Read Part 15 >>The Post-War Years: Coming to Terms with ManzanarOf course once freed from the concentration camps, the Japanese did congregate in clusters, many settling not far from the Los Angeles Little Tokyo they had inhabited before the war. Decades of pre-war racial prejudice followed by the mass illegal roundup …
Read Part 14 >>In Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Jasmine Alinder described how the U.S. military and government used photography as a tool of power and control over Japanese Americans during World War II:
Read Part 13 >>Back to Japan, 1933-1936When Miyatake’s father fell ill in Japan in 1933, Toyo was selected to represent the family and returned to Japan to pay his respects. By the time he and his family had completed the two-week passage, however, Toyo’s father had died. As the de …
Read Part 12 >>While Lange and Adams photographed Manzanar from the outside, Toyo Miyatake was the ultimate insider. Imprisoned at Manzanar almost from its opening to its closure, from 1942 to 1945, Miyatake witnessed and photographed, at first surreptitiously, then with official permission, a much broader range of scenes and …
Read Part 11 >>“Everything Is Propaganda”Lange’s outlook on life informed the pictures she took at Manzanar. Where Adams saw the rugged natural setting as spirit-lifting and awe-inspiring, Lange saw it as brutal and oppressive. Where Adams saw opportunity and triumph of spirit at Manzanar, Lange saw suffering and a gross …
Having surveyed the landscape of Nikkei long-term care choices in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Sacramento and San Jose, I turned my attentions to Seattle, the last stop on my reporting tour. Although Japanese immigrants began arriving in Seattle in the late 19th-century, its Nihonmachi population has always been small …
I woke on the morning of March 11 to an email from a friend saying she had just heard about a massive quake in Japan and she hoped that my relatives and friends there were safe. It was the first of many such emails and phone calls I received in …
Read Part 10 >> Part Two: Dorothea Lange When Lange arrived at Manzanar in 1942 to take photos for the WRA, she was already famous for her 1930s documentary photos of the rural poor, part of her work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her best known work, the bleakly …
Read Part 9 >> It was not until I looked at an online version of the 1944 Born Free and Equal (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams/ ) that I felt the full impact of Adams’s message. This original version includes several landscapes omitted from a 2002 reprint (Spotted Dog Press, Inc., Bishop, CA), including his majestic …
Read Part 8 >> Walking a Fine Line In Born Free and Equal, Adams struggled to walk a fine line between advocating for the imprisoned Japanese while not leaving himself vulnerable to charges of disloyalty. The Nisei, too, walked that line, balancing hurt and anger with a desire for approval …
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