BY CORINNE KENNEDY

This article is a follow-up to my March article about Japanese American contributions to Pacific Northwest horticulture. Here, in the first of three articles, I range further afield, writing not about horticulture or Japanese gardens, but about three Issei artists—first generation Japanese who immigrated to Seattle in the early 20th century. By the 1930s, their paintings had brought them widespread recognition and awards, but their lives and careers were upended—and largely erased from historical memory—by the World War II incarceration of all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. These three Issei artists, all born in Japan in the 1890s, were Kamekichi Tokita, Takuichi Fujii, and Kenjiro Nomura.

We’re fortunate that relatively recently their paintings, sketches, and diaries have been rediscovered and publicized—in books, online, and in museum exhibits and catalogues. Art historian and curator Barbara Johns’s three books of biography and art history, published between 2011 and 2021, have been my primary resources for the blog series that begins with this article.

My subject this month is Kamekichi Tokita, who died only a few years after the end of World War II.

PART ONE: Kamekichi Tokita (1897–1948)

Title unknown (Prefontaine Street), oil painting by Kamekichi Tokita, 1930. (image: published online in Densho Encyclopedia; Creative Commons 3.0 License)

Barbara Johns first learned of Kamekichi Tokita when she worked at the Seattle Art Museum in the 1980s and discovered his paintings in its collection. Tokita had immigrated to Seattle in 1919, becoming a well-recognized artist as well as a successful small businessman. In fact, he was described in The Town Crier (December 5,1931) by artist and art critic Kenneth Callahan as "the leader of the Japanese painters in Seattle.”

After extensive research, Johns published Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (University of Washington Press, 2011), which includes this description of his art:

“Tokita's paintings of the late 1920s and 1930s are primarily urban landscapes: the buildings and streetscapes of the neighborhoods where he lived and worked and the waterfront where fishing boats docked.

He painted in an American realist style, with a keen color sensibility and a dramatic use of compositional framing that reflects his interest in photography and earned him praise as a modernist.”

Early Life, Immigration to Seattle, and the Pre-war Years:

Tokita was born in Japan in 1897, in the port city of Shizuoka. The second son of a successful businessman, he was expected to follow his father in the tea business and dutifully earned a business degree. Sent to China to sell tea, he studied Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy against his father’s wishes. Eventually he immigrated here and made Seattle his home. As Barbara Johns asserts, “he arrived on new shores not only as a citizen of the old world but also as a modern young man of his time.”

In Seattle’s Japantown (Nihonmachi), Tokita learned the basics of Western-style oil painting from Kenjiro Nomura, and in 1928 became a partner in Nomura's sign-painting business, Noto Sign Company. Their shop served as an art studio and community space for Japanese American (Nikkei) artists, who also took Sunday painting and sketching trips together in the city and surrounding countryside.

At first, Tokita’s paintings were exhibited in Nihonmachi, but in 1929 he began entering regional exhibitions. By the 1930s, he’d become established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene, winning public recognition and awards. Barbara Johns explains:

“As a mark of the respect accorded the three Issei artists, Tokita, Nomura, and Fujii were invited to become founding members of the Group of Twelve, a collective of Seattle-area artists formed in 1935 to advance modernist painting in the region. The Group of Twelve exhibited frequently for several years and published a catalogue that provides a singular statement of Tokita's intention. In it, he declares his interest in combining Western and Asian artistic practices and cites the French modernist Paul Cézanne and the fifteenth-century Zen priest Sesshū Tōyō as models.”

National recognition followed in 1936, when Tokita, Nomura and Fujii were among ten artists selected to represent Washington State at the First National Exhibition of American Art in New York.

But by the late 1930s, with marriage and a large family that eventually included eight children, Tokita no longer had time for art. The sign shop had closed in 1936, but he continued working as a sign painter and became the manager/operator of the Cadillac Hotel at Second and Jackson Streets, near Japantown.

“Backyard”, oil painting by Kamekichi Tokita, 1934. Created for the Works Projects Administration, Public Works of Art Project; Washington State and now held by the Seattle Art Museum. (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Wartime Incarceration (1941-1945):

Like all people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast, Tokita and his family were incarcerated during World War II, losing nearly everything they’d worked so hard for. Nothing remains of Tokita’s earliest work, and only some of his paintings from the 1920s and 30s have been preserved—including works held in museums, in private collections, and saved by family members.

After several months in temporary barracks at the Puyallup fairgrounds, Tokita and his family were sent to Minidoka, a War Relocation Authority camp in Idaho’s high desert. At first, he was assigned to maintenance work, but later worked as a sign-painter in the cabinet shop.

Tokita produced only a few paintings at Minidoka—oil paintings of barracks and other buildings. Instead, he wrote poetry and made pencil sketches “of motifs from the nineteenth-century printmaker Hiroshige, as well as a few paintings in traditional Japanese styles.” They were shown in art exhibits held in camp as well as in nearby Twin Falls.

