The Japanese-American landscapes of Chiura Obata and Tsuruoka Kakunen
For AAPI Heritage Month, the spotlight falls on Chiura Obata (1885-1975) and Tsuruoka Kakune (1892-1966), two Japanese-American artists who transformed American landscapes into Japanese woodblock prints and lived through both internment and war.
Context: Many Japanese moved abroad in the late 1800s to study and start businesses in the US and Europe. This was prompted by the euphemistic ‘opening’ of Japan in 1853, in which American warships forced the late Tokugawa Shogunate to open the Japanese economy to foreign trade and directly ushered in the restoration of the Emperor to a seat of power and a series of modernising—and Westernising—reforms across the country.
During this period, known as the Meiji Era, Japan became the hub for Western-style learning in Asia. The region’s technology, art, and culture changed rapidly as waves of scholars and artists arrived from abroad and left overseas, some temporarily and others permanently. Among them were Chiura Obata (1885-1975) and Tsuruoka Kakunen (1892-1977), both of whom embarked on international careers and ultimately settled down in the United States.
Chiura Obata (1885-1975)
Chiura Obata began making art at age 14, when he ran away from home to avoid military school and ended up in Tokyo as painter’s apprentice. Three years later, in 1903, he moved to the US and settled in San Francisco following stints in Seattle and Paris.
Working as a commercial illustrator and designer for luxury department stores (notably Gump’s), he was invited to go on a sketching trip to Yosemite with a UC Berkeley professor and soon joined the school’s faculty as art instructor in 1932 with numerous solo exhibitions to come over the next decade.
In spring of 1943, Obata was released with his family after being accused of being a spy by a fellow inmate, escalating into a violent attack. After recovering in the camp hospital, Obata was discharged and released with his family. They moved to St Louis, Missouri where his son was studying architecture and had avoided incarceration. The family would return to Berkeley in 1945 when Obata was reinstated as associate professor.
Tsuruoka Tokutaro 'Kakunen' (1892-1977)
Known by his ‘go’ or art name, ‘Kakunen’, Tsuruoka Tokutaro was born in Tokyo to a prestigious family. His parents ran a small tobacco shop in the cultured Ueno neighbourhood, and through his mother he was descended from the same clan that produced Japan’s ‘Great Unifier’, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598). In 1905, a typhoid epidemic swept the city and left Kakunen an orphan; he was soon sent with just $10 to live with distant relative and popular Asian antiques dealer, Takezo ‘T.Z.’ Shiota, in San Francisco. For the next 13 years, he worked as Shiota’s servant until a chance encounter with civil liberties advocate C.E.S. Wood in the shop convinced Kakunen to sue his ‘uncle’ and use the settlement to start his own Asian antiques business.
Wood became Kakunen’s first patron and introduced him to prestigious new clients including the scholar John Dewey and the suffragette Sara Bard Field. Taking up art himself, Kakunen was an enthusiastic participant of the shin-hanga ‘new prints’ movement and sold his new ‘Japanese-inspired’ designs through Shiota and Japanese art magazines. Kakunen also met Langdon Warner, Curator of Oriental Art at the Fogg Museum (Harvard), with whom he regularly visited archaeological sites in China, Mongolia, and Japan to procure antique artifacts.
These business activities often put Kakunen squarely in the middle of the political uncertainties that dominated Asian affairs at this time. His close companion Warner, for one, was wanted by Mongolian authorities for looting the country’s cultural properties. Kakunen himself bore witness to the ‘Shanghai Purge’ of April 12, 1927 – a massacre directed by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek to eliminate Communists and union workers from the party. Fluent in Chinese and Shanghainese, Kakunen lived through the vicissitudes and described the aftermath in letters to his family back in the US: scenes of thousands of bodies piled high in Shanghai’s once-glitzy streets, as the purge raged on.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 brought the US into the fold of the Second World War, with disastrous consequences for Japanese-American community. Executive Order 9066, signed two months later by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorized the incarceration of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast. Kakunen and his family were sent to Poston Camp 2 in Arizona despite their outspoken criticism of the Japanese Empire. Part of the Colorado River Relocation Center, Kakunen found himself in the company of many fellow Japanese-American artists, including Shiota (who later died of liver cancer while still incarcerated in ’44). The artists ran the camp’s art classes, and Kakunen’s wife also led handicrafts workshops for making making artificial flowers. Kakunen eschewed portraying the cramped interiors of the camps and took to painting watercolour landscapes of the barren Arizona desert, a stark departure from the lively Japanese bird and flower designs he had once sold through Shiota.
In 1944, Kakunen and his family were released from the camp. They promptly left the West Coast for New York, where they set up shops specialising in art supplies, art framing, and artificial flowers.