below: Santa Anita Horse Stables My grandmother (bottom left), her sister Mayumi and mother Mariko (to the right), and a family friend at Heart mountain
My grandmother, June Watanabe, a Nisei, or second- generation Japanese American born to immigrant parents, has been immensely influential in shaping my practice as a designer. Since I was very young, she has told me stories of ‘camp’, what I would later come to understand as the Japanese American incarceration—a history that left a deep scar on the American landscape and the collective memory of Japanese Americans. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, my grandmother, along with her father Naoyoshi Tsukida, mother Mariko and sister Mayumi, were forcibly removed from their home in Los Angeles. Under Executive Order 9066, all persons of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast were ordered to evacuate. Our family was first incarcerated in the horse stalls of the Santa Anita Racetrack and later relocated to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in the high desert of Wyoming where they remained until released in November 1945. Throughout this hardship, my family embodied gaman , a Japanese philosophy of enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience, stoicism and dignity. It became their inner strength in a nation gripped by fear and war hysteria. My grandmother was only three years old at the time, but her memories are vivid. ‘I remember my mother pulling me away from the barbed wire fence, but I didn’t want to go, I was very short, and all I could see were the lower halves of soldiers marching, their rifles swaying back and forth. I remember looking up into the clouds – the watchtowers loomed like giants in the sky. Every morning, we said the Pledge of Allegiance. We lived in small tar paper barracks, ate in mess halls, carried coal to the stoves at night. It felt like a long summer in the desert.’ And yet, amidst barbed wire, dust storms, freezing nights and scorching sun, June witnessed something remarkable: landscapes of incarceration being transformed into spaces of resilience, beauty and joy. ‘Our communities built beautiful gardens with rocks and plants scavenged from the desert. We held movie nights, baseball games, dances, family dinners. Creativity became our grounding force. I remember my father carving sculptures from scrap wood salvaged from our barrack. He was a sensitive, creative man, deeply rooted in his Japanese heritage.’
Everett Collection
family archives
25 on site review 47 :: standing still
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