Dayo Press

PUBLISHED: September 7, 2021

Jerry Takigawa—Balancing Cultures

Review by Wayne Swanson

https://photobookjournal.com/2021/09/03/jerry-takigawa-balancing-cultures/

Gaman: enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience, dignity, and silence.

Shikata ga nai: it cannot be helped.

For the Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during World War II, these terms defined their incarceration. For photographic artist Jerry Takigawa, whose parents and grandparents were among them, “the shadow legacy from these responses is imprinted on my life and my work.”

When Takigawa was growing up, his parents rarely talked about their experiences in the camps, and never in depth. But finding forgotten family photographs unlocked memories and scars of that dark episode in American history. The result is Balancing Cultures.

“Balancing Cultures gave me permission to confront the racism perpetrated on my family that resulted in their confinement in the American concentration camps sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942,” writes Takigawa in the book’s Preface. It is followed by a collection of 42 collages that chart his parents’ and grandparents’ journey from confinement to eventual release.

This understated collection is at once a record of the indignities endured by 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II and an expression of the balancing act facing all minorities striving to find a place in a new land. The collages also convey the contrasts between Japanese and American mindsets.

Takigawa explains that in Japanese culture the group predominates. Traditional Japanese art tends to emphasize this by treating the background and foreground the same, flattening the perspective. In American culture, the individual rules. As a result, the distinctions between subject and its background are primary. By combining the Eastern and Western aesthetics in his collages, he demonstrates the dilemma faced by immigrants — “always straddling two cultures.”

“Intuitively, I’m piecing together a historical puzzle of photographs, memories, and artifacts — a collage approach that has been an integral part of my visual vocabulary for many years,” Takigawa writes. These collages consist of de-focused black-and-white photographs on which he has placed artifacts testifying to the experiences and implications of incarceration.

The photographs show family and friends who were sent to the camps, some smiling, some stoic. These are the type of seemingly benign images you might find in any family album. The blurred treatment gives them the dream-like feel of memories.

The artifacts provide the jarring counterpoint. Takigawa uses documents such as government orders, identity cards and tags, newspaper clippings, and personal letters for historical context. He also includes traditional Japanese motifs such as pebbles, ginkgo leaves and pine needles, as well as words and phrases on scraps of paper, scrabble tiles, or even woven into the photograph, to describe the experiences and decry the injustice behind them. The messages in all this imagery range from the distasteful (“Jap Hunting Licenses Issued Here”) to the hopeful (“Diversity in the one true thing we all have in common”) to the cautionary (“All stereotypes oppress”).

The book presents the images chronologically, telling a narrative story of his family’s journey. Many images span both pages of a spread, and the Smyth-sewn design allows the spreads to lay flat to fully appreciate them.

The power in the compositions comes from the tension between the beauty of Takigawa’s imagery and the messages they hold about the unfinished business of structural racism in America. In 1988 the United States issued a formal apology and paid reparations to survivors of the Japanese internment. Yet events like the recent attacks on Asian Americans after Donald Trump dubbed COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus” show there is still much work to be done.

As Takigawa notes, “with only a small nod of political or social permission, xenophobia and the need to blame lies just under the surface of our civil veneer.”

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Contributing Editor Wayne Swanson is a San Diego-based fine art photographer and writer.

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Balancing Cultures, Jerry Takigawa

Photographer: Jerry Takigawa, born Chicago, Illinois, resides Carmel Valley, California

Foreword: John Hamamura, Preface: Jerry Takigawa

Text: English

Stiff cover book with dust cover, Smyth sewn with signatures binding, four-color lithography, 7 x 9 inches, 42 images, 96 pages, printed in Canada

Photobook designer: Takigawa Design with Jay Galster

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PUBLISHED: July 5, 2021 at 11:54 a.m. | UPDATED: July 5, 2021 at 11:55 a.m.

New book lends artistry to trauma of Japanese internment

By Lisa Crawford Watson | newsroom@montereyherald.com |

Were someone to create the ballet of the Japanese internment during WWII, it wouldn’t be any more meaningful than Balancing Cultures, the book created by Japanese American artist and photographer Jerry Takigawa, to convey his family’s experiences and confront the racism  perpetuated by the confinement. While there is nothing beautiful about the American concentration camps, giving artistry to such a project invites viewers into the story and keeps them from turning away from the truth.

