Ellen’s Work Blog
May 2022
April has come and gone with appropriate showers, daffodils, and not so appropriate sleet, wind, and cold. Now here comes May, my favorite month, everything in bloom and a very strong chance for wearing shorts on a daily basis.
I have been working this past month on yet another incredible collaborative project we did in 2005, in Japantown San Jose and Manzanar, California. (For historical reference, Manzanar is the site of one of ten American internment camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, from March 1942 to November 1945.)
This project took more than a year to organize and would never have happened without help from a few key people in both locations.
In San Jose, Kathy Sakamoto took my phone call, listened to my pitch and, miraculously, stayed on the line. She agreed to work with us and began inviting family, friends, and neighbors in Japantown to come to a fellow artist’s studio for the project. Over two long days, people all over town showed up with memorabilia and created personal messages and artwork on our long rolls of rice paper.
In Manzanar, we planned our arrival to coincide with a weekend pilgrimage to the concentration camp site. People came to the desert from all over northern California—many had lived in one of endless rows of barracks, all using communal bathrooms, no stalls, no doors for two or three years.
My sister, Judy, an award-winning photojournalist, took photos of everyone who participated, and a few are up on our website. She brought her daughter Taylor who skipped school to be on the trip. In exchange, Taylor agreed to write a paper on the internment camps. She interviewed everyone—and I know the experience of listening to people describe their lives in the camps is embedded for life.
