that deserved more public attention. Among the four hundred paintings shown at the San Francisco Art Association, as the Kashu Mainichi noted in January 1935, seventeen of them were by “Japanese artists” that, along with Sugimoto, included Takeo Edward Terada, Koichi Nomiyama, and Miki Hayakawa. In April 1934, the paper emphasized on its front page how the “First Oriental Art exhibition” at the Western Foundation of Art in Los Angeles “is expected to give an impetus to a new trend in art,” with Sugimoto’s works displayed beside those of Benji Okubo, Hideo Date, and Tokio Ueyama. Rafu Shimpo in the same year also promoted on its front page an exhibit of paintings by the “well known San Francisco artist” Henry Sugimoto at the Wilshire Art Gallery in Los Angeles, citing that “special care has been taken to make the art display . . . one of the [most] outstanding.” These news items did not specify what constituted the Japanese American painters’ styles or their unique contributions to the art world. The variety of these artists’ approaches made it almost impossible to find any unifying theme, since the works ranged from surrealist portraits to realist urban scenes to impressionist landscapes. But the media coverage intimated that showcasing this talent, however cosmopolitan in its methods, training, or impact, was an affair rooted in ethnic pride and thus worthy of support from local Japanese communities.²²

Henry Sugimoto, Self-Portrait (1931). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.106].)

Amid these artistic successes, Sugimoto married Susie Tagawa in April 1934. The two had dated since their high school days in Hanford and managed to maintain their relationship throughout Henry’s lengthy travels and the months and years apart from one another. The Tagawa elders had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, around the same time that Sugimoto’s parents arrived, and established a laundry business. In 1910, Susie was born, and ten years later came a younger sister, Naomi. Henry and Susie married at the local Japanese Presbyterian Church and moved to the Bay Area after their wedding. But they relocated back to Hanford and to their extended families when a daughter, Madeleine Sumile, arrived in 1936. To better support themselves, the Sugimotos lived with the Tagawas, and Henry worked at the laundry and various other jobs while continuing to focus on his art.²³ Susie proved an essential figure in the development of Henry’s aspirations by not only encouraging his continued travels and time spent abroad but also providing through her labors the financial stability in their lives, the housekeeping, and the childrearing. As Henry later recalled about her contributions, Susie “made it possible for me to do what I wanted to do and [provided] the time to do it.”²⁴

This acknowledgment pertained as well to other women of Japanese ancestry whom Sugimoto encountered in the United States and abroad. When he visited Carmel to paint the landscape there, he met an Issei couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kodani, who offered him living quarters in a cabin near their house. Sugimoto reminisced that “Mrs. Kodani even made me all my meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner . . . so I was able to work on many more sketches.” While in France, the artist gave not only Ogi but also his wife credit for their generous accommodations. “Mrs. Ogi,” he noted, “cooked three meals a day for me along with the rest of her family.” “When I went out to sketch in the mornings,” he continued, “Mrs. Ogi would even pack a lunch for me, so I could sketch the scenery wherever I wanted to until evening without having to take a break.”²⁵ This pattern of feeding and housing the proverbial starving artist in these Japanese immigrant and expatriate families allowed Sugimoto the precious time and quiet to paint and sketch, providing a more communal look at how he was able to produce his work across continents.

Sugimoto’s reliance on the diaspora of other Japanese contacts helped his further travels and studies. In 1939, he had the opportunity to visit Mexico for a few months through the auspices of several Japanese businessmen. Dwight Takashi Uchida, the father of Yoshiko Uchida (discussed in Chapter 4), worked for the Mitsui Company’s branch office in San Francisco and, being acquainted with Sugimoto, recommended the artist to the trading firm’s network in Mexico City.²⁶ There, Sugimoto was moved by the works of three major muralists—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—when visiting museums and other exhibition venues. Unlike his experiences in France, where he focused on impressionist landscapes, in Mexico Sugimoto sketched and painted ordinary human figures, along with street scenes of Mexico City. His association with Mitsui presented the opportunity for him to display several paintings in the company offices, where employees then purchased several of the pieces. The chance to show and sell his work to Japanese clients made him consider staying in Mexico for several more months, but an illness caused him to return home earlier than expected.²⁷

More significant for Sugimoto’s artistic development, his interest in human figures that developed during this period in Mexico later became evident in his art depicting Japanese American life in the wartime prison camps, where such figures dominate his most notable compositions. Although in several works he rendered in impressionist fashion the barracks, guard towers, and landscapes of the camps, it was the imprisoned bodies themselves, in their rounded and blocklike forms that followed muralist and social realist sensibilities, that gave his paintings of Japanese Americans a unique and compelling look. Sugimoto never painted any murals, or resorted to a muralist style, during the 1930s. He instead emphasized what other visiting artists from the United States had done while in Mexico in the 1910s to the 1940s: portraying the idealized rural simplicity of the landscape and its peoples. In this framing, painters ignored the modernizing forces emerging in Mexico, with its industrial factories and railway lines, its large and lively urban centers, and its other developed aspects, since these traits would spoil their nostalgic vision of what the country was supposed to look like.²⁸ For instance, the studies that Sugimoto created while in Mexico were of conventional, even stereotypical, scenes. One consists of a farmer plowing the land, another of a woman selling her wares in a village market, each invoking the simple, noble life of the peasantry.

But the Mexican muralist and realist styles, with their themes regarding social injustice, would become more pronounced in Sugimoto’s aesthetic approach during the war, when his own displacement and incarceration transformed his artistic vision into sharper commentary. The muralists’ coloring techniques, outlining of bodily shapes and postures, and focus on laborers and the poor as central subjects of Mexican modernity were influential in this regard. Noticeable as well, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco highlighted in their works the presence and influence of indigenous populations in Mexico and of ethnic minorities in the United States. These subjects and stylistic elements offered attractive models for African American muralists, such as Hale Woodruff, Charles White, and John Wilson, for tracing the past degradations of slavery and the struggles toward a more hopeful future.²⁹ Sugimoto likewise paid attention when considering the plight of Japanese Americans. Chances for him to see Rivera’s work were not limited to Mexico but extended to the Bay Area as well. Allegory of California (1931) in the City Club of San Francisco and The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931) at the San Francisco Art Institute would have caught Sugimoto’s notice in the years after his return from Paris. In contrast to the Mexican and African American artists’ concerns about engaging in revolution and social reform, however, Sugimoto avoided overt political tones in his own work. Yet, after the war, he continued to rely on muralist methods to portray the broader aspects of Japanese American history, capturing its range and vitality through coinciding scenes and figures.³⁰

Sugimoto’s life and work in the 1930s thus disclose a cosmopolitan life already formed, from which he was able to navigate different facets of the art world in the United States and abroad. He gained the attention of American, European, and Japanese patrons and critics, exhibited his paintings across the hemispheres, discussed work with fellow Japanese artists and French masters while studying in Europe, and enjoyed the support of Japanese American communities in California. Although Sugimoto thought of himself as an artist who won acclaim from working primarily in the impressionist mode, he was a man of the world in a broader sense, given the mix of his experiences within several nations, his contacts across different classes and ethnicities, and his own background as an Issei. As Karen Higa observes, these social and professional circles in which Sugimoto participated add a different tinge to the conventional portraits we have of Japanese immigrants in the United States as field laborers and shopkeepers living in segregated ethnic communities during the early twentieth century. Because Sugimoto belonged in part to privileged groups and traveled widely, his career did not appear adversely affected by the rampant discrimination that other Japanese encountered. But his talents and his circumstances would be sorely tried, given the looming war with Japan and what it portended for Japanese Americans as a whole.³¹

Cartographies of Confinement: Wartime Camp Life

The wartime incarceration left its brutal mark on a broad range of Japanese Americans. To cope with the grueling environment of the camps, they produced an impressive array of art, from photography and sketches to craft arts and paintings, with many of these pieces offering important social critiques on the confinement. Among the Issei and Nisei were professional artists who had their own studios before the war and who, like Sugimoto, offered to teach classes in the camps. Conditions, however, were challenging. Much of what the instructors and their students could create while behind barbed wire was limited due to lack of resources. Art materials were often scarce, and people had to be inventive with what was available. Sugimoto resorted to using mattress covers, pillowcases, canvas wrappings that had been employed to transport belongings, and other found material on which to paint. He and others also began sketching, painting, or photographing their surroundings in secret, since the Wartime Civilian Control Administration, run by the U.S. Army, forbade them to document what was occurring inside the assembly centers. Once the War Relocation Authority (WRA) took over the supervision of inmates and confined them further inland, officials allowed them to paint scenes of the prison camps. Through these efforts, Japanese Americans left an immense, yet underappreciated, artistic record of their experiences, revealing the extent of their ingenuity and craftsmanship.³²

Other important visual artifacts came from established photographers, such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, who captured the process of forced removal and life in specific camp locations. Lange shot scenes of Japanese Americans before and during the removal process in California and visited various incarceration sites. Adams took his camera to record the camp life at Manzanar, located in Owens Valley in California, and published the results in Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans (1944). Both Lange and Adams were sympathetic to the difficulties facing their subjects. Adams’s collection sought to convey the heroic endurance of the Issei and Nisei amid the transformative natural environment that they inhabited. At the same time, he reinforced predominant stereotypes about Asian passivity, picturing them as part of the western landscape itself, and did not challenge the racial reasons for the Japanese American imprisonment.³³ Lange in particular worked under the auspices of the WRA’s Information Division and often had her photos censored to prevent unfavorable images of confinement from circulating in public. The WRA hired white photographers to detail the removal and detention process to emphasize how Japanese Americans were being well treated, even as their confinement required justification, whether the photographers agreed with this institutional intent or not.³⁴ As Jasmine Alinder notes about the broader effects of this documenting work, “the camera served as a kind of visual gatekeeper that determined who was fit to be a part of the body politic and who should be cast out.”³⁵ Starting with the creation of Asian immigration credentials in the late nineteenth century, photography became an instrument by which federal authorities could record and reinforce their message about who was suitable for citizenship, who was loyal or disloyal, and whose presence was tolerable, if not welcome, within the nation. The origins of documenting and imagining alien or exotic Others in this manner had deep roots in American popular culture and in U.S. imperial ventures in Asia: photographers exhibited these subjects for the purposes of both science and entertainment. But the framing process that warranted the confinement of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, was rife with internal contradictions. The resulting photographs and their supplementary captions portrayed the Issei and Nisei as quiet and dignified in their comportment during the removal. Some of the younger subjects even smiled at the camera, visual evidence for white viewers of Asian civility and good-natured compliance, characteristics that tended to support their assimilation and acceptance. Yet the federal government categorized these men, women, and children as enemy aliens and thus a threat to the nation’s security.³⁶

