Stories of Pacific Northwest Issei Artists Who Achieved Recognition in the Years Before World War II—PART TWO: Takuichi Fujii

BY CORINNE KENNEDY

This article is the second in a series of articles about three remarkable 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 wartime incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. 

These three 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—primarily through three books (published beginning in 2011) by art historian and curator Barbara Johns, with major assistance from translators and the artists’ descendants. These books, and the related museum exhibits that Johns has curated, have been my primary resources for this blog series. My subject here is Takuichi Fujii. 

PART TWO: Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964)  

Takiuchi Fujii, watercolor painting: Minidoka, montage with barbed-wire fence. (image: published online in Densho Encyclopedia; Creative Commons 3.0 License. Courtesy of Sandy and Terry Kita.) 

Barbara Johns’s rediscovery of Takuichi Fujii’s World War II artwork, and his prewar and postwar modernist paintings, was fortuitous. Working on her doctoral dissertation about Issei artists in Seattle, Johns was unexpectedly introduced online to Fujii’s grandson, Sandy Kita, a scholar of Japanese art. While sorting through his mother’s belongings after her 1995 death, he and his wife Terry had discovered a large collection of Fujii’s art from during and after World War II. It had been stored for decades, first by his grandmother and then by his mother. Currently in the process of translating Fujii’s remarkable wartime diary, a unique record in text and art of wartime incarceration, his goal was to publish the diary, restoring his grandfather’s artistic legacy. 

 Johns’s extensive research resulted in the creation and 2017 publication of The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness, a work of biography and art history that features Fujii’s art before, during and after World War II—and includes about half of his wartime diary. Johns also curated a traveling exhibition more narrowly focused on the diary. Titled Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii, it was first exhibited at the Tacoma History Museum. 

Early Life, Immigration to Seattle, and the Pre-war Years (1891-1942): 

Little is known about Takuichi Fujii’s youth in Japan. He was born in Hiroshima in 1891, completed schooling through the eighth grade, and studied sumi ink painting for two years. In 1906, he immigrated to Seattle, where his father and an older brother were already working. Both returned to Japan, but Takuichi chose to make Seattle his home. After working for eight years at a fish company in Seattle’s Japantown (Nihonmachi), he returned to Hiroshima in 1916, where he met and married his wife Fusano, then returned to Seattle and started a business as a fish merchant. Two daughters were born in the next several years. 

Fujii was also an artist, and by the early 1930s his paintings were winning recognition and awards. Unfortunately, as Barbara Johns observes: 

“Only twelve paintings, plus black and white reproductions of two more, remain from the 1930s, the years of Fujii’s public introduction and recognition. They picture urban and rural landscapes, fishing boats, and still life in the modernist-inflected American realism of the time. A self-portrait and a portrait of his daughter are singularly personal images. Three paintings, including one in reproduction, are dated and provide the bare bones of a chronology. Together they show the 1930s to be a time of formal exploration and increasing confidence.” 

One of his paintings was selected for the 1930 Northwest Annual, a juried exhibition, and the next year he won an award there. During the next few years, Fujii exhibited his work frequently in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1935, he was one of three Issei painters invited to join a group of artists known as the Group of Twelve, formed to advance "the best painting in the Northwest.” According to distinguished historian Roger Daniels, writing in his “Foreword” to Johns’s book, the group’s “interracial membership was rare, if not unique, in 1930s America.” Fujii, Kamekichi Tokita, and Kenjiro Nomura were also among ten artists chosen to represent Washington State at the First National Exhibition of American Art in New York in 1936. 

