Densho Digital Archive
Frank Abe Collection
Title: Yosh Kuromiya Interview
Narrator: Yosh Kuromiya
Interviewers: Frank Abe (primary); Frank Chin (secondary)
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: August 15 & 16, 1993
Densho ID: denshovh-kyosh-01-0008

<Begin Segment 8>

FA: Yosh Kuromiya, what was one of the ways that you found to pass the time in camp?

YK: Oh, I did a little sketching. Mostly spontaneous pencil sketching, no big thing. [Interruption] Well, I don't know if it was really in order to pass the time. I was, I was interested in sketching. I mean, that was my way of communicating with my environment, to be in touch with my environment. So could you pose the question a little differently?

FA: You just did. Why did you draw sketches in camp, Yosh?

YK: Well, as I say, it was my way of relating to my environment, and accepting it as my home.

FC: What did you sketch?

[Interruption]

YK: Well, I sketched the different landscape elements. The mountain itself, of course, which had a kind of symbolic meaning, a sense of place, identity, and the barracks, and sometimes some of the activities that went on around the barracks.

FA: One of the sketches shows some four men, boys, sitting around something.

YK: Yeah, those were some of my friends that were just having a rap session, sitting around a -- I think it was a raised vegetable garden that one of the neighbors was growing.

FA: One of the nice pictures, of course, has Heart Mountain in the middle. And when you drew that sketch, what -- when you looked at the mountains you were sketching, how did they make you feel?

YK: I don't know how to put that in, in more poetic terms, but the mountain itself symbolized something. It was a, it's a rather unique landmark, and I did several sketches of the mountain itself from different angles, from around the camp vicinity, of course, and under different conditions: wintertime, summertime. And I don't know... as I say, I think there's some symbolic value there. I hadn't really analyzed it.

FC: Do you think the mountain was beautiful?

YK: Yeah, very definitely.

FA: Say something -- can you say that?

YK: Yeah, I thought it was a thing of beauty and that maybe it was the only sanity that I was experiencing at the time. There was something permanent about it and something that... all-knowing. Like it had been there a long time, and we were just passing through, and in time it would all blow over.

[Interruption]

FA: Your sketches, what materials, what mediums did you work with?

YK: Basically just pencil sketches. I tried a little bit of watercolor except that I discovered in the wintertime, the water would tend to freeze and I couldn't get anything finished, as one of the drawings will indicate. But pencil sketches primarily, simply because the materials were easy to come by, paper and pencil.

FA: How did you acquire the materials? And start your answer by saying, "I got the..."

YK: I think I got most of the materials probably through the Montgomery Ward catalog. I might have taken a couple of sketchpads in with me initially, before camp, that is.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1993, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.