We Can Never Forget

Historic paintings by two Seattle artists

Four score years ago our government brought forth on this continent one of the country’s more despicable acts, clearly not dedicated to the proposition that all men, and women, are created equal. On March 30, 1942, the U.S. Government forced 227 Bainbridge Island residents out of their homes and livelihoods and began the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in desolate camps across the western US. On Sunday, the Seattle Times did a deep dive into the story. I highly recommend reading all of the articles, as well as Dan Brown’s excellent Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II. 

To pay my respects to those who were incarcerated, I would like to highlight two people: Kamekichi Tokita and Kenjiro Nomura. Both were born in Japan and moved to Seattle, where they worked together as sign painters. They also began to paint scenes around the city, particularly downtown and in Nihonmachi, and became well-known and well-respected, winning many awards. After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Nomura’s and Tokita’s families were incarcerated at Minidoka, Idaho. Both families returned to Seattle after the war.

In the past few years, I have been fortunate to see shows featuring their work, which I think is beautiful and uniquely evocative of place. The strong lines, details, realism, and color convey some of my favorite perspectives of Seattle. You can read more about both in two excellent books by Barbara Johns: Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist and Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita. 

Being the history-oriented fellow that I am, I decided to do a Now and Then series of photographs, trying to reproduce the scenes depicted by these two gifted painters. Obviously, things have changed and they were able to create perspectives that I couldn’t. I was still pleased at what I found to compare and contrast and to reflect on the stories these two left us.

The station had many owners and names, including Roy’s, Texaco, and Signal, and appears to have gone up between the time of the creation of the two images. It was there until at least 1957, when a landslide occurred behind it. The hill where I took the photograph is sometimes referred to as Goat Hill.

A couple of photos of the gas station and surroundings. The street that intersects the station is Terrace. It used to have steps going up the slope, which was known as Profanity Hill. The steeple of Our Lady of Good Help Church also appears in Nomura’s RR tunnel painting below.

The red tower in Nomura’s background is King Street station, which opened in 1906. It still stands. The Yesler Building—opened in 1909 as the city’s new Municipal Building—dominates the right side of the image and can also be seen Nomura’s Yesler Way and RR tunnel paintings below.

I think it’s nifty that several, relatively small buildings have persisted from 1930. The ornate whitish and terra cotta building is the Frye Apartments, built in 1911 as a “testimonial to the faith of its promotor in the future of Seattle.” It is now owned by the Low Income Housing Institute. The triangular building went up in 1907 and has housed a variety of entities, most recently 4Culture.

I like how the modern street still has the old style lights and a green space and trees in the same location. Smith Tower dominates in the background. The red brick Morrisoin Building opened in 1908 and now provides emergency shelter and services to homeless people.

Built in 1904 for the Great Northern Railway, the tunnel is one mile long and was said by early Seattle residents to be the longest in the world because it ran from Washington to Virginia, streets that is. Such was humor back in the day. The twin towers in the background are St. James Cathedral, which still stands.

Despite their popularity and the praise they earned prior to their incarcerations in WWII, both Tokita and Nomura lost their places in the pantheon of great Seattle painters. Fortunately, the work of Barbara Johns and others is restoring their well-deserved reputations. In Signs of Hope, she writes “their viewpoint and aesthetic statement arise from the specificity of the Japanese immigrant experience in the Northwest. Rather than being subsumed by the generalizing label [American Scene painting], they make a lasting contribution to its complexity.” 

As we all know, the world is constantly changing, both physically and culturally. Sadly, far too many people still hold prejudices against Asian people. Let us hope that this too will change. On this anniversary of the first forced evacuations, I am reminded again that we can never forget past wrongs inflicted upon others.

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Word of the week - Score - A group of twenty. The OED notes “Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a ‘score’ or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty.”