Minidoka
Revisited: The Paintings of Roger Shimomura
by William
Lew, Editor
Lee Gallery, Clemson University, Clemson,
SC, 2005
Distributed by The University of Washington
Press
128 pp., illus., col. Paper, $18.97
ISBN: 0-295-98583-6.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
ballast@netins.net
Its been well over a half-century
since World War II, yet few events in
American history evoke such lasting bitterness
as the thought of what the U.S. government
did to thousands of its citizens (many,
or most, American-born), not because they
broke the law, but simply because their
forebears had come from Japan. Using racially
targeted scrutiny that was defended at
the time as a way to prevent a second
attack on Pearl Harbor (a shocking tragedy
now compared to 9/11), 110,000 American
families of Japanese descent were pulled
out of their own homes, and, without recourse,
shipped off to concentration camps (surrounded
by barbed wire) in remote regions of the
country. One of which, called Minidoka,
was in south central Idaho, about 20 miles
from Twin Falls. Among those imprisoned
there were members of three generations
of the Shimomura family, the youngest
of whom was Roger Shimomura (born 1939),
who as an adult would become a painting
professor at the University of Kansas.
Many Japanese-Americans still share disturbing
stories about this deplorable phase in
U.S. political history, but, in Shimomuras
case, the memories of his family remain
even more vivid for the reason that his
paternal grandmother (Toku Shimomura)
kept a diary (written in Japanese) from
the year of her arrival in the U.S. in
1912 until her death in 1968. When she
died, her grandson inherited that diary,
and excerpts from its entries are quoted
in this exhibition catalog. This has everything
to do with Shimomuras artwork, which
at first might be dismissively seen as
a harmless art historical blend of Pop
Art, comic book drawings, and ukiyo-e
woodblock prints from the 18th and
19th centuries. However, as this catalog
shows, in a series of interesting essays
about the context and consequences of
his work, his art not only barksit
bites. While comic at first glance, a
closer look at his paintings reveals an
abiding rage, in part of course because
the attitudes that imprisoned his own
American family appear to have once again
surfaced, this time directed not at Native
Americans, Jews, Asians or Blacks, but
at those of Arab ancestry. "Lest
we forget," writes art historian
William Lew in his introduction, "Shimomuras
art admonishes ussometimes subtly,
sometimes veiled in humor and irony, and
more recently with a fury and an intensity
that strikes us between the eyes like
a sharp blowabout our inclinations
to succumb to a distrust of those who
dont look like us."
Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review from Vol 21 No 3
(Spring 2006).