Within six months, all Japanese-born immigrants and Japanese American citizens living on the West Coast and in Southern Arizona—as many as 120,000 people accounting for 90 percent of ethnically Japanese people in the continental United States—were ordered to abandon their homes and report to nearby “assembly centers.” These were usually fairgrounds or racetracks, where they had to sleep in animal stalls, because those were the quickest accommodations the government could muster. After a few months, they would be sent to isolated “relocation centers” or “internment camps” away from the coast and crowded into small, thin-walled and sparsely furnished barracks, where most of them would live for nearly three years or longer.
Being stripped of all their resources made the newly incarcerated extra resourceful. At first, they used every little scrap they could get their hands on to make necessities like chairs, drawers, door signs, Buddhist altars, walking sticks, and shower shoes, as well as doilies and decorations to make their barrack rooms less bleak. But eventually, many of the Issei, who were given fewer responsibilities than their American-born children who could speak fluent English, turned to art as a way to pass the time. Hirasuna first documented these artifacts as artworks made to lessen the emotional pain of being locked up and having their civil rights stripped in her book, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946.
As Hirasuna points out, these artworks were made by incarcerated people who hadn’t been charged with or convicted of any crimes. In The Art of Gaman, she writes, “All these lovely objects were made by prisoners in concentration camps, surrounded by barbed wire fences, guarded by soldiers in watchtowers, with guns pointing down at them.”
“Gaman” is a Japanese word from Zen Buddhism meaning “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” “It basically means ‘Grin and bear it,'” Hirasuna tells me. “‘Gaman’ was the one word that came up during almost every interview I did for the book.”
Hirasuna, who was born shortly after her family returned to California, said her parents tended to speak about their pasts in terms of life before camp and after camp, but they never said anything explicit about their time in these prisons. After Hirasuna’s mom died in 2000, she stumbled upon the art of gaman going through her mother’s things. “I happened to be cleaning out the garage in the house my family moved into in 1949,” she says. “I looked inside a dusty wooden box, and found a hand-carved and hand-painted bird pin, and some other family heirlooms from the 1940s, like watches.”