By creating different or little-known scenes of their tribulations, Sugimoto and other Japanese Americans offered counternarratives that modified, if not contested or complicated, the WRA-sponsored versions of the camp experiences that served to promote the government’s benevolence. Individuals like the professional photographer Toyo Miyatake and others snuck in camera parts and took their own photographs from makeshift devices, or even made home movies. These visual recordings, including paintings, sketches, and illustrations, varied in their levels of discernible protest or critique, depending on the intentions, perspective, or tone of each. As examined below, such disparities occurred within Sugimoto’s own body of work, in which he explored the possible range of his subjects’ sentiments and attempted to grasp what he observed and faced in the camps.³⁷

All through his career, however, Sugimoto denied any political intentions in his work, seeing himself instead as a worldly artist who was merely “documenting” life as he saw it. He intimated by this statement that to document meant to record in an emotionally truthful manner, conveying through his art a lasting aesthetic experience. Sugimoto wanted to focus on recounting the circumstances and feelings of Japanese Americans during the war, rather than on criticizing the federal government for its actions against them. Several reasons explain this stance regarding the function of his work. First and foremost, being detached from political motives fit his ideal of a cosmopolitan figure unconfined by borders, styles, or expectations when pursuing artistic aims. As Sugimoto explained in an interview in the 1980s: “Art is essentially a means of expression designed to give aesthetic pleasure.” This ideal remained as true for him while in art school during the 1920s as it did six decades later.³⁸

But there may have been underlying, yet unexpressed, motives as to why Sugimoto avoided addressing issues in such a way that others could interpret as attacks on the government, or why he did not want to see his past experiences and his art defined in this manner. The wartime incarceration itself proved how state power could adversely affect entire populations that it considered a threat. Japanese Americans for the most part remained quiet for years afterward about their lives in the camps, many having been shamed or traumatized into silence. The ensuing Cold War climate, in which anyone who criticized national ideals or institutions fell under suspicion as a communist or a sympathizer, also contributed to repressing dissent and the voicing of grievances. People’s lives and careers at the time could come to quick ruin merely on the basis of innuendo or rumor. That Japanese Americans suffered charges of disloyalty due to their ancestral background even before their mass imprisonment made them all the more careful in the probing glare of McCarthyism.³⁹ From another angle, Sugimoto may have adopted a noncommittal view on sensitive or controversial topics simply to safeguard his prospects when attempting to gain favor from patrons in the United States. Even then, showing the nation’s racial prejudice against Japanese Americans in his work misaligned with art galleries’ preferences for exhibitions and sales. These desires coincided with the broader directives of the federal government during the Cold War, when U.S. officials sought to counter Soviet propaganda on the shortcomings of American democracy. Not until the 1980s did Sugimoto acknowledge in interviews the racial discrimination he and his family members faced in the United States. He recalled his student days, when he could not practice with his white teammates on the high school swim team at other institutions’ pools. He also noted that his brother Ralph, despite serving in the U.S. Army, could not get a haircut at a local barbershop because of his ethnic background. These later reminiscences highlight how Sugimoto may have dealt with earlier personal traumas, or how his generation addressed such racial instances: by keeping silent about them as they occurred. Despite these hindrances, however, it is important to remember that he continued to paint scenes of wartime camp life.⁴⁰

At the same time, the artistic ideas espoused by the Mexican muralists shadowed Sugimoto’s labors as he adapted their politically charged styles that included narratives about revolution and social injustice.⁴¹ This point became more apparent to art critics in the post–civil rights era. As one reporter noted in the 1980s, Sugimoto’s “documentary works combined the brooding Expressionist styles he grew up with, with the political literalness of an editorial cartoonist and the sentiment of a magazine illustrator.” A reviewer of the 2001 retrospective exhibit at the JANM went further, writing that “the tone and mood of Sugimoto’s pieces [were] driven by political activism,” wherein his pieces “from the mid-’40s on . . . converse with activist-based works that began to emerge again in the ’70s.”⁴² In this case, the assumption that his documenting events were political acts (and not just aesthetic practices) suggests that he was participating in, or setting the foundations for, other artistic critiques of social issues regarding ethnic minorities. Although Sugimoto would have demurred at describing his art as “activist,” his reliance on particular styles and the interpretations of his art by different audiences over the years reveal the charged dynamics of the work, given his selection of subject matter and perspective. The war- and immigration-related compositions were thus not as timeless, objective, or apolitical as they appeared, especially when viewed from the vantage point of Asian American political engagements that lent his work renewed public visibility in the 1970s and 1980s.

Considering Sugimoto’s own artistic process, the affective power of his art on the mass confinement stemmed from his feelings of fear and doubt during that moment and from his need to keep reconceiving those sentiments in new and different ways. His tone in, and approach to, recording occurrences in the camps and during prewar migrations, then, were more fluid and open, since he kept revising many of the paintings over the course of decades. For example, we can see the transformations in two variations of a similarly titled scene, My Papa (circa 1942; circa 1965). In each of these renderings, an FBI agent takes away a farmer dressed in blue overalls from his plowing, located on the left side of the frame, the horse and farm buildings on the right-center, as his wife and two children helplessly watch in the lower right corner. The incident in the painting occurs after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the rounding up of Japanese heads of households begins. Religious themes often permeated Sugimoto’s work, and here, the mother and baby are reminiscent of a Madonna and Christ child, the woman with a white head covering seen in profile from the back and left side, the infant facing the viewer. In this scene, an unjust state power intrudes on a now separated family’s innocence and sanctity of home. The little girl in the lower-middle foreground of the picture chases after her father as he looks to his right, back at her (in the later adaptation), bolstering the affective power of the scene. The first version (circa 1942), measuring eighteen by twenty-two inches, discloses a less sentimental perspective. The father glances to his left, away from his family, perhaps because he cannot bear the pain of seeing their aggrieved countenances. The held baby in the lower right places its hand on the mother’s cheek as small comfort. This depiction shows hurried, heavy brushwork with few colors in the composition, a reflection of the Sugimotos’ rush to pack a few possessions before their removal to the detention center in Fresno. Browns and blues predominate, with the figures revealing a naïve, folk art look that matches the simple, yet powerful, emotions of seeing a Japanese American family disrupted in this manner. By 1965, the artist revisited My Papa with a bigger canvas (fifty-two by sixty-five inches), softer brushwork, and brighter colors. He also began painting scenes of prewar Japanese immigration at this time, with a comparable array of hues and on large-sized canvases. We can then appreciate Sugimoto’s body of work as an evolving series of social critiques ingrained in the racially laden experiences of Japanese Americans throughout the twentieth century. In this framework, the Pacific War was a major turning point for him that clarified his and others’ inferior, racialized status, as decreed by the United States.

Henry Sugimoto, My Papa (circa 1942). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.91].)

Henry Sugimoto, My Papa (circa 1965). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.139].)

These matters became more evident to Sugimoto once the federal government declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the FBI began arresting Japanese nationals with any suspicious ties to their homeland. Sugimoto worried about his own safety after some of his colleagues at a Japanese-language school, where he also worked as a part-time instructor, were held for questioning about their connections to Japan. Gripped by panic, the artist went to the school and buried the textbooks over the next few days, hoping to destroy any signs of disloyalty or acts of purveying Japanese culture on his part. He then waited with his family in fear of what might develop. But somehow, to his relief, the agents never came for him.⁴³ Several weeks passed, with hardly any calls for a mass removal. However, pressure on the federal government from local political leaders and white farming interests that wanted to rid themselves of Japanese competition on the West Coast increased. Growing fears of the Japanese functioning as a fifth column within the United States and early victories by Japan’s imperial forces in the Pacific also began to change people’s sentiments against the Issei and Nisei. President Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 activated an array of actions that held ominous import for Japanese Americans across the West Coast. In April, the U.S. Army alerted them about their impending removal from their homes and neighborhoods to temporary holding areas.⁴⁴ The Sugimoto family, which then included Henry and Susie, their six-year-old daughter Madeleine, and Henry’s parents and brothers, were assigned in early May to the Fresno Assembly Center, a former fairground located near Hanford, California. The detention facility held more than five thousand people, who had had only a few days to bundle their belongings, or sell what they could not carry, before being transported there on buses under armed guard. Amid this rush of activity, Sugimoto gave about one hundred paintings to a San Francisco art dealer for safekeeping while he was away. But to his dismay at what he learned afterward, the dealer went out of business and the work went missing, presumably auctioned off to unknown clients. Sugimoto was never able to recover these pieces or any profits from them, which he valued at over ten thousand dollars at the time.⁴⁵

Adding insult to injury, the arrivals at Fresno met with other unanticipated adversities. For one, they were housed in buildings that had served as horse stalls; the artist recounted later how the smell of animals still pervaded their quarters. The dismalness of the situation, however, failed to diminish Sugimoto’s desire to continue making art. “We were allowed [a] limited amount of personal belongings—bare necessities,” he recalled about the move, “but being an artist I snuck in art materials like [a] few tubes of pigment, three brushes and a small bottle of turpentine.”⁴⁶ This lack of supplies and the conditions under which they were made gave his early paintings of the scenes around him a rough and hurried look. We saw this method in My Papa (circa 1942), where his stylistic touches and dark coloring schemes lent such works a pervasive mood of despair and uncertainty amid the hasty dislocation of civilians.

