look skyward, angel

Los Angeles Reader

IRONICALLY, THOUGH HE GREW UP LISTENING to his mother and father tell of their lives in the infamous World War II relocation camps for Japanese-Americans, thirty-two-year-old historian-photographer John R. Tonai never realized the significance of this major event in his people’s history.

“That’s the unusual thing,” he says. “I was a history major and had no interest in the camps. They were something I really never thought about.”

The fact that these stories were so common at home made them invisible. But there was another reason for Tonai’s indifference.

“We didn’t learn about them in school,” he explains. “I learned all about America, from the European settlement on, and growing up in a white neighborhood, I just thought that was my history also—the Civil War, the Revolutionary War was my history—because I was an American.”

But in 1990, while Tonai was pursuing a masters in visual arts at the University of Northern Colorado, his parents assisted with the exhibition of artist Robert Hasuike’s scale model of Manzanar at L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum. Tonai remembers that all they could talk about at the time was people’s reactions to the model. Their enthusiasm helped him realize the historical significance of their ordeal, and he decided to make the camps the subject of his photography thesis.

He set out to visit the desolate sites of all ten camps, from Jerome, Arkansas, to Tule Lake, California. The pilgrimage brought Tonai face-to-face with his legacy and the cruel reality of racism, but it also drove home a characteristic of history that had always intrigued him: its ultimate elusiveness.

He recalls his first visit to a camp—his father’s. The barracks in the mountains of Colorado are now no more than a lonely pattern of concrete rectangles, but using blueprints and his father’s instructions, Tonai picked his way to the spot where his father and grandfather had lived. When he stepped onto the foundation, all the stories came flooding back. Simple stories of a time in life, a place—anything that might have happened during the three years behind barbed wire. The camp Boy Scout troop going for a hike. Grandfather catching rattlesnakes. One particular rainstorm when the wind blew so hard the water ran uphill. And Tonai got close to an understanding.

“It became clearer to me that I could have been one of those people,” he recalls. “I’m a sansei, which means both of my parents were born in America. There were people who were sansei in the camps, too. So just being a sansei—even more American—didn’t make it, you could still go in. I could’ve been put in the camps just as easily as anybody else, and that became clear to me standing there. So, then I tried to envision what I would do if I was my age now and I had to go into a camp like that. And I couldn’t.”

In “Look to the Sky,” his poetic examination of the camps, Tonai combines his interpretation of this historical event with the realization that it’s impossible for anyone who wasn’t imprisoned to truly understand the experience.

“Sky,” which is the Japanese American National Museum’s Nisei Week offering, consists of Tonai’s photographs of the campsites, framed by and combined with bits and pieces of the ruins themselves, marrying the artist’s interests in photography, history, and education.

“Stranger to the Nightmare” is a large window frame taken from a barracks building on a piece of privately owned land that was part of the Tule Lake camp. The window, which once held nine panes of glass, is divided by its cross braces into a three-by-three grid and serves as a natural picture frame. The upper six “panes” are made up of a photograph Tonai took inside the actual building, so it appears that we’re looking through the window into the deserted barrack. Two of the three lower rectangles are filled with handmade rice paper, and the third is empty, save for a strand of barbed wire looping across it. In this space, the image of the barrack vanishes and we’re left really looking through the window, at the gallery wall beyond. The photo that makes up the upper “panes” shows a small boy standing in the sunlight at the doorway of the abandoned barracks and staring into the dark, cavernous building.

Tonai actually encountered this boy at Tule Lake. He and his mother live about twenty yards from the barrack, and the boy plays there every day. But neither he nor his mother knew what the building once was. So the boy serves as a fitting symbol of the lack of awareness that persists about this moment in American history.

Windows are a recurring theme. “Because we can’t be part of the camp,” Tonai explains, “we have to look at the camp, and by using windows, we’re looking through time, we’re looking through distance and space to these camps, and in looking at a photograph you can never truly put yourself in those camps because we’re foreign to them. So, with the windows, you can’t really get through them at all. You can get through ’em to a certain point, but you can’t go any further.”

The rice paper picks up on another theme in the show. It represents the spirit of Shikataganai many of the prisoners cultivated during their internment, a Zen-like attitude of making the best of the cards you’ve been dealt. Many took to making the camps their homes, decorating them with rice paper and other artworks they created. The paper, then, serves as a reminder of the spiritual struggle of the people who were there.

“Valley of the Sun” features a frame made of the cracked and weathered wood Tonai took from a site, and it suggests our perception of the camps as we look back through time. Contrasted with a work like “Pleasure Garden,” framed by the kind of wood the prisoners were actually greeted with—lumber so green it quickly warped—“Valley” points out yet again how our perceptions will forever be different from the reality. In truth, the camps no longer exist, except as memories, or stories.

As a historian then, Tonai has realized his limitations.

“I can’t tell you what it was like inside the camps,” he says. “I can’t even tell you after reading what people say about what it was like. I can tell you the physical conditions. I can tell you all of that. But I can’t tell you what it was like to live behind barbed wire, to live where machine guns were pointed at you just because you didn’t look right.”

In “Look to the Sky” he attempts, by combining history with art, to transcend these limits. And with his strange mixture of graceful photographs and weathered artifacts, he succeeds in bringing us as close to the camps spiritually as many of us would like to be. +