Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Chapter 3: Re-territorializing Outside Spaces

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C H A P T E R 3 C H A P T E R 3 Re-territorializing Outside Spaces Perhaps more dramatic than interior changes to internee living quarters and shared gathering places was the rearticulation of outside living spaces. Internees re-territorialized the camps, a process of altering hostile and unfamiliar landscapes into arenas of identity articulation in which differences are declared and subjectivities enacted.1 Through this process of re-territorialization, imprisoned Japanese Americans became anchored in unfamiliar, harsh, and antagonistic environments. These places of imprisonment were spatial expressions of race based on the U.S. government concentrating persons of Japanese ancestry in specific geographical sites. But internees altered the spatial order of these physical landscapes by joining aesthetics with politics and engaging with the art forms of gardening and landscaping as strategies for creating survivable places. For the internees, vegetable, fruit, and rock gardens as well as skating rinks, golf courses, and swimming pools were, in the words of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “conceptual and political acts of reimagination .”2 These acts of re-imagination were particularly important for many imprisoned Japanese Americans as they drew on the physical landscape to reshape understandings of power and generate new ideas that better ensured their survival. Through the process of re-inscribing the physical environment with gardening and landscaping projects, internees imagined and enacted 52 artifacts of loss portable senses of place. When studying these art activities of Japanese Americans, we learn that place, even when denied by the almost limitless power of a nation-state, can reside in portable spaces such as art. Understanding gardening and landscaping in these terms helps us see how internees identified with one another by creating portable senses of place, which they carried with them. This portability problematizes the attachment of culture to physical locations structured by nation-states and instead suggests a more transnational understanding of identity formation. Identities unmoored from physical boundaries of nationhood , such as that of being Japanese or American or any combination of the two, appear equally relevant or powerful as identities constructed by structures of the nation-state and issues of territory. A critical tool of survival for imprisoned Japanese Americans was creating understandings of place as portable and then engraving this newly constructed knowledge onto the outside spaces of concentration camps. This form of physical place making took on added meaning and importance for a people who collectively possessed a long and heterogeneous history of geographical displacement that encompassed a series of voluntary, coerced, and forced movements. Sex, class, ethnic, religious, occupational, and generational differences constructed distinct paths of migration for many internees before they were forcibly removed from designated West Coast exclusionary areas during spring 1942. However, people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States now shared confinement in concentration camps defined by race. Understandings of place as portable took on even more meaning when we recall that these new prisoners of the U.S. government were first incarcerated in temporary facilities and later moved to more distant, permanent locations of imprisonment. Denied places of their own, Japanese Americans relied on the portable spaces of art in the form of landscaping projects to recuperate and remake new senses of place. Almost immediately, internees reacted to the traumas of internment by working with soil surrounding their living quarters. As they engaged re-territorializing outside spaces 53 with the art form of gardening, imprisoned Japanese Americans altered the barren and dusty physical landscapes of the camps into places marked by flower, vegetable, and rock gardens complete with ponds and waterfalls. Larger landscaping and architectural additions included bridges, wishing wells, sizable seating areas, and lakes where model boat “regattas” frequently occurred, not to mention newly constructed baseball fields, skating rinks, sumo rings, and golf courses. Personal gardens were the most immediate sign of this re-territorialization process, with children and adults alike staking out small lots near their living quarters and preparing the less than hospitable soil for planting during their first difficult days of imprisonment. Many internees were deeply effected by the bleakness of their temporary imprisonment sites, or what the government euphemistically called “assembly centers.” Mary Tsukamoto, a young mother imprisoned at Fresno, was no exception. Tsukamoto was shipped by train from her home in Florin, California, to the Fresno County Fairgrounds, which she reported was hot, dusty, and devoid of greenery. The main feature at Fresno—just over a...