Monterey County Weekly

C E N T E R P I E C E

Jerry Takigawa explores a traumatic and guarded episode in the life of his family, as well as his country.

By Walter Ryce

November 29, 2018

Out of respect for his parents’ example, photographer and designer Jerry Takigawa didn’t delve into his family’s World War II-era Japanese-American internment ordeal until after they had died. That’s when he and his brother were left with boxes of photographs, letters and artifacts that revealed that part of their story.

“It was really a trip,” Takigawa says. “They kept this stuff. Cards, documents, my father’s draft card, the cards they got when they were released. It was a horrible time in their life, and they didn’t talk about it [substantially] for almost 40 years.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order 9066 purported to give the government license to round up and incarcerate Japanese-Americans in the West simply for their ethnicity. (The order was later ruled unconstitutional.) Some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in 10 remote camps around the country without due process. Like Takigawa’s maternal grandfather Unosuke Higashi, who owned a fish market on Fisherman’s Wharf and a restaurant on Franklin Street in Monterey.

“I know my grandfather was arrested first,” he says. “He was an elder. They arrested all the elders first.” Takigawa has a black-and-white photo of 15 men of Japanese ethnicity, dressed in overcoats and fedoras, flanked by police officers at Colton Hall. His grandfather, in the middle, was arrested for owning a shortwave radio. Takigawa’s father, who lived next door to the family restaurant, was taken into custody for possessing navigational charts of Monterey Bay. His mother and grandmother were given six days to wrap up their affairs before being sent to an internment camp (sometimes now referred to as concentration camps) in Arkansas by a three-day train journey with armed guards and the blinds drawn down.

Takigawa’s mother and father had married nine months prior. In an artist’s statement Takigawa writes: “Our country has amnesia when it comes to its racial history. Balancing Cultures gives voice to a family story, long-silenced by the Japanese ideology of ‘gaman,’ or ‘enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.’”

Balancing Cultures is the name of his new exhibit of two dozen photos coming to Alvarado Gallery, a few blocks away from where his grandfather’s restaurant was. Now – his parents gone, and the box of photos seemingly demanding illumination – Takigawa is ready to explore that part of his family’s story. Each of the photos is actually two distinct photographs. He starts with a backdrop of an old historic picture. Most came in  from his family, two came from local historian Tim Thomas (as part of Monterey’s recent Go for Broke exhibition on Japanese-American internment), some come from garage sales and other community sources.

He prints an enlargement of the vintage black-and-white photos, but slightly blurred, which gives it more of an impressionistic soft focus, a haziness like the haziness of old memories. On top of that he artfully arranges artifacts – newspaper clippings, leaves, stones, bamboo fans, diary pages, handmade crafts from the camps – like the physical evidence of the story.

He uses a tripod-mounted Canon 5D in the studio to shoot down at the assemblage, which he calls an in-camera still life. The blurry, black-and-white photos serve as backdrops to the sharp-focused objects sitting on top, creating a 3D effect, like you could touch the objects. They are presented in a one-and-a-half-inch shadowbox, which adds even more depth and dimensionality.

“I’ve been developing this language for probably 20 years,” he says. “It’s gotten much more articulate now than when it first started. It’s a good way to tell a story.”

For the first time, he’s titling his photos (previously he just used catalog numbers to identify them), and embedding text within them. Some of the objects placed atop the old photos are handwritten letters, government documents, a Western Union telegraph, business cards, Scrabble tiles spelling out words. There are novelty “Jap hunting” licenses.

“I put text in to give people breadcrumbs to figure out what’s going on,” he says. Chalet Booker, the cultural arts assistant for the city of Monterey, which runs Alvarado Gallery, doesn’t recall past shows that touched the political realm like this one. But she says Takigawa is talented and believes his work successfully navigates tensions to tell a balanced story. “You’re going to have [different reactions] with anything you do when dealing with history,” she says. “The reality is that history occurred. Some of it is ugly and some of it is beautiful.”

The photos have been in 16 group shows and two solo shows all over the country this year, but this is the biggest single presentation of the work, which will be up until Feb. 3, 2019. In smaller iterations of it, Takigawa has noticed that the objects and text clues cause people to linger longer in front of the photos, working to decipher them, like a puzzle.

Takigawa’s father admonished him to be more American to protect him from the type of persecution that they suffered. If you get out of line, his father told him, you’re going to jail. But Takigawa also retained his parents’ Japanese traditions and values. The exhibit is calledBalancing Cultures because Takigawa says his artistic approach – his life – is informed by both Japan and America. Originally intended as an “identity project,” it’s his most personal artwork yet.

“I’m doing this now because I wanted to know more about my family history, so I could know more about who I was,” he says. “The way I express things has an aesthetic, balancing the Western way of thinking with the Eastern way of thinking. It’s like when I did the ocean plastic work [False Food] – it’s about a serious and tragic situation, but it’s presented in a beautiful way.” One critique he recalls from False Food, however, was that the aesthetically pleasing execution belied the grave situation.

Even though Takigawa was shocked at the depth of the discrimination he uncovered in this episode of U.S. history, Takigawa says he’s not angry, but more resolved to advance social justice. Balancing Cultures is a complex conversation, a cautionary tale, a scathing and ironic testimony, a form of protest filled with patience and dignity.

Takigawa says, “Art is a powerful way to get people to feel.”