Four generations of a Japanese American family visit Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America at the Barnes

The American public seemed more willing to distinguish the ethnic identity of German or Italian immigrants from the political ideology of Nazis or Italian fascists, but all Japanese Americans, regardless of their US citizenship, were scapegoated as potential threats. Of the more than 126,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly removed from their West Coast homes, businesses, and schools, more than two thirds were US citizens, and more than half were children under the age of 18.

Never charged with a crime, these internally displaced peoples spent an average length of three and a half years in hastily made concentration camps situated in deserts and swamplands, surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards. While the circumstances of WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and America’s current immigrant detention landscape are different in many key aspects, they are rooted in the same institutional white supremacy and state violence.

The false premise of American empathy

Since the 1960s, Japanese American survivors and descendants of the camps have attempted to tell our stories through various public history exhibits, educational curriculums, and cultural productions. All have relied on the same premise: if we told our stories from our perspectives to enough people, the American public would not allow what happened to Japanese Americans to happen again.

This was a faulty premise. ICE raids are terrorizing immigrant communities across the country, and in Philadelphia. We did not fail for lack of effort in telling our story, but we may have relied too much on hopes that the American people would share a basic empathy with people who were unjustly targeted on the basis of race, ethnicity, or nationality. Just as Japanese Americans were flattened into a monolithic image of danger, today’s immigrant communities face xenophobic propaganda and hateful demagoguery.

Persisting through art

We must keep exploring this topic, and Noguchi to Asawa is an excellent opportunity. The show demonstrates how modern design aesthetics entered the domestic sphere of mid-century furniture design, advertising, and other popular culture mediums. Japanese American artists who lived through the wartime incarceration had an outsized impact on American society at large. This show (on view through January 10, 2027) surveys sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, architect and furniture designer George Nakashima, sculptor Leo Amino, graphic designer S. Neil Fujita, fiber artist Kay Sekimachi, and artist and sculptor Ruth Asawa.

In framing the exhibition through the rupture of wartime incarceration, curator Cindy Kang demonstrates how these life-altering events shaped the artists’ respective careers. Such extreme circumstances affected each individual artist in similar ways, as they sought to express themselves in a medium that did not require words to convey their emotion. Visual art and commercial design provided a layer of safety to Japanese Americans to explore complex topics that may have felt unsafe to discuss aloud.

This continued for decades after the war as each artist’s career took off in various capacities. Their works reflect unique perspectives as liminal figures whose constitutional right to habeas corpus was rescinded on the basis of their ethnicity, yet were tried as draft dodgers if they refused conscription into the US military. Belonging only when convenient to the state, their status as perpetual foreigners remained a constant as they navigated residual anti-Japanese prejudice in the postwar era.

Despite, or perhaps in spite of all this, the Japanese American artists featured in this show each left meaningful and lasting impacts on the built environment that all Americans experienced during the mid-20th century. The observant viewer also might ask what future cultural contributions will be lost if our current anti-immigrant detention and deportation regime continues.

My own family history

I’m a mixed-race Yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese American), so this topic cuts close to my own lived experiences and family history. My maternal great-grandparents Masaichiro and Asako Marumoto were both Issei (immigrants born in Japan). The Marumotos were forcibly removed from their home in Gardena, California where they operated a successful farm business for more than a decade. Losing everything, they avoided wartime incarceration by fleeing inland to Clearfield, Utah on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.

Members of our extended family were incarcerated at Jerome and Tule Lake concentration camps. Another relative was arrested under the Alien Enemies Act and held at the Weber County Jail. I am related through marriage to others who were incarcerated at Manzanar and Crystal City. At least one of our relatives served in the US Army segregated Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Another responded No-No to the infamous 1943 loyalty questionnaire and was deported to Japan.

A peer’s perception

I toured Noguchi to Asawa with my 90-year-old Obaachan (grandmother), who was six when her parents packed her and her three siblings into their 1931 Chevy sedan and fled to Utah with the few belongings they could fit with them. While Obaachan did not experience the wartime incarceration, she lived through internal displacement, dispossession of wealth/property, and intense anti-Japanese prejudice as one of the only non-whites living in Mormon pioneer country during WWII. Obaachan remembers her second-grade teacher, whose fiancé was killed in action during the Pacific War, punishing her students by forcing them to sit next to “the Jap girl” in class.

Obaachan is at least a decade younger than the artists featured here, but she’s part of the same Nisei (American-born) generation, so she viewed these works as a peer and contemporary. “It’s amazing what our people were able to do with the conditions they were given,” she told me after our Barnes visit. “With all that time in camp, they honed their skills and produced such beautiful art.”

As with other communities who have lived historic tragedies, I find that there is sometimes an overemphasis on victimization in the ways that the Japanese American story is told, especially by those outside of our community. Alongside Obaachan, I see these survivors’ artworks less as a reminder of the abuses they experienced and more of a testament to their resilience and the incredible feats they accomplished. We must of course continue to teach about and remember these events, but no person or community should be remembered solely by the worst thing that ever happened to them.

For the sake of the children

Touring the Barnes with my grandmother proves that the Japanese American wartime experience is very much a living history. There is a lasting impact of trauma both on survivors and their descendants. In the same ways that anti-Japanese scapegoating continues to impact Japanese Americans more than 80 years after the war ended, the immigrant communities targeted by our current Department of Homeland Security will suffer lifelong repercussions from our country’s cruelty and indifference.

We have a saying in Japanese: Kodomo no Tame ni (“for the sake of the children”), which has become a rallying cry for immigrant justice in the Japanese American community. We know from our own experiences that today’s DHS abuses will have a profound and damaging impact on children yet unborn who will suffer intergenerational trauma from their parents’ or grandparents’ ordeals. As people of conscience, we must close the concentration camps of today and find a better way forward that respects everyone’s human dignity, regardless of immigration status.

Noguchi to Asawa stops short of saying this part out loud, but anyone who sees this show should be able to read between the lines and apply these lessons from the past to today.

Editor’s note: On December 12 from 1-4pm, writer Rob Buscher will curate a selection of short films in a Barnes program titled Camp and the Japanese American Artistic Psyche in Film.

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