Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Chapter 4: Making Connections

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C H A P T E R 4 C H A P T E R 4 Making Connections Many imprisoned Japanese Americans used art as a way of making and sustaining connections among themselves and with people outside the camps. Such a framework complicates the idea of community, which is often rooted in creating structures of sameness, homogeneity, and exclusionary thought. Although the idea of community sometimes allows us to freeze and study moments of cultural and social solidarity, we are often left with a utopian understanding that fails to encompass the complexity or full range of human experience. The idea of connections is offered as a tool for understanding how people relate with each other in more fluid ways that run along a continuum from momentary to long-lived alliances. Rather than emphasizing uniformity in values and ideas, this framework offers a way to highlight difference among people who choose to create bonds with one another. Here I offer connections as a way of thinking about the countless, complex, and imbricated practices that aid relational understandings among people while encompassing conflict and differences. Revealing these layered webs of everyday connections balances exclusionary understandings of community building and identity formation based on oppositional constructs of us versus them, with alternative forms of identification that may lead us to expand liberative social change. In this way, art created and sustained a myriad of intricate and layered connections among imprisoned Japanese Americans and making connections 89 friends beyond the confines of the barbed-wired camps. Art provided some internees with cultural practices that created connections based on identifying with each other rather than being identical to one another.1 The making of crafts sustained and reformed relationships among family members imprisoned together, with these activities often taking on gendered meanings in terms of art-making materials. Fathers and sons most commonly created art for family members with wood, whereas mothers and daughters employed yarn and fabric. Many art forms exchanged between family members addressed functional needs, as in the case of a chair made by Tom Kikuchi for his Issei father. The elder Kikuchi, a barber in Vallejo, California, before internment, brought his clippers with him to Tanforan, but he found cutting the hair of internee customers a cumbersome process because he had no barber’s chair in which to seat them. By May 7, 1942, a short week after being transported to Tanforan, Kikuchi’s three clippers were hanging on a wall in the family’s living quarters next to a new barber’s chair made by his son from a discarded barrel. Dramatic changes in social relations among family members had occurred, however. Charles, the eldest Kikuchi son, noted a change in his father’s attitude after the first few days using his campmade chair: “It’s a bit pathetic when he so tenderly cleans off the clippers after using them; oiling, brushing, and wrapping them up so carefully. He probably realizes that he no longer controls the family group.”2 Some fathers carved model boats for young sons and then accompanied the youngsters to camp-made ponds to launch their creations.3 Most boats were carved from wood, but when supplies ran low, soap was substituted. Many of these boats were powered by wind, but some fathers searched the motor pool for discarded parts and equipped their sons’ boats with engines. Other fathers constructed outdoor play equipment for their children. Hobbyhorses made from recently felled trees were especially popular among children at Rohwer, and youngsters imprisoned at Tule Lake spent many enjoyable hours in camp-made wooden carts.4 Creating specialized outdoor chairs with “post-like prongs” that 90 artifacts of loss were pounded into the ground was also an art form favored by young men.5 Making these portable seats took skill and practice, as evidenced by a teenager who worked for an entire evening before becoming so frustrated that he destroyed a chair he was making for his sister. Encouraged by family members to approach his project with more patience, the young crafter’s subsequent attempt to build an outdoor chair proved successful.6 Sometimes men crossed gender lines to create crafts for their mothers that were more commonly associated with the opposite sex. One young man imprisoned at Tanforan, especially skilled in the art of knitting , created a matching skirt and jacket for his mother. However, fear of being ridiculed prevented this talented...