<Begin Segment 49>

RS: And then, about the middle '70s, late-'70s, is when I began -- I can't remember what the, whether there was an incident or what, that suddenly stimulated my interest in my grandmother's diaries again. And I think it had to do with the fact that they were in her cabinet. She had died in 1968, and my dad kept telling me, "Why don't you take those diaries back with you?" Because he was tired of seeing them in his basement. And he sort of felt that I had a proprietary interest in it, because for the last fourteen years, I used to give her an empty diary for Christmas. And so, and he would always threaten to get rid of them, like so many Niseis, just get rid of it. And, and he knew that I felt very strongly that they should not be gotten rid of. And, because they were written in Japanese, of course, they were inaccessible to, to both of us.

And so, finally, I decided, in the late-'70s, to bring them back to Kansas. And so I put 'em all in a box one summer and brought 'em back with me. And thought maybe these will be worth translating. And I'd be really interested to see what she had to say. Because my grandmother and I had always been close, but I didn't know anything really about her before I was born, other than a few factual things. And just looking at the diaries, I mean, just filled with writing. And I thought, gee, you know, and I'd looked up my birthdate, when she delivered me. And there was hardly anything written there. As it turns out, all she said was, "Today, Roger was born." Which was real disappointing. First grandson and everything else. But she told me, she told me she was tired. But, in any case, I brought the diaries back with me, and I applied for a grant to get them translated. I didn't have any idea how many I can get translated, for how much money, or whatever. But one of my students was from Japan, and she was an art education major. And she had been in this country for, at that time, fourteen years, and so she was bilingual. And she looked at the diaries and thought that she could translate them. So I got this grant and we made this arrangement where every two weeks she would give me what she translated, and as it turns out it was about two weeks' worth of translations.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, because when I brought those diaries, it was about the time that the movement for reparations started, and when Frank Chin was involved in the first "Day of Remembrance." And Frank asked me if I would help him silkscreen T-shirts. And Frank Fujii had designed that T-shirt, the Issei-Nisei-Sansei. And I was up in Seattle, and so I volunteered my services and helped Frank and some other people silkscreen these T-shirts. And so that sort of put them in the front of my brain.

And I was due for my first sabbatical leave at Kansas in 1978. And applying for sabbatical leave was applying for a grant, and you had to sort of give a reason, what you were, why, and what you were going to do. And I decided that I was ready for a shift in, in my work. And that I wanted to do a series of narrative paintings. And the first thing that popped in my head was camp. And, because the "Oriental Masterpiece" series was pretty much about just looking Japanese. They were pretty much based upon ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and other than changing themes from single figures to landscapes, to other very kinds of mundane themes, there was no sort of narrative or political content to the, to the work. So I decided that I would do a series about Minidoka, but I decided that I would keep them in that ukiyo-e style. Because I wasn't ready to deal with it as, in a very sort of frontal manner. And I was a little wary of that. And my, my thought at the time was there were people that did that in camp, people like Mine Okubo, and who was I, all these years later, to try to do work that looked like I was making paintings of camp, as though it were going on at the time. And I also felt like it would be more conceptually interesting to keep it in that style.

And, and so I decided to do six paintings about the internment, and they funded my sabbatical, which meant that I would have a full semester and a summer to do this series of work. And I chose to do it 5 x 6 feet, which was fairly large. As I said, six paintings, and I would divide up various issues into six paintings. And the first one was called "The Notification." And it was a painting about that moment that we were notified that we would have to be moved out of Seattle and into the camps. And again, these were all in sort of ukiyo-e woodblock style, so that if you looked at the paintings, you wouldn't know that they had anything to do with the internment until someone told you that. And then, suddenly you, pieces would start to fall into place. The second painting was called "The (Exodus)" or the move to the camps. The third one was a diary, dedicated to my grandmother, and shows her writing in her diary with my mother and I in the upper corner, standing in front of a guard tower. The fourth one was, I believe, "No-No Boy." And I had read No-No Boy and so assembled all the various characters. The fifth painting was dedicated to the 442nd, and it's a painting that George Suyama owns. I just got a phone call from him a few days ago, and he's going to donate it to the Tacoma Art Museum. But it's filled with all these images of warriors, with a large figure standing in front that's supposed to be my uncle, who was one of the first people to be wounded in Italy. And then the sixth painting was, was called, it had to do with memories outside of camp. And it showed my grandmother in camp having a daydream about better times outside of camp. So that, those were the six paintings that comprised the "Minidoka" series. And the paintings were, the museum at Kansas showed them right, for a period of a couple of weeks as a group of work, because they thought it was quite a unique series. And then the work was shipped up here, and I had a show at the Kiku Gallery. Do you remember Kiku?

MT: Uh-huh.

RS: And, and it was at the opening that this attorney couple, this attorney came and purchased the "Exodus" painting, I believe it was, and donated it to the Seattle Art Museum, because he wanted to make sure that one would stay up here. And then one by one, the other paintings were sold, and went to different places.

<End Segment 49> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.