For reasons unknown, Fujii and his family moved to Chicago in 1937. As a result, a planned one-person exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, which might have preserved more of his pre-war paintings, never took place. He exhibited only once in Chicago—at the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual juried exhibition. Takuichi and Fusano returned to Seattle in 1939, leaving behind their young adult daughters, who remained in Chicago for several more years. The couple then opened a new business, the Mary Rose Florist Shop, with Fusano in charge, allowing Takuichi to dedicate himself to his art.* 

Wartime Incarceration and the Wartime Diary (1942-1945): 

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Fujii and his family were forcibly “relocated” in May 1942 to a WRA (War Relocation Authority) temporary detention camp on the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup. That August they were incarcerated at Minidoka in the Idaho desert. Both daughters left the Minidoka camp on work release in 1943, but Fujii and Fusano remained until the camp's closure in October 1945. 

 In May 1942, Fujii began a diary of ink drawings combined with text, which documents the family’s uprooting and imprisonment. Most consist of very brief captions identifying places or events, but a few entries, including the following, are longer and more evocative: 

“An Evening of Reluctance 

Finally, tomorrow morning, we must say farewell to this house to which we have become so accustomed. Naked, having disposed of our shop, furniture, everything, in a muddle we packed only the absolute minimum of personal belongings, clothing, and bedding. Our home, which is now empty, feels sad and cold in the dim light. Since we had no bed, we got out our coats and, making a temporary bed, slept together like sardines in a can. But because we could not sleep, we were up before dawn. Having taken our last breakfast, we waited for the time to pass. All my family looked anxious.” [Diary 4] 

Throughout, the diary is a stark depiction of forced incarceration, first at Puyallup and then at Minidoka. Its ink sketches depict the harsh environment and sparse living conditions, daily routines, varied kinds of work, and leisure activities, but images of confinement (barbed wire fences, armed soldiers, and watchtowers) predominate. Fujii also describes his own position and viewpoint relative to what he observes, including images of himself at work sketching—thus declaring himself witness to his own confinement. 

Title page of the Fujii diary (image: published online in Densho Encyclopedia; Creative Commons 3.0 License. Courtesy of Sandy and Terry Kita.) 

This unique diary also represents Fujii’s perspective as an Issei, revealing generational tensions between the Issei and their Nisei children—the latter American citizens and usually fluent speakers of English. It depicts young adult Nisei in leadership roles and participating in leisure activities that differ from their parents’, and shows young children with their peers, away from the family group. In words and images, the diary reveals the painful loss of traditional Issei authority and the weakening of their family units. 

The diary was translated from Japanese into English by Fujii’s grandson, art historian Sandy Kita, assisted by the Reverend Honda Shōjō—a demanding project that was completed in 2011. In his “Introduction to the Diary” in The Hope of Another Spring, Kita characterizes it as an “art diary” (e-nikki), placing it within an important Japanese literary tradition that combined words with images. 

According to Barbara Johns, Fujii's diary doesn’t simply record daily experiences, but like poetry communicates complex thoughts and emotions:   

“Throughout the diary, text and image together intensify meaning to reveal a more complex story than either does alone;… In creating such a record, Fujii demonstrates his resistance to the conditions of control and conformity in which he was forced to live. His work signifies an insistence upon self-representation and his determination to relate circumstances as he experienced them…. The diary as a whole and related wartime work demonstrate his extraordinary resilience and perseverance…” 

John Ruff, a professor of English at Valparaiso University, offers a slightly different perspective, with a focus on transcendence: 

“I see him recording, through frequent images of himself at leisure or working at his art, his effort to escape or transcend the worst aspects of a terrible ordeal. He records that ordeal faithfully, and through that process achieves a sense of purpose, psychic health, and wholeness despite circumstances that tragically interrupted his career and nearly ruined his life.” [from Cresset, the Valparaiso University’s online review] 

Historian Roger Daniels asserts in his “Foreword” to Johns’s book that Fujii's diary "would become the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration."   

Other Wartime Art:

In addition to the diary, Fujii created about 130 watercolors and larger ink drawings. Some resembled drawings in the diary; others provided new perspectives. It’s unknown whether all were created at Minidoka. Some may have been created from memory after the war. Forty-two of the larger watercolors were matted and stored in a handmade portfolio, but it’s not known whether they were ever put on display during Fujii’s lifetime. 

