Tag: WWII

Read Seen and Unseen

Read Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams photographs reveal about the Japanese American Incarceration

Three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Families, teachers, farm workers—all were ordered to leave behind their homes, their businesses, and everything they owned. Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced to live under hostile conditions in incarceration camps, their futures uncertain.

Three photographers set out to document life at Manzanar, an incarceration camp in the California desert:

Dorothea Lange was a photographer from San Francisco best known for her haunting Depression-era images. Dorothea was hired by the US government to record the conditions of the camps. Deeply critical of the policy, she wanted her photos to shed light on the harsh reality of incarceration.

Toyo Miyatake was a Japanese-born, Los Angeles–based photographer who lent his artistic eye to portraying dancers, athletes, and events in the Japanese community. Imprisoned at Manzanar, he devised a way to smuggle in photographic equipment, determined to show what was really going on inside the barbed-wire confines of the camp.

Ansel Adams was an acclaimed landscape photographer and environmentalist. Hired by the director of Manzanar, Ansel hoped his carefully curated pictures would demonstrate to the rest of the United States the resilience of those in the camps.

An excellent work. I was engaged even as an adult — the writing is simple but honest. Combining illustrations with photographs worked really well. This complemented We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration, and included some different details.

I liked the framing device of the three photographers, and would even have liked more about their works.

We cannot let this happen again.

Re-watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date February 25, 2024
2 Comments on Re-watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
❤️

Watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Japanese: 風の谷のナウシカ, Hepburn: Kaze no Tani no Naushika) is a 1984 Japanese post-apocalyptic anime fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based on his 1982–94 manga series of the same name.

I first watched this in 1997, when a friend acquired a Japanese version on VHS and we printed off an English script from the internet… except that it only covered about two thirds of the movie — we were so lost 😂 I’m annoyed because when I bought the streaming version, I had to choose between the English dub and the Japanese. Fortunately, the English dub is pretty good (it’s got Patrick Stewart!).

The plot is fast-paced, jumping from travail to travail, but many of the scenes are almost ponderous, lingering on a man in a blowing cape looking off towards the horizon. I think this might help balance the heavy themes.

The environmental and anti-war themes are very on the nose in the (English) dialogue — I wonder if the Japanese might have more nuance? This is… very much the trauma of WWII: the unexpected annihilation of cities, the unimaginable world-destroying weapons and those who would use them.

Such a wonderful introduction; first seeing the grim destruction of the toxic jungle through the eyes of distrustful Lord Yupa, then contrasting Nausicaä’s pleasured wonder at interacting with the environment — the tone shifts marvelously from grim and fearful to accepting and full of awe when the two characters are in similar forests.

I can see the traces of 1960s and 1970s sci-fi art (book covers, Moebius) in the animation and world design. The way the ohmu shells move is echoed later in Howl’s Moving Castle.

Tags 1984, 2005, animated, anime, environmentalism, Hayao Miyazaki, Joe Hisaishi, movie, pacifism, pollution, post-apocalyptic, war, WWII

Comics History

Read We Hereby Refuse

Read WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Warti…

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice.

The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II — but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight.

In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet:

— JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien;

— HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and

— MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

Overall this was an effective and moving history. It was interesting to trace the path of three different forms of resistance. This expands on what I learned in Takei’s They Called Us Enemy.

Jim Akutsu’s story was the most fleshed out, followed by Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s. His could have used a bit more clarity, and I would have liked more on Mitsuye Endo.

Two artists use significantly different art styles to illustrate the stories. Though the art in Kashiwagi’s segment looked rough and sketchy, I did like it for the tone. I’m not sure it was complementary to the more traditional art style for the other two segments. Perhaps a third art style might have pulled the distinctive styles together better?

Tags 2021, biography, book, California, graphic non-fiction, Japanese Americans, resistance, Seattle, West Coast, WWII

Fiction History

Watched The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date June 11, 2022
No Comments on Watched The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
❤️

Watched The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from m.imdb.com2 hours 4 minutes

In the aftermath of World War II, a writer forms an unexpected bond with the residents of Guernsey Island when she decides to write a book about their experiences during the war.

Read the book ages ago but don’t recall much besides the ending, which the movie changed – I think for the better from my recollection? I feel like they added a big plot line but could be I’ve just completely forgotten it 😂 The book is epistolary so they had to adapt it quite a bit but also did a good job incorporating letters.

There was good yearning and tension between the romantic leads. The heroine came off pretty awkward for a lot of the beginning, and her unhappiness seemed apparent.

Tags 2018, book adaptation, England, movie, WWII

Activism Art and Design History Music

Violin Tsunami

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date June 17, 2021
No Comments on Violin Tsunami
❤️

Watched Kishi Bashi – Violin Tsunami (Official Video) by Joyful Noise Recordings from m.youtube.com5 minutes 40 seconds

“Violin Tsunami” from Kishi Bashi off the album ‘Omoiyari’ out on Joyful Noise Recordings. Stream/Download/Purchase: https://JNR.lnk.to/Omoiyari

Video Created by: Julia and Mike McCoy
Tandem Media: https://tandemmedia.net
With help from: Benjamin J. Strickland (Brian Box) https://brainbx.com/

For more information on the Japanese American Incarceration, visit: https://densho.org/

Info about the album ‘Omoiyari’: https://www.joyfulnoiserecordings.com/pages/omoiyari

In that pattern of things popping up all at once, this music video inspired by the Japanese internment camps comes right after reading They Called Us Enemy and visiting the bonsai exhibit about how Japanese incarceration during WWII changed the bonsai world.

Tags Asian artist, music video, WWII

Comics History

Read They Called Us Enemy

Read They Called Us Enemy

A graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei’s childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon — and America itself.

Long before George Takei braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s — and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.

Part memoir, part history, part tribute to his father — I think the storytelling approach worked well, using the personal and individual to tell the greater story, and tie this piece of history together to the present. George Takei credits his father with guiding him into advocacy, which has also been powerful. Things were even worse than I realized — we read a book about Manzanar in elementary school but I think I was too young to totally understand, and we glossed over Japanese internment later in school. It’s helpful to have the pieces assembled in a story to follow along the timeline and explain how people reacted to different things. A powerful story to read now, when fear of “the other” has surged out of the shadows. I really liked the art style and use of halftone shading.