Looking For Jiro and Gentleman’s Gaman

Tina Takemoto’s Looking For Jiro and Gentleman’s Gaman offer a queer meditation on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. At age 38, Jiro Onuma was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in Central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and liked muscular men. Jiro Onuma was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandyish gay Issei bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? Looking For Jiro is a queer experimental performance video featuring an ABBA/Madonna musical mash-up, drag king performance, U.S. propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. Gentleman’s Gaman reengages the craft practices established during incarceration and infuses them with a queer sensibility.

This work explores the hidden dimensions of queer sexuality for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The absence of queer historical accounts of the Japanese American Incarceration Camps is partially related to the atypical structure of the prison camps. Unlike most prison facilities in which individuals are gender segregated, the American concentration camps organized inmates by family units. Some historians also suggest that the unknown history of Japanese American queer sexuality relates to internal pressures within Japanese American communities to assimilate into American culture by conforming to heterosexual norms. This pressure to conform to dominant codes of heterosexuality was heightened especially among Nisei (second generation) men, who sought to prove their masculinity and American citizenship by policing sexual behavior, disavowing homosexuality, and/or enlisting in the U.S. military.

TINA TAKEMOTO

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: TARPAPER PORTRAIT OF JIRO ONUMA AND FRIENDS

TINA TAKEMOTO

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: TARPAPER WALLET AND CIGARETTE HOLDER

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: CARVED WOODEN BIRD CUFFLINKS AND TIE CLIP

TINA TAKEMOTO

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: HOMEMADE EARLE LIEDERMAN EXERCISE DEVICE AND PHYSICAL CULTURE SCHOOL EPHEMERA

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: TARPAPER HANAFUDA FLOWER CARD SET WITH MUSCLE MEN

TINA TAKEMOTO

GENTLEMAN’S GAMAN: TOPAZ BURN

TINA TAKEMOTO

LOOKING FOR JIRO PERFORMANCE STILLS