Interviews

1. Getting measles at the camp

2. His sister’s reaction to the camp

3. His mother’s money belt

4. Differences between Parents

5. His father’s American Dream

6. Allyship after camp

7. Coming back from camp

8. Being an outsider

9. Running Japanese store

10. Starting out in Art

11. About Orange Crate Label

12. His mother’s experience of the camp

13. “I did what I wanted to do”

Ben Sakoguchi

(b. 1938) Japanese American painter & printmaker

Differences between Parents

Oh, my mother did these uh, what, I, there’s a word for it, but I don’t know what it is the little birds, these wooden birds that you would paint. Uh, we have one somewhere, but it’s a really beautiful job she did.

And she’s the art half of this, you know, and my father was old school, old school Japanese, so he wanted us to be doctors or something you know, the aspirations. Art just didn’t enter his, his thinking. He never, he wanted us to be conventional and, I could never be that, you know.

But my mother was the soft one. And she was the art one, she would do us in camp, she liked to do the bonsai and the, whatever it was there. She did, did the arts, you know? He worked, he worked in the canteen, the store that was there, and his life has always been that, his business kind of mind, I don’t, I didn’t get that gene, obviously, you know.

arts families imprisonment incarceration parents World War II camps

Date: September 8, 2011

Location: California, US

Interviewer: John Esaki, Kris Kuramitsu

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Ben Sakoguchi, born in 1938, is a painter and printmaker who has lived in the Los Angeles area his entire life, except for the time when he and his family were incarcerated in Poston Arizona. After studying painting in the 1960s at the University of California, Los Angeles, he developed a distinctive style that is rooted in pairing a narrative painting tradition with a pop culture vocabulary. He is best known for his long running “Orange Crate Label” series, using the classic crate label format to explore diverse subject matter and to combine them in a way that allows for both sharp critique and wry humor. His work is deeply and politically engaged, and he takes a deep delight in the craft and beauty of painting itself. Sakoguchi was a professor at Pasadena City College for nearly 35 years. Visit his website at bensakoguchi.com. (Oct. 2011)

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Life in camp as teenager

(1926 - 2012) Scholar and professor of anthropology. Leader in the establishment of ethnic studies as an academic discipline