<Begin Segment 61>

RS: But in any case, yeah, I collect anything that has to do with the internment camp. And I must have about ten or twelve of these yearbooks from different camps, but now, they're almost impossible to find, because I think so many people -- the first one I got, I paid like thirty or forty dollars for, and the last one that came up, which was about a year ago, I bid four hundred and fifty dollars for it and couldn't get it. And I couldn't get it because the minimum was higher than that. And it never reached the minimum. So people are obviously in a panic mode as to what they're worth. And I think that's really a little too high. So I have about a dozen of those yearbooks, I have magazine articles, special government-issue things that came about the camps, I have some artifacts. I got one of those little birds that they carved out, and a moth that someone carved out of wood and painted, things like that.

And then I have World War II postcards that depict the World War II Jap with the buck teeth and slanted eyes, yellow-skinned and their endless depiction of -- and I almost have all of 'em now. I must have about thirty or forty of 'em. And other ones that are just really foul, dogs urinating on Jap heads and things, defecating on them, and they're all these different versions. I have magazine advertisements of those same kinds of depictions, Jap hunting licenses that companies gave away, you put stamps on 'em and how many Japs you've killed. I have "Slap a Jap" cards that were clubs that you would join and every time you were supposed to slap the Jap that you saw. Patriotics, which were envelopes that you use with images on there that were the stereotypes of, of Japanese people, so just about anything that had to do with depictions, negative depictions of Japanese people.

And then I have a collection of, I picked out certain movies that, like the movie Go for Broke, and I have all the original posters and the big ones, the half-sheets, the small ones, I have all the lobby cards. And then I have, I think, every 8 x 10 black and white publicity photo of the whole movie, and other magazines, ads that were in magazines and so on. And then I also have the same thing with the movie Crimson Kimono, which was one of the first James Shigeta movies, where he is, has a white girlfriend, and that's what made that movie so interesting to me, and then the other one, of course, Bridge to the Sun, with Caroll Baker. And he has the blond girlfriend. So those two movies were extremely important in Asian America because the first times that the Japanese guy ends up with the American white woman. And the poster, which I originally saw when I was in LA, I was over at Renee Tajima, her house, and she had this poster and it shows James Shigeta and this white woman and then it says over here, "What appeal did this strange Japanese man have to this American girl?" And I love that line. And so that's when I decided to collect everything from Crimson Kimono. And so, again, I have all the lobby cards, all the 8 x 10 photos from those movies, magazine ads.

And then I also collect "yellow face," black and white photographs of Herman Munster looking like a Chinese on one of his TV shows, and of course it's just a whole slew of them, Mickey Rooney, and Breakfast at Tiffany's and so on and so forth. And, let's see... what other, all kinds of sort of miscellaneous objects like Chinese makeup kits -- I have a lot of Chinese stuff, too -- and kits you put a Fu Man Chu mustache on and paint your skin yellow, and make your eyes slanted. I have quite a few of those, one of which I picked up in Scotland last year, that they're still selling. Then I have a whole collection of World War II Halloween masks of Asian people, most of 'em are Chinese. And I must have about thirty-five or forty. They're all different. And those all came from eBay. And along with that I also have a photograph of my cousin wearing one of those masks, Halloween of 1949.

So, those are just some of the things I have. I probably mentioned half of... and, of course, all of these things end up informing my paintings, so I've been working on a series called "Stereotypes & Admonitions" where I depict myself, sometimes as a samurai from a ukiyo-e woodblock print, because that refers to how people see me as the person from Japan, or as that World War II "yellow peril" threat, which is still that kind of eternal foreigner, but more of a threat. And so what I'll do, is I'll put myself under one of those two disguises within a Western framework, so it also refers to that idea of, when you tell a white person that not a day goes by where you don't realize that you're not white, they don't understand what you mean. And that's what this refers to because it's so dramatized with these horrible depictions.

<End Segment 61> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.