When transported in a secondary move from Fresno to the Jerome camp in southeastern Arkansas in October 1942, Sugimoto recalled the cross-country train ride as a long and arduous journey. The railway cars were old and uncomfortable, having been out of service for years, as they rattled, screeched, and plodded toward their destination. The windows were draped with black shades, so the passengers could not see out and thus had no idea where they were. The lavatory in the Sugimotos’ compartment flooded, filling the aisle with water and soaking the luggage. Sleep came in fits and starts. Amid these conditions, Sugimoto was able to create small, four-by-six-inch sketches of the southwestern surroundings on rest stops along the way. Some of these captured farm and village landscapes, while others depicted Japanese Americans moving their suitcases, waiting in stations, and one with his wife and daughter leaning against each other on a train seat.⁴⁷

By the time the Sugimoto family and thousands of others reached the camp at Jerome, what they saw disheartened them further. The site was located amid swampy woodlands, where snakes and mosquitos thrived. The barracks were still unfinished, so the new arrivals had to sleep in warehouses, with blankets covering the floor. Once assigned to their quarters, the inmates then discovered that the WRA officials had failed to supply them with tables, shelves, or chairs, so they had to build their own furniture, taking any excess lumber from the camp construction to do so. Although fatigued and anxious at this point, Sugimoto was determined to continue painting. As he recounted, “If I can make my art still, I am feeling not so bitter.” Once the camp populace established mess halls, schools, clinics, and other civic facilities, Sugimoto began teaching art at the high school and night classes for adults, where his salary was nineteen dollars a month. This position allowed him to collect more art supplies, both for his students and for himself. We can observe the changes in his style by 1943, with the wider range of color schemes, the increased precision in brushwork, and the experimentation in forms. Despite his feelings of uncertainty and the hardships encountered, Sugimoto was able to produce a new and different genre of art from his prewar work as a way to survive, even to flourish, when doing what he loved.⁴⁸

Painting scenes of the camp landscape initially proved difficult for the artist. Recollecting his first impressions of the surroundings in Arkansas, he noted that, compared to the French countryside, there was “nothing good . . . just barracks” to depict on his makeshift canvases.⁴⁹ Yet, when rendering this environment in Postimpressionist fashion, he was more than able to reconfigure the desolation around him into visions of pensive beauty to offset the severity of his circumstances. In several variations of the landscape, such as Jerome, Ark. (circa 1942), Jerome Camp from Swamp (circa 1942), or Near the Jerome Camp (circa 1943), we recognize Sugimoto’s earlier shadings, strong brush strokes, and vantage points developed from his prewar efforts in France. Most of these later depictions also reveal similar cloud-streaked skies, this time over rows of gray barracks, low wire fences, and guard towers set amid the fields and forests of Arkansas. A tiny figure or two often ambles along a road in front or alongside of the barracks. But Sugimoto moved beyond a partiality for Postimpressionism as an aesthetic style and created what he called a “documentary record” of what he saw and experienced in the camps.⁵⁰

One of the more suggestive portrayals is the winter scene Sunrise—Jerome (1943). The camp is discerned in the distance, a row of barracks and other structures occupying the middle horizon of the canvas. Below them is a grassy field that dominates the right and middle foreground. A path and a ditch with walkways over it run parallel in a diagonal slant from the immediate middle foreground to the left side of the frame. Sugimoto renders much of this winter atmosphere in blues, whites, and grays, heightening the sense of dreariness and seclusion that engulfs the camp. Unlike his other prison landscapes, no human figure is present. What captures the viewer’s attention amid this overall bleakness is the crimson orb that emerges above the barracks, its presence faintly tinting the surrounding sky in wispy pinks. We notice, too, the signs of human activity in the barracks, with some of the tiny windows aglow in yellow-orange light and the smoke curling up from the chimneys. As this particular day begins, which will renew itself in following sunrises, we detect the artist’s small, glimmering hope in these specks of bright colors, that despite the isolation and despair pervading the camp, life still continues. Furthermore, the painting presents the rising red sun, the symbol of Japan, as conveying something other than its associations with imperial desires and destructiveness. Instead, it suggests a more measured sense of ethnic pride and peaceable endurance located within the Japanese diaspora. Considered a domestic racial threat by the U.S. government, Sugimoto countered this charge in subtle and diverse ways throughout his work. He did so in transnational styles that also at times evoked transnational movements in his muralist compositions. But here, Sugimoto offered a new twist along these lines to his Postimpressionist training. Sunrise—Jerome implies, through the camp landscape, that a migratory people in their ordinary pursuits (including the painter himself), and not the imperial state across the Pacific, better represents the traditions, spirit, and cosmopolitan yearnings of Japan.

Henry Sugimoto, Jerome, Ark. (circa 1942). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.31].)

Henry Sugimoto, Sunrise—Jerome (1943). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.14].)

Much of Sugimoto’s artistic and affective power came from his adaptations of muralist and social realist approaches to create his own style when rendering the everyday lives of incarcerated Japanese Americans. Although he avoided expressing any developed political ideology, his work reflected the tenets of social realism, with its concerns for the poor and working classes that intensified in the 1930s amid the Great Depression and the rise of fascism across the globe. Many of Sugimoto’s views stemmed from his own past experiences of the rural poverty of Japanese American farming communities in Hanford. He also realized that Issei farmers could not own property due to the alien land laws that prevented such opportunities. These acts developed from other restrictive measures, such as denying them the right to become naturalized citizens, thus sustaining their alien status and inability to purchase land, among other disallowed privileges. As a result, their choices in a small community like Hanford were limited to establishing their own small businesses (restaurants, vegetable stands, watch repairing), laying iron tracks for the railroad companies, or working for white agricultural interests as sharecroppers. These conditions made Sugimoto later sympathize with the plight of impoverished African Americans he saw near the camps and around the towns in Arkansas, since they reminded him of his own generation’s and forebears’ struggles in California.⁵¹

Thus, even as Sugimoto became a world-traveling professional artist, he was attracted to rural settings and themes and to the presence of laboring classes, in part because of his awareness of the social and racial conditions that Japanese Americans endured in the United States. In many of his paintings, for example, he included male subjects toiling in overalls. Indeed, this figure became for him a central archetype—the man in blue overalls—depicted as a farmer or a manual laborer, often with a family, modeled in the two adaptations of My Papa that I have discussed. In this way, Sugimoto’s artwork fits within the broader American tradition of celebrating the nation’s democratic ideals, as rooted in the populace at large, through this type of protagonist. A familiar and similarly clothed person appears in American art throughout the 1930s and beyond that paid homage to the rural and urban traits of the nation. We see him in the works of American regionalists, such as Thomas Hart Benton’s The Engineer’s Dream (1931) and Arts of the West (1932). The figure even achieves iconic status in Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930). Documentary photographs emphasized this representative persona, including Walker Evans’s portraits of Floyd Burroughs in Hale County, Alabama (1936) and Charles C. Ebbets’s New York City construction workers in Lunch atop a Skyscraper (1932). But Sugimoto’s art also functioned in visual dialogue with works that extended the meaning of “American” beyond the white national mainstream or its regional counterparts, engaging with other U.S. ethnic minority artists or with those from Latin America. Mexican and African American muralists, Diego Rivera and Hale Woodruff among them, referenced as well the sufferings and the nobility of common people through the image of working men in overalls. Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933) and Woodruff’s The Building of Savery Library (1942), a part of his series at Talladega College in Alabama, illustrate this theme. By including Japanese Americans in this genre, Sugimoto conversed in figurative terms with preceding and coinciding artwork through a racialized cosmopolitan style that exposed the trans-American state of minority families and communities. Although disenfranchised, they yet endured.

Laboring characters appear across the decades in Sugimoto’s art, from the 1940s to the 1970s. What aligns his work more with the concerns of social realists, such as Diego Rivera, than with regionalists or others is the impending danger or injustice that this figure in overalls and his family encounters. Although Sugimoto was cognizant of working people’s economic struggles, he focused more on the racial prejudice that Japanese Americans confronted in the United States. He may have found that overcoming matters of race were more pertinent to his own self-perception as a cosmopolitan artist who had already gained cultural capital from his professional training and early critical reception. As mentioned previously, however, race and class concerns were apparent and interconnected in Sugimoto’s work and memories since he empathized with the Issei farmers in California and with the segregated African American populace in Arkansas. Yet the artist shunned a militant tone, even as he conveyed the innocence of civilians smarting under institutional authority, as represented by the U.S. soldiers and FBI agents who detained them as alien offenders. He otherwise relied on affective approaches of valorizing ordinary families, portraying them as peaceable, hard-working figures facing national pressures that molded them into racial threats.

The main idea that captures the variety of Sugimoto’s works during this period is how Japanese American communities adapted to trying circumstances, while also revealing their humanity in everyday tasks and occurrences. His paintings of the removal process to Fresno and life in Arkansas, including his own family’s arrival in Jerome, recall realist imagery from the 1930s regarding the themes of migration and displacement. We can see in the wartime pieces the beginnings of a racialized cosmopolitan style, wherein the artist engaged with Mexican muralist and social realist influences that focused on the dislocation and disempowerment, as well as the heroism and endurance, of Japanese Americans. Indeed, Sugimoto’s compositions fit within the broader, trans-American grain of realist art, alongside the works of Lange and Rivera, that depicts families threatened by transition and uncertainty.

Sugimoto’s work, as a set of cultural narratives that portrayed a population anxious about their displacement, aligns with earlier documentary photographs of poor whites during the Great Depression, as captured by Lange. The famous photographs in her Migrant Mother series (1936) establish the difficult conditions faced by these individuals through a haggard mother and her children waiting among other pea pickers in the fields of Nipomo, California. Lange began working for the Resettlement Administration in 1935, which then became the Farm Security Administration. As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the purpose of these organizations was to record the dire circumstances of the poor in order to justify their need for federal assistance. The photographs that Lange took of Florence Thompson and some of her young children in various poses were widely distributed and have become part of American iconography. In Lange’s framing, the mother becomes a secularized Madonna figure, with the baby replacing the Christ child and the other offspring acting as surrounding cherubs. But unlike earlier religious imagery, the parent and older children look uncertain and fearful about the future. In one particular composition (no. 5 in the series), the mother holds her sleeping infant, while an elder child stands slightly behind her, leaning a tired head on her left shoulder and looking off-camera in a dazed stare. A canvas sheet held up by a wooden pole serves as not only a makeshift tent but also the backdrop for this family portrait. A suitcase with an empty tin plate perched on top is evident in the immediate left foreground, accentuating a not-so-bountiful future of itinerancy and hunger. As Wendy Kozol suggests, these pictures of women and children became intentional symbols of helplessness and innocence, designed to stir empathy for their plight among urban, middle-class audiences. The strategy appeared to work, as a selection of Lange’s images caught the American imagination, a vision of life during the Depression that survives to this day.⁵²

Sugimoto’s art challenges these purposes and contexts, while providing a similar mood of doubt and despair. In an untitled 1942 work, he shows a Japanese American migrant mother tending to her children and in comparable distress to Florence Thompson and her offspring. Likewise, the painting discloses poses similar to those seen in Lange’s Migrant Mother. In Sugimoto’s rendering, suitcases also occupy the foreground, while the mother, with an exhausted and concerned countenance, sits while bottle-feeding her infant in the same position as Lange’s migrant mother when holding her sleeping child. Yet, in the Japanese American case, two other tired young children beg for the mother’s attention, one standing in front with her arms up, waiting for a comforting embrace, while another off to the side cries in anguish, hands on his face. The scene, unlike the repose and quiet desperation of the mother and children in Lange’s 1936 photograph, instead invokes the physical motions and aural turbulence of the unhappy children, heightening the affective impact of the composition. While Lange’s mother gazes to the viewer’s right into the middle distance, Sugimoto’s looks at her baby, caught in the immediacy of the distressing moment, as she feeds the infant. Shades of brown, applied heavily and quickly, prevail in the mother’s clothes, the luggage, the background, and the family’s skin tone. Also notably different in Sugimoto’s portrait of the Japanese American Madonna, aside from the racial makeup of the family, is the squared back end of a bus, which acts as the backdrop (replacing the canvas tent in Lange’s formulation), waiting to convey the family to a detention center. An Army MP, identified by his light-brown uniform and armband, also stands in the left background, visible over the mother’s shoulder, ensuring an obedient transport with his presence and his rifle.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother (no. 5, 1936). (Library of Congress [LC-USF34- 009095-C].)

