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Displaced Smiles: Photography and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Jasmine Alinder
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Historical texts, oral testimony, and scholarship document vividly the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — the loss of private property and personal belongings, and the emotional and psychological suffering, that the imprisonment caused. Yet there is very little visual evidence in the photographic record of incarceration that would attest overtly to these injustices. A photograph on April 1, 1942, by Clem Albers, a photographer for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), depicts three well-dressed young women who have just boarded a train in Los Angeles, which will take them to a so-called assembly center (Figure l). The photograph would appear at first glance to tell a very different story. The women smile and extend their arms out of a raised train window to wave goodbye, as if they are embarking on a vacation or some other pleasant excursion. The Albers photograph is not an exception to the photographic record of incarceration. In the thousands of photographs made of the incarceration process by government photographers, independent documentarians, and “internees,” it is much more difficult to find photographs that portray suffering than it is to find images of smiling prisoners.

Not surprisingly, these photographs of smiling Japanese Americans are unsettling for those scholars, curators, and activists who have worked to expose the injustices of the wartime imprisonment. The smiles are charged for several reasons: They appear to belie the injustice of incarceration and the suffering it caused, they are reminiscent of the ugly stereotype of the grinning Oriental, and they suggest that those portrayed were entirely compliant with the government's racist agenda.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 30 , October 2005 , pp. 519 - 537
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

I am grateful for the helpful comments offered by Roger Daniels and Aims McGuinness. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's History Department. Support from a Woodrow Wilson postdoctoral fellowship provided valuable writing time. And a special thank you to Diana L. Linden for her professional support.

1. Clem Albers: “Waving goodbye as the train pulls away from the station. These girls are on their way to an assembly center with others from this area of Japanese ancestry. They will later be transferred to War Relocation Authority Centers to spend the duration” (April 1, 1942, Los Angeles, California. Photo G2-B18, Record Group 210, U.S. National Archive, College Park, Maryland [hereafter cited as RG 210 USNA]). Albers also produced many images that underscored the more harsh realities of incarceration, including one photograph of the making of “segregee” mug shots (see note 3) and another of a line of men being escorted labeled, “Aliens at Sharp Camp following the evacuation order for persons of Japanese ancestry. This camp was set up as detention station where suspects were held before given hearings. They remained here only a short while, being sent to an internment camp or a relocation center following the hearings” (March 30, 1942, Sharp Park, California. Photo C-73, RG 210 USNA). The government impounded this image.

2. Kuramitsu, Kristine, “Incarceration and Identity in Japanese American Art,” American Quarterly 47 (12 1995): 619–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. An exception to the government's use of photography to represent the incarceration process positively includes the taking of mug shots, including of Japanese Americans who were segregated to the Tule Lake concentration camp (Clem Albers, “Segregees are photographed” [September 1943. Photo G18, RG 210 USNA]).

4. April 4, 1942, San Francisco. Photo 2-C438, RG 210 USNA.

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1. For more on Lange's tense relationship with the WRA, see Ohrn, Karin Becker, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1980), 119–48Google Scholar.

11. Dorothea Lange, April 6. 1942, San Francisco. Photo 2A-95, RG 210 USNA.

12. Dorothea Lange, March 13, 1942, Oakland, California. Photo 2C-519, RG 210 USNA.

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16. In fact, though the context of their making is rarely elaborated, both of these famous landscapes come from the Manzanar project. Adams first published Winter Sunrise with the caption “In the presence of the ancient mountains the people of Manzanar await their destiny” (Adams, Ansel, Born Free and Equal [New York: U.S. Camera, 1944], 106–7Google Scholar). Subsequently the image has been titled and reprinted as Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, California, 1944.

17. For more detailed accounts of the Manzanar riot, see Weglyn, Michi, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (1976; rept. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 122–25Google Scholar; and Hansen, Arthur A. and Hacker, David A.'s, “The Manzanar ‘Riot’: An Ethnic Perspective,” in Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation, ed. Hansen, Arthur A. and Mitson, Betty E. (Fullerton: Oral History Program, California State University, 1974), 41–79Google Scholar. The camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press, stopped production after December 5, 1942, and did not resume until December 25, 1942. Once production restarted, the paper noted one death had occurred on December 6 and two on December 11. Although Manzanar had endured the riot and subsequent martial law, the newspaper did not refer overtly to either the tragedy or its aftermath. See “Death,” Manzanar Free Press, 12 25, 1942, p. 6Google Scholar.

18. “[T]hree mobs gathered. One mob attacked the hospital trying to reach Toyama [sic]…. Another mob surrounded the police station” (New York Times, 12 7, 1942, p. 16Google Scholar). Per the Washington Post on 12 8, 1942 (p. 3)Google Scholar,

Director Ralph P. Merritt said military police fired into a milling crowd of 4000 in which Japanese born or Japanese-educated shouted “Pearl Harbor, Banzai! Banzai!” and jeered other Japanese of pro-American sympathies who were endeavoring to assist camp authorities in restoring order…. Part of the crowd surged toward the soldiers and was met with tear gas bombs. After the fumes were blown away, the Japs hurled stones. The soldiers then opened fire. This halted the shouting, gesticulating mob and sullenly they returned to their bungalows.

Note that there was no mention of internal spying, prisoners were referred to as “Japs,” and barracks were transformed into quaint “bungalows.”

19. For a particularly poignant fictional account of the psychic trauma following the release of a “no-no” boy (the slang term for someone who answered “no” to both questions 27 and 28) from prison and his return home, see Okada, John, No-No Boy (1957; rept. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976Google Scholar).

20. An article on the front page of the Manzanar Free Press articulated Merritt's hope for peace: “To establish peace and harmony within the center as the goal for the coming year was the essence of the talk given by Project Director Ralph P. Merritt at a meeting of a representative group of 108 people at town hall” (“Peace and Harmony Main Topic of Talk,” Manzanar Free Press, 01 16, 1943, p. 1Google Scholar).

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29. Nevertheless, there were pamphlet publications like Outcasts! by Foote, Caleb and McWilliams, Carey's Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little Brown, 1944)Google Scholar, which assailed the injustice of the incarceration and the charge that Japanese Americans were unassimilated.

30. According to Bulletin 126 from the Japanese American Citizens League, dated March 24, 1942,

After March 31, 1942, no person of Japanese ancestry shall have in his possession or use or operate at any time or place within any of the Military Areas 1 to 6 inclusive, as established and defined in Public Proclamations Nos. 1 and 2, above mentioned any of the following items a. firearms b. weapons c. ammunition d. bombs e. explosives f. short wave radio g. radio transmitting sets h. signal devices i. Codes or ciphers j. cameras.

Bulletin 135 of March 30,1942, gives instructions for the move to assembly centers, including “No contraband items as described … may be carried” (box 1:11 mss 97/145C, Dorothea Lange Papers).

31. “Cooperative Enterprises Serve Residents' Needs,” Manzanar Free Press, 09 10, 1943, p. 5Google Scholar.

32. Embrey, Sue Kunitomi, “Born Free and Equal,” in Born Free and Equal, ed. Benti, Wynne (Bishop, Calif.: Spotted Dog, 2002), 25Google Scholar. Benti and Spotted Dog Press have bravely republished as much of Adams's original Born Free as Equal as is allowed under copyright law. Although republication of the entire volume would greatly benefit scholars and the general public, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust has not yet done so, nor did they cooperate with or give permission for Benti's project.

33. These works include Allan Sekula's famous essay “The Body and the Archive,” which examines the key role that photography played in defining the criminal and social body during the 19th century, and John Tagg's The Burden of Representation, which exposes the use of photographs as evidence by the state and other institutions. See Sekula, , “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Bolton, Richard (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 343–89Google Scholar; and Tagg, , The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar.