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

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

Facing housing discrimination in Rhode Island

So they gave me a list of people who would take on students for housing. So, I went knocking on all these doors they had on the list. This was in late August, before school started. As soon as I got there and tried to see if they had room...after about 5 or 6 of them, I began to realize, they all, for one reason or another, didn’t have any room. It was strange. So, I told my mother and father, “Something’s wrong here. I’m not going to go to this school.” So, I got on a Greyhound bus and came home. And I told ‘em, “I’m going to UCLA” because I was already accepted to UCLA. I had no idea what to do. So, basically, even in Rhode Island, I recall, even in New Jersey, when you went to a movie, African-Americans, or Black, were upstairs in the balcony and only whites were downstairs. Somehow, in New Jersey, I was treated as a white. So, anyway, it was a very strange kind of thing going on there. I told the Rhode Island School of Design “I’m not going there.”

discrimination education housing interpersonal relations racism segregation

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)

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