More significantly, Tokita kept a diary. According to Johns, the diary is “a rare account among first-person documents for its attention to the months from Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor until the mass removal.” In fact, two-thirds of its entries were written in that nearly five-month period, when Tokita wrote almost daily, recording events, rumors and his own innermost feelings. In the words of his eldest son, Shokichi (Shox) Tokita:

“The diary is quite detailed in his thoughts, fears, feelings of disparity, how it affects him physically, and most of all, his disbelief. It is one of very few writings by an Issei that has been translated into English and into book form.” [https://napost.com/2022/the-tokita-world-war-ii-diary/]:

The family’s forced removal from Seattle took place in April 1942, but Tokita stopped writing in the diary until their arrival at Minidoka that September. He describes their living and working conditions, commenting on intergenerational relationships. By the following spring his entries have become infrequent, their focus on news of the war. The diary ends In July 1944, but the Tokitas remained at Minidoka until its closure, in October 1945.

After the War (1945-1948):

Unlike many who had been incarcerated, Tokita and his family returned to Seattle, despite violence against returnees to the West Coast. Father Leopold Tibesar of the Maryknoll Mission had secured the Japanese Language School building (renamed the “Hunt Hotel”) to house the returning Nikkei families, who shared the building’s single kitchen. The Tokitas lived for two years in its largest classroom. Tibesar also arranged for Tokita to work as a sign painter at Saint Vincent de Paul.

Tokita and his wife Haruko next embarked on a new beginning, moving into a run-down workers' hotel, which they planned to renovate. Soon afterwards, though, Tokita’s health deteriorated, and he died in 1948 at the age of fifty-one. Haruko then managed the hotel with help from the oldest children, and within a few years obtained three additional properties. All eight Tokita children completed high school, some earning college degrees.

Translation and Publication of the Diary:

Tokita's diary, which consists of three volumes, was written in prewar Japanese, which utilized over 10,000 kanji characters. But after World War II, written Japanese had been standardized to about 2,000 kanji, making it easier to learn. As a result, though, the project to translate Tokita’s diary was not a simple one.

This fascinating story begins in Japan. In 1950, Haruko had sent the first volume of the diary to Tokita’s niece, Kakuko Imoto, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that their son Shox visited Japan and told his cousin about the other two volumes. Held at the Smithsonian, they had been digitized and made available online. Imoto then arranged for Haruo Takasugi, her brother-in-law and a retired newspaper editor, to translate all three volumes from prewar to modern Japanese.

But it was in the U.S. that Shox completed the project. He arranged for Naomi Kusunoki-Martin, a professional translator in Los Angeles who had been born in Japan, to translate the diary from modern Japanese into English. Finally, he contacted the University of Washington Press, which agreed to publish a book that would reproduce the diary, but with a focus on Tokita’s life and art. Shox recommended Barbara Johns, who had helped him donate his father’s papers to the Smithsonian, to be its author. He had also read and admired her previous book about Issei artist Paul Horiuchi.

After extensive research, assisted by members of Tokita’s family, Johns completed Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita. A unique wartime diary, it is also an important work of biography, art, and art history/criticism. Three-fourths of the diary, in its English translation, is included in her book. The three original volumes, written in prewar Japanese, are among in the Tokita papers held at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Photo of Kamekichi Tokita, 1930s. (image: published online in Densho Encyclopedia; Creative Commons 3.0 License)

In Conclusion:

In closing, the following passage from the cover jacket of Signs of Home provides a moving summary of Tokita’s life and art:

“This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it….

By the 1930s he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene and allied with the region's progressive artists. His art shares qualities of American Realism while it embodies a distinctively Issei perspective on his new home.”

In his prewar art, Tokita painted his American home, Seattle and its environs. In contrast, his wartime diary gives voice to despair at the family’s incarceration and all they’ve lost:

“My heart is full to bursting. In a moment, we have lost all the value of our existence in this society. Not only have we lost our value, we’re unwanted. It would be better if we didn’t exist.”

This passage and the entire diary seem to predict the postwar reality that Tokita and his fellow Nikkei artists of the prewar years would largely be forgotten by history. But with son Shokichi’s 1990 donation of his father’s papers and memorabilia to the Smithsonian, and the 2011 publication of Signs of Home, Tokita’s important place in local art history has been restored.

For me personally, Kamekichi Tokita’s paintings speak eloquently of the Seattle of my childhood—a city with a vibrant Japanese American community and old buildings that would later be lost to development. I’m grateful that Tokita’s prewar Seattle still existed when I was born, the year after his passing—and that the preservation of his life and art also preserves that city and its prewar communities for future generations to discover.

Corinne Kennedy is a Garden Guide, frequent contributor to the Seattle Japanese Garden blog, and retired garden designer.

Stories of Pacific Northwest Issei Artists Who Achieved Recognition in the Years Before World War II: