LITTLE TOKYO : Art Show Focuses on Japanese Internment

The video images run vertically, like Japanese writing. In one shot, grains of sand fall onto the face of an Asian woman, settling into the recesses. The woman doesn’t resist.

For artist Kim Yasuda, the image represents an act of oppression, the one perpetrated against her mother. She was a 19-year-old headed for college during World War II when she was sent to a desert internment camp for people of Japanese descent.

Yasuda is one of four artists commissioned in 1992 by the Little Tokyo Cultural and Arts Fund to create works commemorating the 50th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. The order, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, forced the evacuation and internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast.

“Remembering the Past, Looking Towards the Future,” which opened last week at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, features artists whose parents were interned at one of 10 camps scattered across seven Western states.

Yasuda’s mother, an American citizen, contracted tuberculosis while working as a nurse’s aide at the camp in Tule Lake, Calif. The illness required the removal of part of a lung and a two-year stay at a sanitarium.

Like many other internees, Yasuda said, her mother’s memory recalls the winds that sprayed sand against the barracks, the grains slipping through the inch-wide cracks of the flimsy wood.

“My mother would always say I just remember the dust, walking through dust storms and no privacy,” said Yasuda, 35, who along with the video created a series of concrete slabs that bear the imprint of belongings left by those sent to camps.

More than 50 years after the internment, it’s important to nurture the exploration of history by descendants of the internees, said Gerald Yoshitomi, executive director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

“The commentary and reflection must continue to subsequent generations,” Yoshitomi said.

The commission allowed Patrick Nagatani, a 49-year-old art teacher, to visit each camp and photograph its landscape. At one camp all that remained was a “sea of nails” from the camp’s wood-frame structures. At another, Nagatani found a child’s tin car, which he left there.

“Each place has its own kind of archeology and identity within the landscape,” Nagatani said. “I have a belief that landscape retains memory.”

Nagatani, who took his 11-year-old son to two of the camps, said his parents spoke little of their internment when he was a child. His mother was interned in Manzanar, in the Owens Valley, and his father in Jerome, Ark.

“I think the whole mind-set of my parents was, ‘The kids were going to go to college,’ ” Nagatani said. “We didn’t talk about the negativeness of the camps.”

The artwork by Clement Shuji Hanami, 33, shifts focus from the camps themselves to the evacuation. For background material, Hanami interviewed volunteers at the Japanese American National Museum, where he works as an exhibit manager.

Hanami’s piece features a 1920s truck loaded with boxes and bags. Inside the truck, an audio track plays old radio news reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and sound bites from President Roosevelt. Projected onto a windshield are interviews with internees.

“It’s about being uprooted,” Hanami said. “It’s about the specific experience of being singled out and told that all of you collectively as a group must move.”

The works of Hanami, Nagatani, Yasuda and Miles Hamada are on exhibit through July 30 at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Information: (213) 628-2725.