Henry Sugimoto, untitled (circa 1942). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.69].)

In Lange’s and Sugimoto’s renderings of a migrant mother, a male head of household is missing. This lack of a patriarchal presence suggests the disruptiveness of economic depression and war, which disorders family and gender hierarchies. As in the numerous religious depictions of the Madonna and Christ child throughout history (wherein the unseen God replaces Joseph as the father), these modern, secularized versions also supply a substitution, if not an explanation, for the vanished patriarch. As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites contend about Lange’s migrant mother, the viewing public itself takes the place of the father figure as part of the photograph’s appeal to help her condition, one caused by larger, unseen forces beyond her control. This collective empathy and call for reform would then be expressed through the liberal state and even become embodied in President Roosevelt as the symbolic replacement father.⁵³

In Sugimoto’s 1942 portrayal of Japanese American displacement, the dynamics are altered because the government itself is the cause of the mother and her children’s woeful situation. As Colleen Lye argues, the intentions behind New Deal liberalism went hand in hand with the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. The link becomes clear, she notes, when we see how the Roosevelt administration and associated American writers and intellectuals, such as Carey McWilliams, viewed the camps as “experiments in cooperative living,” a directive that aligned with broader ideas about rural reform and Asian assimilation.⁵⁴ Concerns in the West over rising property costs, more efficient land use, irrigation methods, and the racial presence of Asian laborers had been evident since the Progressive Era and intensified in the 1930s. Federal projects involving land reclamation and overseen by the Farm Security Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps served as models for establishing the War Relocation Authority. That WRA officials also had backgrounds working in federal agricultural agencies was no accident. Thus, by wartime, these earlier matters of land and labor management coincided in varying degrees with revised Asian exclusion and removal policies. In this new system, Japanese Americans in the distant and desolate camps could reclaim underutilized acreage and become self-sufficient through their farming and other manual labor, while later dispersing and integrating themselves among the general populace.⁵⁵

Sugimoto’s untitled painting makes the structural and political reasons for displacement clear: the federal government’s presence, embodied in the U.S. soldier, is the power behind the removal because of the nation’s fearful attitude toward Japanese Americans as a wartime threat. Thus, the Army MP becomes the symbolic figure and force of the patriarchal liberal state. The previously discussed My Papa (circa 1942), when read alongside the untitled work of the Japanese American migrant mother created around the same time, then explains this lack of a father figure. The FBI agent detaining the Japanese American farmer replayed Sugimoto’s own fears and memories of detention, wherein we can surmise from a broader representational sense how that mother in the untitled work might be left alone with her children, as they wait for their transportation to a detention facility. Both the untitled work of the Japanese American migrant mother and My Papa can also be viewed as outgrowths of a transnational style that originated from Sugimoto’s Mexican travels, when he portrayed a farmer plowing the land in a 1939 composition. But the benign brown skin of the Mexican farmer in this earlier work becomes a sign of racialized endangerment for the similarly brown-skinned Japanese Americans. In My Papa, as in the untitled work, the tone—both of color and of emotion—undermines any notions of government benevolence because we see the state’s force enacted against ordinary civilians.

When portraying his own family’s arrival at the Jerome camp, Sugimoto adapted the human forms and poses from a lithograph by Diego Rivera, El Sueño (The Dream, 1932). Rivera’s depiction is a detail from a larger mural, La Noche de los Pobres (The Night of the Poor, 1928), which Sugimoto may have seen while visiting Mexico City. The applicability of this work is apparent in Arrival in Camp Jerome (1942), with Sugimoto’s focus on the tired and vulnerable bodies of his displaced family. The father figures in Rivera’s and Sugimoto’s pieces mirror one another, the former’s facing right, the latter’s facing left, with their heads resting on their arms, elbows akimbo. Meanwhile, the mother and child pairings are replicated in parallel ways, with the parents’ sitting bodies tilted toward the right and their children leaning into them toward the left. Sugimoto worked on several versions of Arrival in Camp Jerome, among other specific scenes from their incarcerated lives. The first rendition of this piece, for instance, was painted when the Sugimotos initially came to Jerome. We should recall that the artist lacked his usual array of brushes and paint colors, so the rough, sketch-like quality of this family portrait is noticeable. But even as he drew from Rivera’s work, Sugimoto did not follow the muralist’s Marxist leanings about the proletariat’s class struggles and the revolutionary transformations required to reform society at large. Instead, Sugimoto relied on his Christian faith and references to religious themes, both indirect and explicit, for his multiple versions of camp experiences. Arrival in Camp Jerome shows how a family’s forced removal and homeless, unwelcome status in the United States evokes depictions of Joseph and Mary with the Christ child, wherein the three figures suffer from persecution while finding temporary shelter. Yet no discernible imagery appears to explain the institutional causes behind their situation, since Sugimoto seemed intent on producing an immediate emotional and spiritual impression rather than one that called for political action.

Henry Sugimoto, Arrival in Camp Jerome (1942). (Wakayama Civic Library, Wakayama, Japan.)

The artist, however, was no mere mimic when appropriating styles and compositional perspectives. The circumstances of the war, and what he and his family endured, pushed him into new modes of originality. Sugimoto frequently relied on family members, especially his wife, Susie, and his daughter, Madeleine, as his models to advance the boundaries of his art. One memorable moment that the artist rendered during the initial removal process to the detention facility at Fresno focused on his daughter. After the family finished a packed meal of rice balls, she asked her mother when they could go home, thinking that the outing was a temporary picnic, rather than the beginning of a long-term exile. Sugimoto depicted several adaptations of mother and daughter in this heartrending instant. One of the best-known versions is When Can We Go Home? (1943), in which Sugimoto transposes the incident at the Fresno Assembly Center to the camps in Arkansas. Here, we see the mother in a frontal view holding forth her arms to embrace and comfort her child, the daughter with her back slightly to the observer and facing her parent. While doing so, Madeleine points left in the direction of home, signified by the buildings and bridges of the Bay Area in the background. The artist portrays both figures through muralist influences on a monumental scale with truncated perspectives, the mother in a yellow dress and the daughter in red. Perhaps making a statement about the visibility of their race, Sugimoto renders their skin tone in dark brown (even darker than in some of his earlier Japanese American subjects), a noticeable trait, given his access to a more varied palette at this later time. Multiple and overlapping Cubist shapes and images surround them: on the left, the aforementioned sights in California, while the prison camp towers stand on the right, together with local flora and fauna from Arkansas that curve into the foreground. These include a sunflower and a rattlesnake, the latter a threatening presence to the two central subjects. What appears as a translucent lightning bolt flashes in zigzag fashion across the middle of the composition, fracturing the painting into different panels, though each remain as part of the larger whole. This method recalls how, in the 1920s and 1930s, artists such as the precisionist Charles Demuth and the African American muralist Aaron Douglas employed background lines and shapes in similar ways, when splitting and forming compositional space. Starting in the lower-left corner of When Can We Go Home? the bolt shears upward toward the right across the two figures and then continues its path toward the upper left corner, suggesting the sudden and intense rupture of a family and a community from their established moorings. Given this mix of elements and styles, the painting is one of Sugimoto’s most original and provocative pieces from the war.

Henry Sugimoto, When Can We Go Home? (1943). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.3].)

The artist’s other scenes of families and communities adapting to hardships with little complaint both reinforce and undermine the idea of Japanese Americans as a model minority. In a host of portrayals, the subjects appear to build sustainable lives through common chores (bathing, laundry duties, gathering wood for fuel), social get-togethers (playing board games, eating at the mess hall), or displays of patriotism with the American flag (family portraits, Nisei soldiers in the U.S. Army leaving the camp to fight overseas). Although these depictions of supposed ordinariness under unusual circumstances lend a sense of stability to the populace’s uncertain future, they also offer counterimages to those supplied by the federal government. When Sugimoto first began painting in his quarters so as not to be discovered, a U.S. Army film crew arrived at his door to record aspects of daily camp life to show the good treatment of Japanese Americans. Sugimoto recollected how the men instructed him and Susie to continue their activities so that these scenes could be documented. We see at the start of filming Sugimoto sitting at an easel in his barracks, looking toward the camera, when a director’s clapboard appears and snaps, and he turns back to the canvas and begins to paint. He then repeats the painting sequence when standing outdoors with his work.⁵⁶ As Sugimoto recounted, the production team also filmed the mess hall with an abundance of provided food, but he noted that the camp population never ate so well as at that moment when posing for the cameras. Sugimoto understood that these acts of documenting on the part of the government, capturing the apparent everyday normality of incarcerated Japanese American lives, served the purpose of propaganda. In response, he worked within and around the filming process, due in part to the government’s nonchalance about what it considered as recreational matters. “They don’t care. So I was free to paint,” he later told an interviewer. Sugimoto knew in this instance that he would be able to produce art as he wished, often in ways that challenged what the films recorded.⁵⁷

As one example, Sugimoto painted several variations of a scene at the mess hall, in contrast to what was shot by the government crew. Our Mess Hall (1942) shows in flattened perspective a long table of eight people, four to each side, ranging from small children to a grandmother figure. A man in blue overalls sits in the bottom middle foreground scooping rice from a bowl into his mouth. A mother across the table from him tries to feed her child, as the boy resists her attempts with his hands up in protest. Others are engaged in various stages of their meal. Another rendition of this scene, Mess Hall (circa 1943), reveals additional details resulting from Sugimoto’s more exact outlining practices and enlarged palette of colors. In both compositions, signs on the background wall read, “No Second Serving” and “Milk for children and Sick people only.” Seen in the context of what Sugimoto recollected about the film crew at the mess hall with its excess of food, these paintings suggest more than mere documenting of an event, in fact disclosing the actual rationing of provisions. In this way, the artist challenged the government’s narrative of benevolence, taking advantage of the institutional indifference toward his art and creating opportunities from that unconcern to record and to contest what occurred in the camps. We even perceive how Sugimoto’s tone changed when he revisited the mess hall scene decades later with brighter colors and softer brushwork that establishes a buoyant atmosphere. The title, No Second Serving (circa 1970), which repeats the cautionary message on the wall, destabilizes this mood by emphasizing how people’s sustenance was curbed. But the vibrancy of colors demonstrates a still lively community that endured despite the imposed shortages.⁵⁸

Henry Sugimoto, No Second Serving (circa 1970). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.113].)

