Matthew Sueda (MS): What are some of the ways that your personal background and experiences have influenced your work and your engagement with these topics? I know you mentioned you were working at Heart Mountain, and a bit about your family ties to that history.
Hana Maruyama (HM): I’m a Yonsei on my father’s side. His grandfather’s family was at Gila River and his grandmother’s family was at Heart Mountain. I feel that as a Yonsei, you get a very different experience of that family history than my father’s generation did. When you talk to Sansei, a lot of the time they’ll tell you that they never spoke about it with their parents. It was completely buried. Maybe it came up in odd spurts; but then it would get shut down almost immediately and you could tell that you weren’t supposed to ask about it.
I think that because my parents were not of the incarcerated generation, I felt like I could ask questions about it and my father and mother would always try to answer. And I think that helped a lot. I had kids’ books. My mother—again, librarian—and my father gathered all the books on Japanese American incarceration that they could, kids books, history books, craft books. So that history was up for discussion in my life from a young age, in a way that it wasn’t for my father and his sisters.
When I was twelve, my grandmother planned a trip for me, my little brother, and my parents, and she took us on a train out to Heart Mountain. One of the things she told me was that Heart Mountain was the place she saw snow for the first time. I don’t know why, but she never wanted to go back to Jerome.
A part of me wonders if it’s because Heart Mountain was the place that they ended up at later in the war, so it was maybe less difficult to think about for her; I think some of the hardest parts of the incarceration experience were the assembly centers and those first few months in the WRA concentration camps, because it was so chaotic and they had no idea what to expect at that point. I think by the time she got to Heart Mountain she had a better idea of what it would be like when she arrived.
Even if she didn’t talk about it much, she did want us to know about it and she made that pretty clear, I think, in her own way. At the age of twelve, I was roughly the same age that she was when she was forced to leave home, which is not something I realized at the time I was visiting. It makes me wonder if part of why she wanted to do it at that point in time is because she saw us getting to the ages that she and her younger sibling would have been when it happened.
There was really nothing there at that point. There was one plaque; it talked about how great the hospitals were, and how the education was phenomenal. And someone had graffitied onto it, “It was a concentration camp.” That has also always really stood out to me. We think of these plaques as presenting the historical narrative that’s supposed to be the well-researched, set-in-stone version of the past, and really sometimes it’s the graffiti that is the history that we need to hear.
So in a way, I’ve been thinking about these themes throughout my life but I didn’t think that there was a career in doing research on Japanese American incarceration. I didn’t really even study it in college. But a few months after graduation, in July or August 2012, I went to the Heart Mountain pilgrimage and met Shirley Higuchi, who hired me to start writing for the Heart Mountain newsletter, then I was the communications assistant, then I got a job at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and decided to go to grad school. All of this is to say, those are the experiences that led to my job at UConn, where I am today. So you can absolutely build a career researching and telling the history of Japanese American incarceration.
I really love teaching and working with students. I’d never curated my own exhibition and that has been a lifelong goal of mine. So it was really great to get to work with Jason and the Benton on this exhibition.
MS: What would you say to someone who is unfamiliar with Minnie Negoro’s story to encourage them to see the exhibition or to learn more about her work?
HM: Go for the beautiful artwork, stay for the history. I think her art really does speak for itself. She has such a beautiful sense of form and style. She brings together mid-century aesthetics and what art historians love to talk about as mingei Japanese style, but her work really resists clear definition.
Her work is sometimes described in pretty orientalist terms. For example, she has these gorgeous abstract lines in her pottery. They are a frequent motif in her work, but people ask “do they mean anything?” or “what do they say? Sometimes abstract lines are just lines. She’s playing with these ideas of how western audiences are going to over-interpret her work, when really she is just combining influences at every turn. She has pieces that incorporate really bright, lively reds and vibrant blues, and then there are others that use very muted, natural clay colors and tenmoku glazes.
I think the other thing that the exhibition gave me was a deep appreciation for craft. A lot of artists distinguish between the fine arts world and the crafts world. And a lot of times, I think the crafts world sort of gets the short end of the stick, as though their work is less significant.
But really, crafts are what people incorporate into their daily lives. I bet all of us have beautiful crafts—pottery, woodworking, silversmithed jewelry—in our homes that we walk by every day, that we drink our coffee out of, that we have in our bathrooms, like the cup that we might use to brush our teeth with. We develop relationships with craft through these day-to-day exchanges, and I think there’s something really beautiful and humbling about wanting to be part of someone else’s life in that way. To me it feels like a very social form of art too.
