Interviews

1. School held emergency drills at the start of World War II

2. Father lost everything during World War II

3. Sister was born before family was taken to Heart Mountain

4. Learned what it meant to be called “Jap” in Heart Mountain

5. Family left camp to work at Seabrook Farms

6. Facing housing discrimination in Rhode Island

7. Experimented using portable video systems with kids

8. Explored non-professional use of portable video recorders

9. The first print image from film

Mitsuru "Mits" Kataoka

(1934–2018) Japanese American designer, educator, and pioneer of media technologies

Sister was born before family was taken to Heart Mountain

Pomona Fairgrounds, they had built real quickie barracks, this was supposed to be temporary. My sister was born there, right at the fairgrounds. Then once, we were the last ones to leave the fairgrounds because they wanted to wait until she was several weeks old, I don’t recall how old, but it was several weeks. So, we were then put on a train somewhere in the Pomona area and the train took us to Cody, Wyoming. I don’t know if you’ve every been to Wyoming but during that time, in the summer it was hotter than hell, and in the winter time, your hand, if you put your hand on a metal door, it would stick, you know, it would be so cold.

barracks Heart Mountain Heart Mountain concentration camp United States World War II camps Wyoming

Date: September 15, 2017

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Jennifer Cool

Contributed by: Jennifer Cool, Matthew Purifoy

Interviewee Bio

Mitsuru “Mits” Kataoka, a designer, educator, and pioneer of new media technologies, was born in 1934 in Jefferson Park, California. In 1942, his family was sent to the Pomona Assembly Camp and then to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. At the end of World War II, Kataoka’s parents were among the incarcerees recruited as laborers for Seabrook Farms in New Jersey.

Kataoka graduated from high school in New Jersey, then studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he received a B.A. in Arts Education in 1957 and an M.A. in Communication Design in 1959. From 1957 to 1965, he served in the U.S. Army Reserves as an armored tank officer. He became a faculty member at the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at UCLA in 1966. In the early 1970s, he developed the first two-way, decentralized citywide cable television system in the United States.

Kataoka was instrumental in bringing digital printmaking to the art world. He envisioned a computer and printer system that could be operated by artists with museum quality resolution and archival inks and paper, years before ink jet technology was capable of such quality.

He passed away in May 2018. (July 2019)