Sugimoto’s more direct statements about the psychological costs of confining civilians reveal themselves in other depictions. These images capture the unspoken or unseen traumas and humiliations experienced by Japanese Americans. The titles of the works make certain that viewers understand the consequences of an incarceration without just cause. Some scenes reveal the affective toll that incarceration takes on the camp populace, others present circumstances laced with ironic commentary, while others do both. We perceive in them Sugimoto’s adaptation of muralist styles and folk art sensibilities, with the paintings’ truncated perspectives and proportions, their naïve appearance, and their themes of communal suffering from social injustice. Although it is unclear how Sugimoto became interested in folk art elements, he followed in the tradition of other modern artists, including the Postimpressionist Henri Rousseau, the Mexican muralists, and painters in the Harlem Renaissance, among others, who were attracted to primitive forms. Am I an American Citizen? (circa 1943) shows two men, broad, blocklike, and angled in posture, taking a break from chopping wood for fuel in the Arkansas forest. The figure on the right sits with his head in his hands, feelings of despair sapping his form. The other stands and looks at his companion in sympathy, the unanswered question of citizenship hanging over them. Our Bus (circa 1943) reveals the open backs of two trucks next to one another, which play on the Mexican muralists’ penchant for pairing images for didactic purposes. The truck on the right carries Japanese Americans to some unspecified destination, perhaps to resettle elsewhere or to the Rohwer camp. The other on the left transports livestock, with a mother cow and her calf visible, corresponding to the human cargo, with parents standing behind their children. In the provocatively titled Nisei Babies in Concentration Camp (circa 1943), we see several infants clothed only in diapers, their white blanket that they inhabit presenting a perspective so flattened that it tilts up like a wall behind them. Meanwhile, an armed guard stands nearby to the left. Sugimoto adds a playful sense of irony when depicting one baby saluting, while another waves an American flag. But they do so out of view of the Army MP, each perhaps teasing the authority invested in the soldier, the conventional symbol of the nation’s wartime sacrifices. Here, Sugimoto’s blameless young figures and disturbing compositions highlight the government’s dehumanizing cruelties, even as the uprooted populations assert their humanity through irony and emotion, and disrupt white mainstream definitions of what it means to be an “American.”

One prevalent topic among Sugimoto’s depictions of camp life focused on the Nisei men who volunteered from the camps to fight for the U.S. military in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team in its European campaigns. A variety of scenes show them taking leave of their families, thus portraying the sacrifices of a model minority. In these cases, even with the federal government’s power to confine their friends and families, they still proceed to fight for the nation’s ideals on distant battlefields. This perspective had personal ramifications for Sugimoto, his younger brother Ralph having served in the unit, for which he received a Purple Heart. Many of these portrayals also reflect the artist’s Christian faith, in which the soldiers’ sacrifices for the nation parallel Christ’s sufferings for humankind. The departures from parents, wives, and children in the camps then reveal the broader impact on, and the more intimate moments within, Japanese American communities at large. But Sugimoto later recounted in interviews how the military’s call to arms aroused mixed emotions among the camp populace at Jerome, since many resented their treatment by the government. More than a few realized the hypocrisy of fighting for a nation that imprisoned them and their families, while disregarding their rights. Others, however, felt compelled to fulfill their duty. Regarding the choices before the Nisei, Sugimoto noted that, “Some said to act according to justice while the others proposed to act on conscience but no one . . . showed them [any] definite way to follow” as to whether the young men should enlist or resist. Thus, in his scenes of the recruits’ leave-taking from camp, Sugimoto engaged in no plain or easy patriotism.⁵⁹

Henry Sugimoto, Our Bus (circa 1943). (Wakayama Civic Library, Wakayama, Japan.)

Henry Sugimoto, Nisei Babies in Concentration Camp (circa 1943). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.130].)

In one image, Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp (1943), a Nisei soldier leaves the confines of camp to fight for his country, while a ghastly, white-faced guard and a “STOP” sign block his wife and two children from proceeding further to say their farewells. The contrast between the Nisei soldier’s sacrifices and the state’s ability to detain civilians is apparent. The little girl’s waving of the American flag symbolizes the hopes and values of the nation and partially covers the “s” on the literal sign of state authority. The word “STOP” then reads “TOP,” reinforcing our attention on the top figure, the Nisei soldier, who is associated with the flag. This figure, in turn, embodies the American principles of freedom and democracy and of fighting for those ideals, in opposition to the surrounding signs representing repressive government authority. The painting can then be read as a development from My Papa, in which the FBI agent leads away the Japanese American farmer, as his family watches with unease. The soldier in Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp now goes off to war for a country that initially detained him, again with anxious family members left behind as observers. The families in each painting heighten the sense of disruption that results from these departures, the first due to the husband/father/farmer’s questioned innocence and the second because of the husband/father/soldier’s impending sacrifices, with each set of mothers and children still placed in uncertain straits. The government’s oppression thus functions in manifold ways when enacted against its own civilians, first envisioned as a farmer in blue overalls with a family. This institutional power then reconfigures itself to recruit the Nisei into military service, supposedly in order to uphold the nation’s ideals of freedom and democracy when fighting overseas, a position that, as Sugimoto acknowledged, created more friction than consent among the camp population.⁶⁰

Henry Sugimoto, Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp (1943). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.1].)

Henry Sugimoto, Carrying Heavy Burden (circa 1943). (Wakayama Civic Library, Wakayama, Japan.)

In other renderings of the camps, Sugimoto displayed a developing artistic and political sensibility by combining several different images into one larger narrative, framing them within national and Christian ideals. This practice becomes apparent in Carrying Heavy Burden (circa 1943), in which the artist displays three types of encumbrances endured by the imprisoned population. The first two burdens are borne by the two generations of Issei and Nisei family members. In the lower-left corner, a sitting Issei couple prays for the safety of their Nisei son, who, at the top right, leaves his wife and child to fight. This section comprises earlier individual studies, such as Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp. The Issei parents appear in Prayer for Safety (circa 1943), which shows them in similar meditative poses with heads bowed, regarding their uncertain future once they have arrived at Jerome, and in Old Parents Thinking about Their Son on the Battlefield (circa 1944), in which a bust-like image of a young man in uniform appears as a vision between the two worried parents. In the middle space of Carrying Heavy Burden is the third load assumed by Christians in the camp. We see a man bent over by a large package on his back, a posture that faces and mirrors Christ carrying the cross, positioned slightly to the left above the man. Sugimoto included this image from another study, Thinking about Christ (1943). The artist’s merging of these multiple images follows the methods of muralists, which later became an important element in his postwar pieces, in which he situated Japanese Americans in a larger epic of immigration, war, and confinement. In Carrying Heavy Burden, we again see evidence of not only Sugimoto’s faith and how Japanese Americans replay the travails of Christ but also how the camp woes connect to one another. The three crosses at the painting’s top left recall not only the crucifixion scene at Golgotha but also the sacrifices of Issei parents lending their sons to battle and the impending martyrdom of these Nisei soldiers, all intended for the benefit of humankind. In other versions of this painting, the three crosses become the numerous crosses in a cemetery, marking the gravesites of the Nisei soldiers who died for their country.

In another vein, Sugimoto wrestled with his status as a racialized cosmopolitan, as evidenced in his wartime self-portraits. A 1943 depiction captures one of his responses to confinement, a work developed from, but also proceeding beyond, his earlier depictions of himself. In contrast to the 1931 self-portrait examined earlier, the wartime likeness discloses a more mature artist, in that he surrounds himself with paintings already completed. We see in the background a still life and a few landscapes done in impressionist fashion. Although Sugimoto again wears his black beret, he sits in front of a canvas in the process of completion on the left, his signature noticeable on the bottom-right corner. His right hand holds a palette that generates a wider arrangement of colors on the whole of the self-portrait than seen in his prewar depiction. We also discern several artistic influences, with not only the impressionist landscapes and still lifes but also elements of Cubism noticeable on his left shirt shoulder and sleeve facing the viewer, with its sharp creases and angular forms. Sugimoto thus presents himself as a cosmopolitan in the conventional sense, in that his concerns are aesthetic, worldly, and apolitical. More noteworthy, he avoids any evidence of camp life, even in the shown paintings, suggesting a man who lives simply for art and who desires to transcend the everyday realities of his incarceration. In this way, Sugimoto defied his racialization by the state through a painting that appeared as if it could have been done anywhere, free from any institutional confines.

Henry Sugimoto, Self-Portrait in Camp (1943). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.5].)

Sugimoto’s talents eventually drew the notice of local artists and writers. H. Louis Freund, a resident artist and professor at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, visited the Jerome camp and, after surveying Sugimoto’s work, invited him to exhibit some pieces at the school. Once the WRA officials approved the event, other members of the college community soon became involved. The curator of art, Floy Katherine Hanson, organized the show, which opened in February 1944. Paul Faris, an English professor, wrote the news release for it, noting that Sugimoto’s works “contain no suggestion of bitterness and are marked by tenderness and occasional humor.” He concluded that the artist “and his family are loyal Americans and members of the Presbyterian [Church].” By emphasizing the Sugimotos’ loyalty, Christianity, lack of bitter feelings, and willingness to show humor, Faris established them as a nonthreatening model minority for public consumption.⁶¹ Hendrix College officials reasoned that they needed to position Sugimoto in this manner, given that the exhibition opened at the time when the federal government released a report about Japanese imperial forces abusing American prisoners of war during the Philippines campaigns at Bataan and Corregidor in 1942. The exhibit curators thus wanted to distance the Sugimotos from the potential anger from white audiences that might associate the painter with these overseas atrocities.⁶² At the same time, Sugimoto relied on his respectable conduct to gain favors from WRA administrators and white benefactors, such as obtaining art materials to teach classes in the camps, or accepting the chance to show his work beyond the guard towers and barbed wire. For a cosmopolitan who lived for his art, this model of belief and behavior was not merely posturing on his part: it was the way his persona functioned and how he framed his worldview. He needed to negotiate opportunities to keep producing, exhibiting, and selling his work.

