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CHAPTER TWO 6MOW\QI\QVO¹2IXIVM[MVM[[º “This is not a racial war.” So Kuniyoshi proclaimed in a letter written in October 1942 to James Reed, a student at Sheldon School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who contacted Kuniyoshi on behalf of his classmates. The students’ teacher mentioned Kuniyoshi’s name while they were studying “Worthwhile People” in class and told them that this émigr é Japanese artist did radio broadcasts for the U.S. government and gave the proceeds of his exhibition to the United China Relief Funds. Reed and his classmates wanted to know why Kuniyoshi gave his money to China and what the content of his broadcast was. They were also curious about the difference between Japan and the United States and what Kuniyoshi liked about America. Writing less than a year after Pearl Harbor, Kuniyoshi pronounced his patriotism in a two-page reply that reads like a pledge of his American allegiance. “I am very proud to consider myself an American artist,” he wrote, “and I am proud that I am generally thought of that way.” He elaborated: I will stay all my life because this is my home. America has given me everything ; it has taught me the democratic way of life which to me is the real essence of worthwhile living. . . . In appearance, I am Oriental but my beliefs, my ideals and my sentiments have been shaped by living in the free American atmosphere most of my life. At hear[t] I am an American and I see and feel everything that way.1 He was in essence reiterating the unequivocal belief in assimilation he had stated in the 1940 MoMA speech. In Kuniyoshi’s, and his liberal compatriots’, view, after thirty-five years of working and living in the United States, the only things that Negotiating“Japaneseness” 47 might distinguish him from other Americans were his physical features and birth country, neither of which he could change. Writing during his involvement with the U.S. graphics propaganda program in late 1942, Kuniyoshi was able to claim his “Americanness” especially because the U.S. government’s enlistment bolstered his American artist status—a patriotic and loyal one no less. His proclaimed American credentials were further solidified , even during war years, as he continued to win prestigious awards and exhibit in shows organized by major American museums. For example, he was included in an exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago, proudly titled Nine American Artists, in February 1942. His benefit retrospective at the Downtown Gallery in May 1942 received numerous positive reviews in the press. Following up on a second prize for his Lay Figure at the annual International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in 1939, Kuniyoshi won the Institute’s first-place, $1,000 prize in 1944 with his Room 110 (Fig. 12). The Carnegie exhibition was regarded as one of the most prestigious shows for an American artist to earn national recognition. The Carnegie award would become the best proof of Kuniyoshi’s assimilationist stance, deployed in his public speeches to both evidence his success and substantiate his “melting pot” vision of American democracy even during the Japanese American internment. The prize supported Kuniyoshi’s “this is not a racial war” tagline that sustained his public position during wartime. The Carnegie Institute corroborated Kuniyoshi’s proclamation, in fact, as its magazinestatedthatKuniyoshi’sworksshowed“theinfluencesofhisnativeOriental strain, American upbringing and environment, and contact with French.”2 The statement implied that Kuniyoshi’s winning painting, Room 110, was an exemplary work of cultural fusion and assimilation that was acknowledged and embraced in the United States. The “Oriental strain” that the Carnegie commentator alluded to seems to refer to the pictorial perspective Kuniyoshi used in Room 110, in which the table and the objects on top of it are pushed upward and forward. It differs from the conventional perspectival system established in fifteenth-century Southern Renaissance art, in which objects decrease in size to give the illusion of a receding, three-dimensional space. While Kuniyoshi maintained subtle shading and shadows to create some sense of space between the still life and the wall, the flatness of the picture perhaps reminded the commentator of the kind of Japonisme in the work of late nineteenth-century French artists, who incorporated the perspectives found in Japanese woodcuts.3 In terms of the subject matter, Room 110 was certainly a safe choice for the Carnegie Institute; as a still life of domestic objects, the work appeared nonconfrontational and was unlikely to provoke any...

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