Photography was integral to the program. More than one article appeared to explain how to distinguish the enemy ‘Japs’ from the friendly Chinese, ostensibly to ensure hostility was directed at the appropriate target. The diagrams of facial features, superimposed on portraits, offered helpful hints such as the former wearing horn- rimmed eyeglasses. Cartoonist Milton Caniff prepared an Army booklet on ‘How to Spot a Jap’ to prevent confusion with ‘our Oriental allies.’ While the adversary was ‘more on the lemon yellow side’ with ‘eyes slanted toward his nose,’ the Chinese were described as more ‘dull bronze in color’ with eyes set apart ‘like any European’s or American’s’ notwithstanding a ‘marked squint.’ There was no effort to differentiate Japanese from Japanese Americans. To the contrary, the internment was premised on their intrinsic affinity. Cartoonist Theodore Geisel, not yet revered under his pen name of Dr. Seuss, drew propaganda suggesting the Japanese were being aided by Japanese Americans as a ‘fifth column’ on United States soil. ‘Blood will tell’ was the prevailing sentiment.
The conventional history of the internment highlights two of the most acclaimed artists working in the medium of photography in twentieth century America: Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. They were professionals for whom the Japanese American population were subjects. Two other photographers were among the 120,000 individuals who were imprisoned. Toyo Miyatake and Bill Manbo documented their experiences as members of the community under scrutiny.
Adams, who had created iconic photos of Yosemite National Park, pursued a personal project as an ally to Japanese Americans because a family employee had been summarily apprehended. Gaining entry to the Manzanar internment camp through friendship with its director, Adam’s Born Free and Equal suggested what was not allowed to be shown clearly, with soldiers and the barbed wire fence shown in the shadows, and the gun tower serving as a vantage point. As an activist not expected to have such an attitude, Lange is best known for her Migrant Mother portrait depicting the Great Dust Bowl migration. Hired by the War Relocation Authority, Lange’s photos of the internment, emphasising families and children in ordinary acts such as pledging allegiance to the flag, were so sympathetic to their subjects they were impounded so as not to spread support for them.
Miyatake had been a leader in the Los Angeles Little Tokyo commercial district. Like others of Japanese ancestry, whether men, women, children, the elderly, orphans, the disabled, and even veterans of the United States military from the Great War he had committed no crime, faced no charges, and was afforded no trial. An immigrant who originally served as a ‘houseboy’ for a wealthy white family, he had established himself with a studio serving primarily other Japanese Americans. He belonged to the pictorialist movement of softer focus and was selected by the Hollywood Bowl to shoot their dances. Ordered to Manzanar (Spanish for ‘apple orchard’), at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, Miyatake smuggled in a lens and persuaded another prisoner to construct a wooden camera body; the emulsions came from a former client. He snapped the shutter at dusk or dawn, to avoid notice, but he was eventually designated the official photographer among the inhabitants.
Manbo was an auto mechanic from Riverside, California. Along with weapons, which included items such as baseball bats, cameras initially were confiscated from Japanese Americans, as they were terminated from their jobs and ordered in a few days’ notice to report with only what they could carry, to be taken into custody. Those military orders were adjusted, as Japanese Americans themselves were changed in status, required to take loyalty oaths, and drafted into the military on the theory it was good public relations for the yellow man to be fighting for the white man. Manbo had brought along a Zeiss Contax 35mm camera to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where five dozen men protested the loyalty oath and were convicted en masse of draft evasion. Manbo had rolls of the then new Kodachrome slide film, with its preternatural palette. His photos, displayed in museums and published decades later, were as much family snapshots as possible under the circumstances.
As Japan, China, and Asia in general rose in status, the stereotype of hordes of Asian tourists toting cameras, eager to produce their own postcard imagery rather than take in a scene, has become cliche. Susan Sontag’s influential essay on photography mentions them in a derogatory manner. The theme of Asians being difficult to tell apart was exploited as the plot device for the 1981 comedy movie Under the Rainbow starring Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, as ‘JAPS,’ the Japanese Amateur Photographer Society, descends upon Hollywood while a troupe of ‘little people’ who are in the cast of the Wizard of Oz cavort off set, in a United States still innocent before its impending entry into World War II. Among the egregious examples of cinematic ‘yellow face’ is I.Y. Yunioshi from the Audrey Hepburn classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s, played by Mickey Rooney replete with buck teeth and thick eyeglasses; he is of course a photographer. Ironically, the camera favoured by Asian tour guides for the posed shots, the Fuji medium format G690, of Japanese origin, was nicknamed ‘the Texas Leica,’ for looking as if it were a supersized American version of the prestigious German rangefinder.
Is Asian American an oxymoron?