Jerry Takigawa should have been born on the West Coast. Instead, he was born in Chicago, where his parents moved following their release from internment in Arkansas. In 1950, when he was 5 years old, his parents returned with him to Monterey.

Although he was never interned, although his parents never discussed their experiences with him, although he did not discover the photographs that chronicled his parents’ years in Arkansas until he was grown, Takigawa was raised by people who had endured the indignity.

He learned something of the camps in school and through other sources as he grew older, but he had never associated the stories with the look in his mother’s eyes. Takigawa’s growing-up years were influenced and affected by something he hadn’t experienced. There is sentiment in silence.

Once he studied the photographs his mother had stored, he understood she needed no symbol or reminder to keep her memories present. Not all scars are visible. He also began to understand aspects of himself — why he is so driven to make a difference where change is warranted, to speak up for those that can’t stick up for themselves, to heal injustice with equity, keep plastics and other “false food” out of the mouths of sea life, and become a photographer who makes pictures of how people feel.

“My whole family was in prison for two years because of racism, hysteria, and economic opportunity,” Takigawa said. “This kind of emotional trauma doesn’t go away, doesn’t have a statute of limitations, and doesn’t have to be voiced to exist.”

Silence can serve as a stealth transmission of trauma. Not talking about it, he says, eventually transfers the effects of the very thing we’re trying to conceal.

Takigawa ultimately used his parents’ photographs to embark on an investigation that would become Balancing Cultures, part of an award-winning artistic installation unveiled in January, through which he explored the uneasy space between an idea or experience and its  understanding. This summer, he released the project as a 96-page book, using collaged photographs, artifacts, documents, and text, to explore his family’s journey from immigration to incarceration to reintegration and, ultimately, to some degree of reassimilation.

“As I got further into the project,” he said, “I began to develop an expressive vocabulary by making pictures that mean something to me, gradually building the strength and stamina that would enable me to say something personal about the ‘elephant in the room.’”

Throughout his process, Takigawa sought to find out more about what happened to his family to help him understand more about himself while recognizing that his statement piece about racial subjugation dovetailed with ongoing national politics.

“I started the project in 2016,” he said, “during a revival of racist talk and encouragement for people to hate each other. I didn’t plan that; I had been working up the courage to do something that was very much a part of the bigger panorama.”

Positive feedback gave him confidence that he should pursue his project if only to learn and to teach about what had happened during WWII and its lasting impact on society and sentiment.

“Jerry tells a story that’s really important and visceral and, in some cases, political,” said Helaine Glick, who curated his exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in January. “But he doesn’t hit us over the head with it. Instead, he presents it in such an aesthetically beautiful way, it gets in subliminally, while we appreciate his images.”

When Takigawa invited his high school friend and college roommate, author and poet John Hamamura, to write the foreword to his book, his friend wasn’t sure he had the time or the perspective to do so. In the end, he found he had both, recognizing he “did not choose these  stories but was born into them,” as he developed his piece into a long-form poem.

“Jerry Takigawa and I,” he wrote, “are Japanese-American, now more often written without the hyphen as Japanese American. Even before we learned to read and write, we felt like we stood balanced on that wire-thin hyphen. Minus a hyphen, we became the bridge, with a foot on each  side, more or less weight on one or the other, depending on the situation.”

Hamamura’s poetry precedes Takigawa’s photographs yet introduces its own images, as he used his own artistry to interpret what Takigawa’s photographs represent.

“So much of our family histories were lost,” he wrote, “because our families could not bear the pain of telling the stories. Our mothers, lovely and gentle, deeply sensitive women, were barely out of their teens when they were sent to the camps. The war shattered their spirits like grenades  thrown against their hearts. . .”

As Takigawa considers the book that has given both imagery and verse to his family’s experience and legacy, he appreciates that the whole collection of his parents’ pictures is now in one place, paired with his prose and Hamamura’s poetry.

“The book is not an end in itself. It is a conversation,” he said, “which, I hope, will continue during upcoming exhibitions, as the book and ‘Balancing Cultures’ installation remain on tour during the next five years.”

Balancing Cultures is available at BookWorks in Pacific Grove and Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, Center for Photographic Art, The Weston Gallery, Pilgrim’s Way, and Riverhouse Books in Carmel.

Monterey’s Jerry Takigawa believes his book has given both imagery and verse to his family’s experience and he appreciates that the whole collection of his parents’ pictures is now in one place, paired with his prose and John Hamamura’s poetry.