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

Kataoka,Mitsuru "Mits"

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

Family left camp to work at Seabrook Farms

We had a sponsor from New Jersey whose name was Seabrook. And Seabrook was a big farming company. Mr. Seabrook himself was still alive then and they needed workers. Out of the 10,000, we were maybe like 100, including children and parents. So my mother and father worked in the Seabrook farms. We lived at home because we were little children, yet. But we were paid like 50 cents an hour, I think. Maybe 10 of us in our little group and we had little scales, just like scales that you would imagine, and they would pick their peck, which is like a half a bushel, I think, of beans. They would bring the peck and we would put ‘em on the scale and if they weighted 20 pounds, they get a punch, I had a little punch. The punch equaled for them twenty cents or whatever it was. And so, by the end of the day, a fast picker would have about 100 punches.

farms New Jersey Seabrook Farms sponsors United States

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)