Working with archives stretching “from Tokyo to Tennessee,” authors Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel have crafted the first comprehensive biographical account of Japanese photographer and conservationist George Masa—an enigmatic figure whose private life and background were long shrouded in mystery until their painstaking investigative work brought his story to light.
George Masa: A Life Reimagined beautifully explores the intimacies of identity, history, and migration in the making of a life, offering a nuanced portrait of a man who was at once a pioneering visionary—self-assured and ambitious—and a figure of quiet humility and generosity.
Sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous, the biography published by Smokies Life details Masa’s legacy while addressing his experience as an Issei in early 20th-century America, illuminating the numerous challenges he faced as he journeyed across the Pacific Ocean, and then later across the continent to North Carolina, which would become his home and final resting place.
Masa made his way to Asheville, North Carolina in 1915, at the age of 30. He began working as a clothes presser and valet at the luxurious Grove Park Inn, attending to wealthy guests who came for the clean air and picturesque views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fascinated by photography, Masa studied mail-order instructional texts and developed his skills with cameras borrowed from his employer and guests at the inn. Enterprising and industrious, he soon purchased a camera of his own, securing loans to launch a private studio venture. Masa captured thousands of pictures documenting the changing nature of Asheville in the 1920s, eventually becoming the region’s most accomplished photographer.
His clientele included the affluent Seely, Vanderbilt, and Grove families, architect Douglas Ellington, and numerous local businesses and community organizations. He worked as a staff photographer for the Asheville Times newspaper, and later as an official photographer for the Asheville Chamber of Commerce. Experimenting with novel techniques using motion-picture cameras and aerial photography, Masa also shot film for companies such as Paramount and Warner Brothers, bringing his work to a national audience.
Masa’s professional success as a photographer was matched by his dedication to the preservation of southern Appalachia. A prodigious hiker and mountaineer, Masa was drawn to the outdoors, spending much of his free time exploring the nearby Smoky Mountains. He was known for going on long expeditions that tested both patience and endurance, carrying heavy photography equipment through miles of rough terrain, only to wait hours to capture the perfect image. Drawing similarities to Johnny Appleseed from friends in local hiking organizations such as the Carolina Mountain Club and Carolina Appalachian Trail Club, Masa was an almost legendary figure, known for his generosity and love of the trails.
Working closely with writer and conservationist Horace Kephart, Appalachian Trial founder Myron Avery, and National Park Service Director Horace Albright, Masa charted many of the paths and landmarks in the Smokies, and his expert knowledge on nomenclature and natural features was used in systematically mapping what would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Masa’s photographs of the Smokies were key in drawing public support, helping to raise funds for large land purchases which would prove crucial in establishing the park. He sent his pictures to politicians and philanthropists, courting the governors of North Carolina and Tennessee, First Lady Grace Coolidge, and even John D. Rockefeller Jr., who eventually donated $5 million to the cause, ensuring that the park idea would become a reality. Today, Great Smoky Mountains National Park spans more than 522,000 acres and was the country’s most visited in 2023, welcoming over 13 million visitors, according to the National Park Service.
“George Masa experienced an incredible amount of American history,” McCue explains to Discover Nikkei. “He’s a hero,” she says, underscoring Masa’s contributions to Asheville and the nation, despite the many obstacles he faced to citizenship and belonging in his adopted country.
Masa arrived in the United States at a time when Japan was experiencing drastic political and socioeconomic upheavals, and actively encouraging large-scale overseas migration. Emblematic of the broader geopolitical tensions and shifting racial dynamics of the era, Japanese migrants in the US faced exclusionary legislative policies that barred land ownership and, eventually, immigration altogether, in 1924.
Masa, for his part, was no stranger to discrimination. In 1918, he was probed by the Bureau of Investigation, an earlier iteration of the FBI, under suspicion of espionage by his Grove Park Inn employer. No evidence was found of Masa acting as a foreign agent, and the investigation was swiftly thrown out. Several years later, in 1921, he was targeted yet again, but this time by the Ku Klux Klan. Masa was publicly harassed in a series of legal proceedings aimed at damaging his reputation, though his continued success as a photographer in the years that followed speaks to the trust he had established in the community.