Invited to attend the Hendrix College exhibition’s opening, Sugimoto and his wife, Susie, obtained permission from the WRA to journey outside of Jerome. These ventures were not uncommon, given that Japanese Americans roamed in and out of the nearby towns and other vicinities for work or shopping expeditions. One WRA official, Eudora Akin, even accompanied Sugimoto to New Orleans in 1944, when he tried to find employment there but was unsuccessful. Although other artists might not have had the same freedom of movement to appear at exhibitions as the Sugimotos did at Hendrix College, they were still able to display their works through the sponsorship of various art associations and civic groups.⁶³ Venues in the Bay Area exhibited paintings by students of Chiura Obata who were housed at the detention facility at Tanforan in San Bruno, California, and at the camp at Topaz, Utah. One show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, entitled Relocation Center Art Exhibition, included pieces by Japanese Americans from all ten camps and drew nationwide notice. Some of Sugimoto’s works also toured throughout the United States for two years in an exhibition sponsored by the California Watercolor Society. As Gordon H. Chang observes, these art shows not only served aesthetic purposes but also gained Japanese Americans a degree of visibility that humanized them to the white mainstream of society. The traveling artwork in this way challenged other graphic depictions of Asians that resorted to racial caricatures as war propaganda, especially against Japan.⁶⁴

Yet Sugimoto could not escape the enduring racism and suspicions against him, despite his standing as a respected artist. When journeying with Susie to Hendrix College via Little Rock, he recalled the tense atmosphere along the way. At Little Rock Station (1944) records the mixed reactions the couple receives from white passengers. The artist captures an ambiguous moment in southern segregation, wherein public areas such as bus stations and train platforms implied not strict separation but racial intermingling.⁶⁵ We discern the curious, if not sympathetic, look of the black porter on the bottom left, counterbalanced by the white racist cab driver on the bottom right, who gestures his “thumbs down” disapproval of the Sugimotos. The couple occupies the middle space of the composition, suggesting that Japanese Americans were caught between, but also challenged, the categories of “black” and “white” in the Jim Crow South.⁶⁶ Indeed, the artist renders the skin tone of the Sugimotos a light brown, a shifting marker of race located somewhere between the porter’s darker brown skin and the lighter tan face of the cabbie. Sugimoto realized the extent of this improvised and indeterminate racial status of Asians in Arkansas and later recounted in a 1982 interview his own confusion about where to sit on the bus. Considering the dictates of segregation and of his own racialization at this moment, the artist assumed that he should proceed to the “colored” section but was told to place himself in the “white people’s place.” This more privileged position, however, only conjured for him prewar memories of racial oppression against the Issei in California. Reflecting on the treatment of African Americans in the South, he noted that “colored people [were] living so poor and I’m so pity, like Japanese immigrants [who] came to [the] United States.” As he acknowledged from these entangled instances, issues of race, class, and region came under the rule and resolve of white supremacy.⁶⁷

Henry Sugimoto, At Little Rock Station (1944). (Wakayama Civic Library, Wakayama, Japan.)

In the painting At Little Rock Station, the racial hostility expressed toward Henry and Susie Sugimoto is palpable, but more complicated than at first imagined, even with their newfound “white” positioning. Here, the target of the white figure’s disgust includes not only the couple’s same racial makeup as the Japanese enemy but also their cosmopolitan presence. Their clothing, signified by the artist’s beret and his wife’s fashionable hat, and their long winter coats, implies a certain amount of class privilege and sophistication that reinforces their foreignness. Surrounded by servicemen going off to war, they stand among, but also above, the emblems of southern working-class life: that is, the white cabbie with his flat cap and the black porter with his signifying hat. Sugimoto, then, discloses a fraught moment in his artistic imaginings of race, class, and region. Occupying the middle space of the composition, he is reminded by others that the racialized cosmopolitan couple does not belong anywhere. This state of instability and itinerancy would reoccur in June 1944, when the family endured their third move, this time to the Rohwer camp near McGehee, Arkansas (about thirty miles from Jerome), where they would remain for over a year until the war’s end.

Cartographies of Containment: Postwar Paintings

After their release from Rohwer in early August 1945, a few days before the official surrender of Japan, the Sugimotos and their relatives had to decide where to go. The extended family members eventually dispersed to different parts of the country, with Susie’s parents moving back to Hanford, while Henry’s relocated with his brother Ralph to Cleveland, Ohio. Rather than return to their prewar location in California, Sugimoto wanted to expand his artistic opportunities, thinking that New York City would provide better exposure and contacts for his talents. Susie readily agreed. Once they arrived, other Japanese immigrant families who had already relocated there helped them with finding an apartment, some used furniture, and other necessities for starting life anew in their Harlem neighborhood. A visiting minister from their Hanford days relied on his community sources and found Susie a job as a typist for the local Baptist church. But Henry’s artistic ambitions would be disappointed. Dealers and galleries were not interested in paintings on the mass confinement, let alone works done in a social realist manner, especially when the New York market preferred abstract expressionists in the immediate postwar years. To help with the family finances, Sugimoto found employment designing textile fabrics for several companies, illustrating children’s books (including one for Yoshiko Uchida), and writing Japanese captions for English-language films sent to Japan. Meanwhile, he continued to paint in his spare time, reworking the wartime compositions and adding scenes of New York City street life to his repertoire.⁶⁸

Perhaps because of these pressures to establish new living arrangements in another environment, Sugimoto did not produce much art during the period between 1945 and 1960. The few paintings completed at this time, however, reveal how he began to revise his wartime work and to extend his awareness of the immigrant Japanese presence in the United States. One piece, To Find a Job (circa 1950), is one of his first on migrants, which shows a lone Japanese laborer walking along railroad tracks and following the sign toward Hanford in search of work. He carries a suitcase in hand as well as a bundle on his back with various cooking utensils hanging from it. The man also wears a hat and a suit, both bluish-gray in color, with a blue shirt underneath. Bulky in build and sporting a beard, this figure recalls both earlier and later renditions of the man in blue overalls, often portrayed with a similar bewhiskered mien and blue shirt. To Find a Job, then, may have been a way for Sugimoto not only to think about Japanese migrants but also to trace the origins of this archetypal character and his ensuing family life, which began with the artist’s prior wartime compositions, such as My Papa (circa 1942).

Then there is an intriguing scene from the Fresno to Arkansas trip that Sugimoto distinctly recollected, which consisted of a stop to let the civilians out to stretch and get some fresh air. These moments usually occurred in some desolate place, he noted, with the military police guards cordoning off an area and pointing their weapons at the passengers to ensure no escape.⁶⁹ In Take Fresh Air (1957), the signs of state power enacted on civilians proved a powerful, emotive way not only to record the tragedy of the mass removal and imprisonment but to highlight the absurdity of it as well. The style of the work does not fit any particular impressionist or muralist approach that Sugimoto used in other paintings. Instead, Take Fresh Air appears to disclose an experiment in folk art forms, with its flattened perspective and the naïve look of the composition and its figures. The Japanese Americans, in their numerous stances and wondrous array of colorful clothing, occupy much of the painting’s center, positing a lively and enduring community. Their small, almost indistinguishable figures stretch out, converse or play catch with one another, and care for children. Life for them continues as much as it can, given the circumstances. But the artist encloses this populace between the train in the background and the larger-sized, stiffly postured soldiers forming a half-circle from the immediate right foreground to the whole left side of the canvas, these mechanical and human barriers rendered mainly in browns and grays. Sugimoto even makes viewers complicit in the federal government’s dark actions when locating them in the same line of sight that the U.S. Army troops have of their Japanese American charges. One literally looks over the MPs’ backs and shoulders and down the barrels of their machine guns at the scene they are responsible for controlling. Thus, the overall portrayal of the rest stop has an awakening effect on the spectator. Sugimoto alerts us through our implicated gaze to remember the removal and racial segregation of civilians who had posed no threat to the nation at large. Given the social and political expectations of the Cold War years in which he produced the piece, however, one can imagine why it would not find a venue or an audience.

Henry Sugimoto, Take Fresh Air (1957). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.55].)

Yet, by 1965, Sugimoto had completed an impressive array of work reconceiving the wartime incarceration and the prewar history of Japanese immigration. Much of this art retraces episodes of his camp life from the 1940s, both in paintings and in woodblock prints.⁷⁰ Other compositions veer toward new muralist directions that disclose the artist’s larger, epic vision of Japanese Americans that explored the interwoven themes of migration, war, and confinement. Thus, when viewed as a series, we see how the early twentieth-century Japanese migrations connect to the wartime incarceration and to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan.

Much of this new course that Sugimoto took in his artwork developed from his postwar travels abroad. In 1962, he retired from the textile design company for which he had worked during the prior several years. He then traveled to France and Japan, believing that these trips were his final chance to have an impact with his paintings. The two countries held great significance for him, the former offering his first major opportunities to make his name in art, the latter because he had not visited since he had left over forty years before. In interviews from the 1980s, Sugimoto did not offer much detail about his two-year stay in Paris, aside from revealing that he did some painting and sketching. As his biographer, Kristine Kim, suggests, “The scenery no longer held the same magical charm” that it had during his initial visit in the 1930s. Attempting to recapture this youthful moment was complicated not only by the transformations within France since his travels there three decades before but also by the wartime incarceration that had kindled new desires and directions in his art.⁷¹ This changed feeling toward his work was expressed in the fact that he did not paint many camp landscapes in impressionist fashion during the postwar years. Sugimoto’s travels to Japan in 1964, and especially to his hometown of Wakayama, made a greater lasting imprint on his artistic focus. The painter basked in renewed relations with his extended family and involvement in the Japanese art scene. At one point, Sugimoto was invited to exhibit some of his work as part of an annual art collective, the Nikakai. The members discouraged him from presenting any of his wartime camp pieces, since they felt that the public still wanted to avoid reminders of anything associated with the Pacific War. The trip, however, proved a success. Sugimoto noted that the paintings he had brought with him sold for a much greater sum than he usually earned from American sales of his work. It was a pleasing moment that recalled his earlier successes in the 1930s, when he relied on Japanese patronage of his art.⁷²

Sugimoto’s lack of success in the postwar years in the United States was due in part to how abstract expressionism began to rule the art market, dominated by the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, among others. Even though the public initially remained indifferent at best, or surly at worst, toward the new style, postwar expressionism and other varieties of abstract art became the predominant symbol of American freedom and originality.⁷³ The federal government, through the State Department and the CIA, even sponsored overseas tours of American modernist art as a Cold War strategy to advertise the types of liberality allowed in the United States. At the same time, as other studies suggest, abstract expressionism in particular became a mode of political resistance to McCarthyism and to the suffocating demands of the Cold War.⁷⁴ Sugimoto, unlike other Japanese American artists, such as Hideo Date, Miné Okubo, and Hisako Hibi, never considered abstract art a possible avenue to explore. He intimated in a later interview that it did not appeal to his tastes, since the style was too much a matter of “anything goes.”⁷⁵ Then again, his reliance on aspects of social realism made it more difficult for him to gain acceptance in the postwar art world, given its decline in popularity. That his works also addressed a taboo subject, the wartime confinement, only added to his inability to garner more critical or public notice.