So I feel like Negoro’s commitment to the vessel, which is the traditional pottery shape, is really telling about her commitment to also wanting to just fit very humbly into people’s lives and make them a little more beautiful. I don’t know whether that came out of her experience at Heart Mountain, but I do think crafts were also a really important part of her life at Heart Mountain—she taught art and pottery classes there—and homemade furniture from pilfered wood or scrap wood or art they made in classes or with friends helped people make storage space in a tight living situation and turn their barracks into homes they could raise their children in.
MS: What have been some of the interesting or unexpected comments or reactions that you’ve received from audiences regarding your exhibition?
HM: It’s been a lot of fun getting to meet Negoro’s former students at the exhibition. We actually really struggled to reach out to her former students because it turned out that the School of Fine Arts didn’t really have a list of emails for them; they had graduated before email was really a thing. We had made contact with a few of her students, but others just heard about it organically.
It was amazing to see her students at the exhibition and hear them reminiscing about things like keeping the basement door open to the Benton late at night so that they could get the next person in, making sure that the kiln would be supervised all night. It’s an art museum filled with valuable objects, but it had terrible security back in the day, apparently. [laughs]
They would laugh about the folly of putting a kiln, which is basically a very hot oven, in the basement of an art building. Fortunately they didn’t stay there forever; I think it was there roughly the first ten to fifteen years she was at the university, but her studio did eventually move out of the Benton.
Hearing them talk about how hard of a professor she was—that’s something that came through consistently. She had a reputation for being a really hard professor. All of them have said that, and all of them also remember her so fondly. I think that has really shifted my approach to teaching too.
After the pandemic, I think a lot of professors felt that we just need to give our students as much grace as we possibly can because they’ve been going through such a rough time for so many years. But how do you give grace and also be the person that motivates them to want to produce their best work? How do you be the person that makes them want to challenge themselves, and that they will remember fondly thirty years later?
For me, talking with her former students was definitely the best part of the exhibition, because I never had the pleasure of meeting her. You know that prompt that goes, “If you could have dinner with anyone in the world from any point in time, fictional or real, who would it be?”
Before this, I didn’t really have a good answer for that question, but now I know it would definitely be Minnie Negoro. I respect and admire her so much, and from conversations with her loved ones she sounds like such a fun person too. I think it would have been really fun to be her student and even be scolded by her. [laughs]
MS: Is there anything else that you would like to share with readers at Discover Nikkei?
HN: We’re applying for a Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant, to hopefully bring the exhibition out to Heart Mountain. Federal funding is up in the air, but I really hope that the exhibition gets to travel out to Heart Mountain, even if it’s in a smaller form. My parents really want their pieces to go out to Heart Mountain at some point, at the very least.
Japanese American history is often framed as being sort of boutique or niche, but I think right now, that history is exactly what we need to be talking about. When the current administration started pulling on executive orders, I thought, “This feels really familiar.” And it should have felt familiar to anyone who has studied Japanese American incarceration at all—because the entire program depended on executive orders. I think we need to have a serious discussion about how executive orders enable disproportionate assertions of power. We need to be thinking about how past precedent enabled us to get to the place where something like this could be happening again today.
Part of the challenge of this exhibition was: How do you make this about the Japanese American community, and for the Japanese American community, when most of the community is probably not going to get to see it in-person? I think that was a really important part of my own work process, as well as the process with my students. That was something that we talked about; how do you write this exhibition, working with the understanding that Japanese Americans are one of the target audiences, even if they will not demographically be the main audience coming in to see it? I think it’s really important to write that way, because by doing so, you make sure you are telling a story that is useful and interesting to the community, and not just people who don’t know anything about Japanese American incarceration and are learning about it for the first time.
These pieces that are on display at the Benton right now, they’re not usually in museums. I think one or two pieces maybe came from a museum, but most of them are from private collections, which means that they’re just usually at people’s homes. And no Japanese American museum at present has any work by Minnie Negoro, which to me feels like something that needs to be fixed.
I think it would be really special to be able to bring the exhibition out to Heart Mountain. I hope that it would feel meaningful to her too, and I really hope that we get to do that. I’m committed to it, I think my parents are committed to it, and I think that her former students and family friends would really like to see that happen as well.
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Explore the exhibition through a narrated video tour led by the curator. Courtesy of Hana Maruyama.
© 2025 Matthew Sueda
