Press - Pasadena Star News

Pasadena Star News 4/24/04
Images of internment
Man's father sneaked camera lens into camp at Manzanar
By Cindy Chang, Staff Writer

SAN GABRIEL -- In those frantic days of May 1943, the Miyatake family scrambled to pack what it could into a few suitcases before being shipped off to the Manzanar internment camp in the desert east of Los Angeles.

The family patriarch, Toyo Miyatake, sneaked one item into his luggage that he knew could land him in serious trouble if discovered by the authorities: a camera lens.

As a logical extension of the paranoia that led to the incarceration of all West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry, internees were forbidden to carry cameras, binoculars, flashlights and other mechanical devices for fear that they might use those devices to spy on behalf of the enemy.

But Miyatake was determined to leave a photographic record of life at Manzanar, one of 10 internment camps established in desolate areas of the American West to house the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced to abandon their homes and businesses because of government fears that their loyalties lay with Japan.

In a small but significant act of defiance, Miyatake constructed a makeshift camera with that smuggled lens and began shooting pictures in the early morning hours to avoid the watchful eye of camp guards.

More than half a century later, Miyatake's photographs reveal life at the camp in all its complexity - the stark beauty of the Sierra Nevadas, which gave the internees spiritual sustenance yet also reminded them of the barbed wire fence that stood between them and freedom; the quotidian pleasures of picnics and dance lessons; the young men who left the camp to fight for the country that had taken away their liberty.

Several others, including Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, photographed the camp, but Miyatake, who had owned a thriving photo studio in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo before the internment and was also a dedicated fine art photographer, was the only Manzanar photographer who was himself an internee. "The main reason he wanted to record camp life was so that there would be a record of how things were. The reason for that is that he didn't want this to ever happen again. The evidence is in the photographic record," said Miyatake's son Archie, now 79.

After their release from Manzanar, the Miyatakes were able to start up their Little Tokyo photography studio again, relocating to their present location in San Gabriel in the 1980s. Archie's son, Alan, is the third generation of Miyatakes to run the family business.

Archie Miyatake is among the former internees who will return to Manzanar today to celebrate the opening of a $5.1 million interpretive center. Several dozen of his father's photographs will be on display at the center, which is housed in the newly restored Manzanar High School auditorium and includes exhibits, screening rooms and a bookstore.

"It was just a place where I lived for three-and-a-half years. I graduated high school there. It's funny, I don't have any bitter memories of it," Archie Miyatake said. "I was too young to have a business or property that I had to give up. Also I met my wife at the camp."

After smuggling the lens and some film holders into the camp, Toyo Miyatake asked a fellow internee who was a carpenter to build a wooden box to house the camera. The lens was attached to a metal pipe embedded in the box and could be focused by screwing it looser or tighter on the pipe. The film supply came from a Caucasian friend who worked at a Los Angeles hardware store and made regular deliveries to the camp.

At first, Miyatake took photos with his makeshift camera at the crack of dawn, to lessen the chance of being discovered. Those early landscapes, devoid of people because of the hour, show a desolate, wind-swept place lined with rows of evenly spaced wooden barracks.

Later, as the demand grew for a professional who could shoot family portraits and graduation photos, the camp director allowed Miyatake to open a photo studio, provided that a Caucasian clicked the shutter. That restriction was eventually lifted, and the Miyatake family operated a full-fledged photo studio inside the camp, using equipment from their old studio that they were able to retrieve from a storage facility in Los Angeles.

For young men and women like Archie, life in the camp, with its baseball games, school dances and final exams, was not so different from life on the outside. Most adults settled into routines, too, working as cooks or nurses or gardeners. People beautified the outsides of their grim barracks with intricate Japanese-style rock gardens.

"While showing the conditions of the camp, he also wanted to record the day-to-day life of the camp. Also, between the lines you could see that even though Japanese-Americans were incarcerated, they were not totally victims - they were able to make the best of a real bad situation," said Robert Nakamura, a professor of film and Asian American studies at UCLA who has made a documentary about Miyatake. Perhaps Miyatake's two most famous photos were taken at the barbed wire fence that separated Manzanar from the free world. One shows a hand holding a pair of pliers poised to cut the wire; the other shows three stern-faced young boys standing at the fence, with snow-covered mountains in the background.

Toyo Miyatake was born in Japan in 1895 and came to California as a teenager, studying photography with Edward Weston, among others, and joining a salon of Japanese-American art photographers. Miyatake's studio in Little Tokyo was famous for documenting the weddings and other family milestones of Los Angeles' Japanese-American community. He died in 1979.

Miyatake's photographs are featured in a book, "Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar," along with work by Ansel Adams, Clem Albers and Dorothea Lange.

-- Cindy Chang can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4586, or by e-mail at cindy.chang@sgvn.com.