As the Great Depression set in, Masa struggled with financial insolvency as he found himself in debt, scrambling to pay back loans to keep his business afloat. At the same time, he suffered from declining health—by 1932, he had lost all his upper teeth and had fought several bouts of debilitating respiratory illness. Nonetheless, Masa continued to campaign as one of the national park’s strongest advocates, tirelessly working to defend the Smokies so they might be safeguarded for posterity.
His passing in 1933 left a mystery in its wake—Masa was reticent about his past to the extent that even his closest friends were unaware of his years in Japan, not to mention whether he had any surviving family. However, efforts on behalf of scholars, historians, conservationists, and hiking organizations have drawn renewed attention to his legacy, resulting in national recognition and new initiatives to honor his work.
With the recent release of their new book, McCue and Bonesteel have delivered a rare glimpse into Masa’s personal world, drawing on newly translated material that presents a side of the artist as told in his own words. A transnational collaboration between the authors and the broader research community of scholars, archivists, genealogists, and historians in the US and Japan, A Life Reimagined yields many details that allow the reader to go beyond Masa’s public accomplishments in photography and conservation, and get a sense of his private motivations and struggles.
“It was really only within the last couple of years or so that we began to understand more about Masa’s life before Asheville,” Bonesteel tells Discover Nikkei. “As we came to learn more about his time in Japan and the Pacific Northwest, we gained more insight into his character and how he understood himself.”
A series of cryptic letters found in Masa’s possession spurred a fact-finding investigation involving the analysis of census and immigration records, handwritten notes and professional correspondence in both English and Japanese, and a wealth of early 20th-century newspaper articles published in North Carolina, the US West Coast, and Japan.
The letters revealed details regarding Masa’s materially comfortable, yet joyless upbringing by an adoptive family in Shizuoka, Japan, as well as his stint as a student at Meiji University, one of Japan’s oldest institutions of Western-style higher education. Desperately wishing to escape from his circumstances, Masa emigrated to Seattle in 1906. Records indicate that he worked different jobs on the West Coast, including bathhouse operator, newspaper reporter, and grill chef. In his free time, he engaged in mountain climbing and was a star baseball player on the Nikkei-comprised Seattle Mikado and Portland Mikado teams.
As the authors worked to reconstruct Masa’s past, they learned that he went by a number of different names over the years, including George Iizuka, Masaharu Iizuka (飯塚正治), and Shoji Endo (遠藤章二). He had also gone by the nickname, Yama, which fittingly can mean ‘mountain’ in Japanese.
Importantly, Masa’s writings also shed light on a painful incident, which appears to have been a likely impetus for his departure of the Pacific Northwest in 1915 and his decision to start a new life under a different name. These findings came as a surprise to Masa’s biographers, who have continued to search for answers to gain a fuller understanding of the parties involved and how this event so drastically changed the trajectory of his life. Masa’s words reveal a tortured conscious, as well as a deep desire to take responsibility for the incident, regain respect, and honor his community.
These revelations permit a fresh interpretation of his migration to North Carolina as a journey of self-imposed exile and reinvention. He marooned himself in a distant region of the country where he could start anew, leaving behind the relative comfort of West Coast Nikkei society, along with his identity. In this sense, Masa’s story can be read as one of profound loss—the loss of a homeland, a community, a language—and of redemption, as he strove to create something greater than himself, inspired by the nature around him.
The authors ask a poignant question: “Why would a man, not even naturalized, not even permitted to be a United States citizen, dedicate himself to the Smokies?” While we can’t ask Masa directly, his extant writings offer invaluable clues that have brought us closer to understanding his remarkable devotion.
As Masa’s legacy gains wider recognition, McCue and Bonesteel have continued their collaboration, working on an accompanying documentary film to be released in 2025. Bonesteel’s production company, Bonesteel Films, will bring Masa’s story to the screen, delving into the complexities of his migration journey and illuminating the twists and turns that led to him becoming Asheville’s celebrated photographer and conservationist.
Filming was conducted in Japan, Seattle, Portland, and the Great Smokies, with the authors even visiting Shizuoka, where Masa grew up. The documentary offers a compelling invitation to “see what Masa saw,” capturing the landscapes that may have inspired him as he wrote of home.
McCue and Bonesteel hope their work will help to bring greater attention to Masa’s story on both sides of the Pacific, as his story remains largely untold in Japan. The authors suggest that perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to honor his memory is through direct experience: “Take a hike, take a walk in Masa’s footsteps,” and immerse yourself in the wilderness he dedicated himself to preserving.
© 2025 Matthew Sueda