In addition, Fujii provided diary-like drawings for Minidoka Interlude, a yearbook-style publication published in 1943. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Takuichi_Fujii/ He also produced several oil paintings and carved objects, some of which were exhibited at Minidoka and Twin Falls. His painting of a vase of sunflowers next to the family’s barracks window was prominently displayed in 1943, along with landscapes by Kamekichi Tokita and Kenjiro Nomura, at the Twin Falls Library. 

After the War (1945-1964): 

Takuichi Fujii in Chicago, ca. 1953. (photo: published online in Densho Encyclopedia; Creative Commons 3.0 License. Courtesy of Sandy and Terry Kita.) 

With the closing of Minidoka, Fujii and Fusano joined their older daughter in Ogden, Utah. Two years later they moved to Chicago, and by 1948 the entire family had moved there, where the WRA’s dispersal and resettlement policy had caused a large Japanese American community to become established. Fujii was close to his younger grandson, Sandy Kita, who became a scholar of Japanese art and the translator of his grandfather’s diary. 

Fujii worked briefly in a lithography shop but soon retired. Even before his death in 1964 from complications of lung cancer, people he’d known and worked with in Seattle had lost track of his location and achievements. In 1956 it was reported that he’d returned to Japan. 

After the war, Fujii’s art continued to evolve, as Barbara Johns describes:

“He continued to paint, picturing the seasonal landscape outside his home and experimenting with various modes of abstraction. He exhibited twice in the late 1950s in large non-juried exhibitions at Navy Pier. In the last years of his life, his pursuit of abstraction culminated in a series of black and white abstract expressionist paintings.”  

In Conclusion: 

After the long final section of The Hope of Another Spring, which reproduces about half of Fujii’s wartime diary, “Appendix 1” reproduces his “Artist Statement”: 

“My aim in painting is to remain true to my own ideas and keep away from the influence of other painters. However, in seeing and studying the work of others, I learn from them. 

I am not interested in skill or technique as an end in itself, but in a combined thing, a co-ordination of my visual experiences with my knowledge of forms of art. It is truth in Nature I am after, not the superficial aspect of Nature or man, but the basic truths of the structure of life.  [Fujii’s statement, likely edited by Kenneth Callahan, in 1937’s Some Work of the Group of Twelve.] 

Takuichi Fujii left almost no personal papers, other than his artwork and wartime diary, and it’s unknown how many of his works of art have been lost. But the paintings and other artworks that were preserved—and recently rediscovered—are of great artistic and historical significance. Historians may believe that Fujii’s wartime diary and related watercolor paintings are his most important artistic achievements. My own opinion is that his pre-war and postwar paintings are also of incomparable worth.** 

 As I was beginning to research and write this article, I was excited to learn of a new exhibit at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum that features the three Issei artists in my current blog series. I was fortunate to view this wonderful exhibit on August 16th, its opening day! Side by Side: Nihonmachi Scenes by Tokita, Nomura, and Fujii features paintings from the 1930s by these three remarkable artists. It runs through May 11, 2025, and brings to life their extraordinary artistry and the prewar Nihonmachi where they lived and painted. Although it’s a relatively small exhibit in a single gallery, I encourage art-lovers and readers of this blog not to miss it! 

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*For earlier acknowledgements of Fujii’s 1930s artwork, see two books (about 100 pages each) edited by Mayumi Tsutakawa: Turning Shadows into Light: Art and Culture of the Northwest's Early Asian/Pacific Community, edited by Mayumi Tsutakawa and Alan Chong Lau (Seattle: Young Pine Press, 1982), and They Painted from Their Hearts: Pioneer Asian American Artists, edited by Mayumi Tsutakawa (Seattle: Wing Luke Asian Museum, 1994).  

**To view selected reproductions from Fujii’s prewar, wartime, and postwar art, go to this University of Washington Press Blog article: University of Washington Press Photo Essay: Takuichi Fujii 

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