Yet Sugimoto’s continued adherence to muralist and social realist elements suggest that these methods still proved effective for him, especially for addressing the topics of Japanese American confinement and prewar Japanese immigration. In this sense, he was not too different from the African American artists who also engaged in social realism long after its heyday in the 1930s and early 1940s.⁷⁶ For example, we can compare Sugimoto’s career trajectory with that of Hale Woodruff’s. During the war, Woodruff explored similar issues of racial discrimination, painting allegorical views of African American history when based in Atlanta. This is not to say that Sugimoto and Woodruff influenced one another stylistically, or that enduring black poverty and degradation were similar to what Japanese Americans faced in the United States. The artists’ careers and interests, however, ran on parallel tracks that reveal similar cosmopolitan ways of envisioning their subjects. Both began painting with an admiration for the French Postimpressionists. Both traveled to Mexico in the 1930s and learned from the work of muralists (Woodruff even studied under Rivera). Both also relocated to New York City to continue their work from the 1940s onward.⁷⁷

But here the similarities end. Unlike the postwar African American muralists, many of whom were steeped in the radical leftist politics of earlier decades, Sugimoto disclosed only muted sensibilities, even going out of his way to claim that he was apolitical. Furthermore, what aided African American artists in sustaining their work were the historically black colleges, small businesses, and community centers that provided them sites on which to paint murals. Throughout the early Cold War, Mexico City also became a safe haven for expatriate African Americans and others to create a variety of art without the burdens of anticommunist harassment that they encountered in the United States. Art collectives, such as the Taller de Gráfica Popular, provided African American artists with a collaborative atmosphere in which to produce work alongside their Mexican brethren, forming in the process a transnational aesthetic through shared techniques, themes, and audiences.⁷⁸ Sugimoto had no such institutional support. Nor was he able to attract much public notice for his art until the 1970s and beyond, when critics, curators, and activists saw its artistic as well as political and historical value that spoke to their contemporary concerns regarding the unjust exercise of authority and the resistance to it.

Woodruff and others who depicted large, multipart narratives in their murals, however, corresponded with Sugimoto’s broad view of Japanese American history that connected migrants who came to the United States in the early twentieth century to what occurred during the Pacific War. We see in Woodruff’s Amistad Murals (1938) and The Negro in California History—Settlement and Development (1949) how the artist traced the long-reaching impact of Africans and African Americans on the United States and its history. His mentor Rivera and other Mexican muralists indicated through their art how the past as allegory could be used as political commentary on continuing social injustices and as a call for reform, if not revolution.⁷⁹ Sugimoto expressed no developed intent to render the oppressive conditions of Japanese Americans into a critique of liberalism or of its institutional failures, even though such views are evident in his artwork and in his later interviews. But his scenes of immigration and prewar settlement that connected to his previous work on the wartime confinement aligned with these other artists’ objectives: charting the racial prejudice encountered and their subjects’ persistence in shaping their own lives and in asserting their humanity. Through the representative man in blue overalls, Sugimoto delved further into the past, using his working-class protagonist as a chronic marker of the Japanese presence in American and transpacific history. It is through this recurring figure, then, by which the artist could depict and relate the themes of immigration, incarceration, and war as parts of a larger, epic whole.

By the 1960s and onward, Sugimoto not only painted on larger canvases but also paired several of them in ways that, when viewed together, linked the historical movements of war and immigration across the Pacific. Central to these works are Japanese American figures that, in their migrations across the Pacific, occupied ambivalent and exposed positions that played on the shifting definitions of “Japanese” and “American.” The artist continued to adapt his postwar style, turning to more precise outlining and brighter, oil-based color schemes. Compared to the wartime works, these newer renderings are also greater in scale to match the significance and enormity of the topics presented, with canvases measuring on average fifty-five inches by forty inches. Thus, despite the setbacks in his artistic goals, the postwar years were some of the most creative in Sugimoto’s career, building on a hybrid style that merged his formal training with muralist and folk art sensibilities.

One pair of Sugimoto’s paintings focuses on the migration of Japanese picture brides to the United States and the legal restrictions limiting their entry. Each portrayal has a truncated geographical perspective, from which the viewer discerns both Japan and the United States across a minimized Pacific Ocean, with Japanese populations inhabiting each shore. The first work, Picture Bride (circa 1965), draws on the muralist strategy of collapsing space and time in one frame or composition, showing the vastness of Japanese immigration. At the top of the canvas is Japan, where we perceive Mount Fuji as well as farming villages positioned in the background, with men leaving their homes and families earlier in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, modern steamships traverse the ocean. The arrival of picture brides at a San Francisco pier in the early twentieth century occupies most of the foreground, with a few Japanese men in Western clothes looking at photographs to match with the faces of the incoming women. The new arrivals walk from right to left at an upward angle, from the docked ships toward the viewer, lending a sense of momentum and promise to the scene. By situating Japanese immigration as a transpacific process that incorporates ancestral and adopted homelands from the nineteenth century onward, Sugimoto provides a geographic and chronological grandeur to this history.

Henry Sugimoto, Picture Bride (circa 1965). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.108].)

The second work, an untitled piece featuring the words “STOP PICTURE BRIDE” (circa 1965), recalls the 1924 immigration restrictions that further curtailed migrants from Asia, along with those from southern and eastern Europe, to the United States. In a telling comparison of American ideals and the U.S. government’s practices, Sugimoto positions on the right side of the canvas the Statue of Liberty above Uncle Sam. In the top left of the painting, the picture bride wears a kimono and stands on a map of Japan. She also holds her baggage near a ship ready to cross the ocean to the United States. Her placement is almost parallel with the Statue of Liberty. Uncle Sam appears in the lower-right frame, looking sternly at a bearded man in blue overalls located in the immediate foreground. In turn, this Japanese farmer sits at a kitchen table surrounded by his crops and livestock on the American side of the ocean and looks at a picture of his intended bride. Meanwhile, glaring at the farmer, Uncle Sam holds his right arm and hand in the halt position directed toward the picture bride above him. As he points at the red words “STOP PICTURE BRIDE” with his left hand, his extended arms divide the picture horizontally.

Henry Sugimoto, untitled (circa 1965), featuring the words “STOP PICTURE BRIDE.”(Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.121].)

In this rendering, the disparities between American ideals and practices appear in gendered and racialized forms. Uncle Sam’s motion to stop the picture bride replays the Army MP’s actions in the earlier wartime camp scenes. The “STOP” sign in Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp that halts the mother and her children from proceeding further from the camp confines when the Nisei soldier departs, for instance, implies the unfair exercise of institutional power, as it does in the untitled work representing the immigration restrictions against picture brides. Sugimoto associates Uncle Sam, like the Army MP, with legal and martial might. Depicted as an angry and aggressive white patriarch of the nation, Uncle Sam replays a version of his classic “I Want You” face and finger-pointing image used as a World War I recruiting poster beckoning Americans to make the world safe for democracy. But the artist transforms this figure’s message and body posture to the more exclusionary “I Don’t Want You” directed at Asian immigrants. The corresponding female figures of the picture bride and the Statue of Liberty in their side-by-side stances, however, suggest representations of the nation’s more fully embodied ideals. The migrant woman’s ability to help build families and communities supports the efforts of the man in blue overalls, who appears amid the signs of domestic stability. Adding to this scene, the statue’s symbolic power of freedom and equality aligns with the nation’s principles of color blindness, marking the contradictions between Uncle Sam’s government policies and Lady Liberty’s values. That the Statue of Liberty is “colored” as blue, in line with the ocean’s hue, serves to transform both Asians and southern and eastern Europeans, groups seen by the nation’s mainstream as not “white,” into acceptable immigrants.⁸⁰ That the statue also appears on the West Coast signifies its importance beyond its actual location on the East Coast and its applicability to Ellis Island, where the southern and eastern Europeans arrived. Liberty’s embrace now includes Asians in the West too. The painting thus implies a level of racial consciousness and immigrant solidarity that applies to the Japanese in particular and perhaps to Asian migrants and others in general, their presence contesting the domain of “whiteness.” From this perspective, the Statue of Liberty itself is a racialized cosmopolitan, a welcoming, inclusive, colored symbol to the world, even as it must acquiesce in this principle to the overriding state power and racial restrictions represented by Uncle Sam.

A work that proceeds forward in chronology from the picture bride paintings, although completed around the same time, is an untitled piece featuring the partially obscured words “NO JAPS WANTED” (circa 1965). This picture reflects the prewar prejudices faced by Japanese American communities, as depicted through the bearded man in blue overalls and his family. The husband, wife, and two children are outdoors, perhaps in an orchard, given the low wooden fence and the trees in the background, in front of which is a large makeshift sign with the message “NO JAPS WANTED.” Smaller illustrations appear in the top corners: a skull and crossbones with the phrase “you get out” on the left, and a caricatured head of an Asian man with slanted eyes with “you rats” printed underneath it on the right. The man in blue overalls stands before the sign, partially blocking the word “California,” indicating the location of this incident, his body facing the viewer, but with his head tilted back toward the threatening message. His facial expression reveals concern, if not anger, as he grips his straw hat in both hands. The wife stands in the lower-left foreground, a baby carried on her back, as she lowers her head and cries into her hands. The puzzled young daughter stands to the right by her father, her head also angled in parallel fashion toward the sign to see what is upsetting him. We again discern the artist’s reliance on social realist sensibilities, as he shows the figures in muscular, blocky forms. Sugimoto positions the family within a triangular formation, in which the father’s head acts as the apex, while the bodies of the other members establish the sides and the two lower vertices. A wheelbarrow in front of them adds to part of the base. The father’s two arms holding his hat upward toward his chest form a smaller, concentric triangle within the larger framing. Yet, within this geometric signal of supposed order within a family hierarchy, its fleeting stability cannot sustain or protect itself against a society’s eruption of undue racism and the resulting anguish it causes.

Henry Sugimoto, untitled (circa 1965), featuring the partially obscured words “NO JAPS WANTED.” (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.122].)

This work becomes part of the larger narrative Sugimoto was creating about Japanese Americans. Read in sequence, what occurs in the painting with the “NO JAPS WANTED” sign follows from To Find a Job, with the initial arrival of the bearded man, and then Picture Bride and the untitled piece with the phrase “STOP PICTURE BRIDE” on it, with some of the Japanese migrant women able to enter the United States while others are denied. The reappearance of the man in blue overalls in these works points to the continuing racist obstacles and threats against the unwanted presence of Japanese on the West Coast. But families soon develop, despite the legislative hurdles. Furthermore, the untitled painting featuring the “NO JAPS WANTED” sign anticipates what will occur in the two renderings of My Papa, when the FBI agent comes for the man in blue overalls after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sugimoto even painted the family figures in the later version of My Papa (circa 1965) in the same clothing colors as those worn by the family standing in front of the “NO JAPS WANTED” sign, the parents in blue and the young daughter in a lime-green dress. Although not necessarily the same clan, its members become a constant marker of the racial prejudice and the social transformations that Japanese Americans endure. The postwar paintings in this way connect the prior individual studies that Sugimoto completed during the war, with his scenes of camp life, into a broader overview of ethnic minority experiences that he began tracing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Another pair of paintings presents Sugimoto’s most expansive and significant statement about the Pacific War and its effects on Japanese Americans. In two mural-like narratives, he framed the onset and the end of U.S. involvement in World War II through the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, with Japanese Americans caught between the destruction in both epochal moments. Each portrayal focuses on their reactions to these historical events, causing great concern to the figures involved. Sugimoto situates the bombing scenes in the upper-left and upper-right-hand corners of his two paintings. In the first (circa 1965), which is untitled and features the newspaper headline “Japanese Planes Bombed Pearl Harbor,” we see the Japanese aircraft destroying the U.S. battleships, with plumes of flame and smoke rising amid their towers, an image made familiar from news photographs that remain prominent in American collective memory. In the second, Bombing of Relatives Homeland, 1945 (circa 1965), the mushroom cloud of an atomic blast emerges over the destruction unleashed on a Japanese city, with a tiny shadow of an American B-29 flying away after dropping its payload. Sugimoto locates each scene in the two paintings within corresponding scalloped, cloud-like forms floating above the main Japanese American figures. In this way, the outlines of the upper-corner sections of the artwork, when positioned side by side, mimic the shape of theater curtains pulled back to reveal the central characters as part of a larger historical drama.

As its main focus, the untitled work presents a three-member Japanese American family in their kitchen. The parents sit at the table with a radio, listening with concern to the news of the Japanese attack. A newspaper with the headline “Japanese Planes Bombed Pearl Harbor” lies nearby on the floor in the lower left-hand corner. The little boy stands with his back to the viewer, looking out the window and watching a bird fly away. This image recalls Sugimoto’s work Freedom Day Came (1945), a painting made while he was still in the camp at Rohwer. This earlier piece shows a young man sitting with elbows on a table, chin resting on hands, pondering a bird in an opened-door cage, with a map of the United States framing them in the background. The man, like the bird, considers where he might resettle once released from his confinement. In the 1965 untitled piece, however, the bird in flight is a portent of dangers to come. That is, the boy sees his youth, his promise, and his freedom flitting away from him. But since his back is turned from his parents, he also fails to see their worried countenances and thus cannot fully process what is happening at that instant. The parents listen to the radio with worried expressions, an image developed from a previous work, Attacked Pearl Harber [sic] (Attacked Pearl Harbor Hawaii) (1947). In the later rendition, Sugimoto locates the family in Hanford, California, as the local school pennant hanging on the wall suggests. Symbols of Americanism also decorate the room, with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and an American flag positioned alongside the pennant. But none of these signifiers of loyalty and patriotism will save them from the upcoming removal and imprisonment, since their Japanese ancestry will render moot their lives as Americans.

Henry Sugimoto, untitled (circa 1965), featuring the newspaper headline “Japanese Planes Bombed Pearl Harbor.” (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.104].)

Bombing of Relatives Homeland focuses on Japanese American figures standing on the grounds of the Rohwer camp, learning of the nuclear destruction in Japan that ends the war. In this composition, we perceive how Sugimoto reused his wartime images of the camp structures, with the barracks, a mess hall, a guard tower, and the American flag in the background, as seen in Mess Hall Jerome Camp (Our Mess Hall Documentary) (circa 1942). Two male figures in the foreground, one clothed in blue overalls, discuss the event, with the other holding a camp bulletin while pointing to the upper-right corner of the far-removed scene of the bombing. A third figure in the lower-right foreground reads a sheet and scratches his head, trying to come to grips with what has happened. Further in the background are groupings of other figures, one with three women and a child, two of the adults holding handkerchiefs to wipe their tears, while the third reads from the distributed newsletter. The dual tragedy here encompasses Japanese Americans who are still incarcerated, while their extended families overseas suffer from the atomic explosion, as the painting’s title suggests. Read in concert, the untitled painting about the family’s reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack and Bombing of Relatives Homeland convey the dangers inherent in being part of a transpacific, interstitial community, when caught in the expectations of, and the violence enacted by, two warring empires.

Henry Sugimoto, Bombing of Relatives Homeland, 1945 (circa 1965). (Japanese American National Museum [Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa, Japanese American National Museum, 92.97.8].)

Moreover, these visual bookends of the conflict coincide with, yet challenge, what Tom Engelhardt calls the “end of victory culture” in the American popular mind-set. At the close of World War II, as he observes, the United States experienced great ambivalence in the aftermath of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although these acts broke imperial Japan’s ability and willingness to continue the war, the destruction also released unforeseen consequences as to how the United States understood itself as a nation. Before and during the conflict with Japan, the dominant cultural narrative consisted of the “war story.” This account’s basic theme consisted of imagining a few brave souls who fought against superior numbers of the attacking foe, usually peoples of color. Mexicans at the Alamo, Native Americans at Custer’s last stand, or the Japanese at Pearl Harbor filled the role of alien enemies that required subjugation. This plotline had framed the American popular consciousness since the nation’s colonial origins, when English settlers fought against native peoples. But it also disguised the historical reality that white Americans were often themselves the invaders, especially when claiming the western continental frontier or overseas colonies and client states in the Pacific. The “war story” served to mask this part of the nation’s past, assuring its white citizens that, despite initial defeat, they would eventually achieve total victory as vengeance against the racial Other. In the Pacific War, these were the sentiments after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and many in the United States saw the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as acts of retaliatory justice.⁸¹

In the postwar world, however, the annihilating powers of nuclear weaponry reduced the ability to attain complete victory. If future conflicts between atomic-minded nations promised mutual all-out destruction, no one would survive to bear the outcome. Triumphing over the enemy would cost as much for the victors as for the defeated. Even so, conventional warfare on the Asian continent proved hazardous for Americans as well. Particularly unnerving for the U.S. public to learn about were American and other United Nations units in Korea being swarmed by massive numbers of communist Chinese and North Korean troops in the early 1950s. This drama would replay itself with further disastrous consequences in Vietnam only a few years later. Poverty-ridden, nonindustrialized Third World nations supported by the Soviet Union and communist China appeared to outfight a technologically superior United States and its allied forces. Thus, a “question mark,” a sense of unknowingness, informed postwar Americans’ thoughts about how they could advance their interests and values in the world, when other nations appeared disinterested in, if not combative against, such an objective.⁸²

Positioning Sugimoto’s and other Japanese Americans’ paintings within, but also against, Engelhardt’s idea of the war story narrative offers a more complicated, transpacific understanding of not only Japanese Americans within the nation but also the resultant nuclear blasts on the Japanese populace. For instance, Benji Okubo’s surrealist Atom Bomb (1945) renders the mushroom cloud in white, skull-like formations that emerge from the mouth of a monster-shaped cloud of blackish-gray smoke, which itself arises from flashes of orange fire at ground level. Eitaro Ishigaki’s Disaster by Atomic Bomb (1946) presents a Dantesque vision of hell, with its heavy brushwork treatment of dark browns, oranges, and reds to show naked, vulnerable masses dying amid, or streaming from, a city in flames. Chiura Obata’s watercolor trilogy Devastation (1945), Prayer (1946), and Harmony (1946) conveys the emptiness, hope, and resolve of two small human figures—a postwar Adam and Eve—surviving on a barren landscape that transforms itself over time. As charted in the three works, the terrain both shapes and reflects human emotions, moving from the blacks, browns, and reds of scorched ruin and personal despair to nature’s reviving rains and resurgent greenery. These intense artistic responses as a whole avoided nationalist visions of American triumph or Japanese defeat, focusing instead on the philosophical and affective considerations of what humanity lost, and what it could regain, from such destructiveness.

Sugimoto’s paired works provide a view of Japanese Americans as an indeterminate and contested presence, a “question mark” in their own right regarding their racial Otherness within the United States and their familial ties to Japan. What makes Sugimoto’s postwar art on the bombings at Pearl Harbor and on imperial Japan innovative is his placement of this minority populace in each instance, challenging the dominant victory narrative manufactured about the war. Rather than a footnote to the broader history of global conflict, theirs was the central, ambivalent drama of his concern, in which they carefully negotiated between their “Japanese” and “American” identities during those transformative moments. Sugimoto conveyed this combination of conflicting sentiments and sprawling events in ways that no other artist did. As a result, the overall series of his postwar paintings regarding early immigration, prewar prejudice, mass confinement, and the war’s atomic finale reveals the most developed artistic vision we have of a multifaceted Japanese American past.

Reclamation

In the end, Henry Sugimoto still thought of himself as a cosmopolitan artist who simply wanted to paint scenes of the world around him. But he got and gave more in return. Were it not for the churning ferocity of World War II, his reputation as a celebrated, rising artist of Japanese ancestry in the 1930s might have survived into better days. Instead, the conflict between the United States and Japan, and his ensuing imprisonment in the camps with his family, shortened this promising trajectory. The price he paid was exacting, with anxieties suffered, a professional career lost, and public inattention to what he was producing in the following decades. Even so, he remained undaunted in his painterly pursuits, converting into compelling art the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans and their earlier history of immigration.

When Sugimoto and others testified before Congress during the redress movement in the 1980s this action helped his visibility and accelerated a national rediscovery of the artist and his work that began in the previous decade. Building on the social activism of the civil rights era, Japanese Americans and like-minded others influenced how the United States could more fully realize and redeem its wartime actions through the stories and presence of the once incarcerated. In this manner, the new social and political environment also promoted occasions, such as the JANM retrospective exhibit, to reevaluate Sugimoto’s body of work, even as the artist himself avoided any political framing of it. Yet the significance of his art emerged from a broader and more complex history, given how his worldly sentiments in the 1930s transformed into the subtle political protest of a racialized cosmopolitan during and after the war. The transpacific migrations of Japanese that affected Sugimoto’s own life, and the aesthetic ideas and social circumstances that informed his work and worldview, thus oblige us to examine his achievements in more nuanced fashion. From this viewpoint, we can perceive an artist in various states of transition, who enlarged his creative capacities in trying conditions and in extraordinary ways.

Notes

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Beyond Confinement

A Prewar Art Career

Cartographies of Confinement: Wartime Camp Life

Cartographies of Containment: Postwar Paintings

Reclamation

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