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Lesson 10: Go deeper: the pluralism of American identities- Jamie Wyeth, Kalounna in Frogtown
- A Jewish family in early New York
- Becoming a city: daily life in 1820, Brooklyn
- Superman, World War II, and Japanese-American experience (Roger Shimomura, Diary: December 12, 1941)
- What's in a map? Jaune Quick-To-See Smith's "State Names"
- An African muslim among the founding fathers, Charles Willson Peale’s Yarrow Mamout
- Reflecting on "We the People"
- Seneca Village: the lost history of African Americans in New York
- Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America
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Superman, World War II, and Japanese-American experience (Roger Shimomura, Diary: December 12, 1941)
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Roger Shimomura, Diary: December 12, 1941, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 127.6 x 152.4 cm (Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist, © Roger Shimomura). A conversation with Dr. Sarah Newman, James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Dr. Beth Harris. This Seeing America video was made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation and the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Roger Shimomura, Diary: December 12, 1941, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 127.6 x 152.4 cm (Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist, © Roger Shimomura). A conversation with Dr. Sarah Newman, James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Dr. Beth Harris. This Seeing America video was made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation and the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
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Video transcript
(upbeat piano music) - [Woman] We're in the
Smithsonian American Art Museum looking at a painting by Roger Shimomura, Diary, December 12, 1941. This painting actually
refers very specifically to an experience of his grandmother's. That date might resonate, at
least a date close to that as the date that Pearl Harbor was bombed, December 7th in 1941. - [Woman] Immediately after
Pearl Harbor was bombed, the American government
froze the bank accounts of all Japanese citizens
and all Japanese Americans living in the US. But then a few days
later on December 12th, which is when this diary takes place, President Roosevelt gave the
order that these Japanese Americans could withdraw
up to a $100 a month from their bank accounts. And so even though they were citizens, and they had lived here,
they were effectively treated as a national security threat. - [Woman] Shimomura was
born in '39, so in 1941, 1942, he's a toddler
and like so many people of Japanese decent on the
West Coast he was relocated, he was imprisoned, in what we refer to as an
internment camp in Idaho. - [Woman] This was in the months
before the internment camps were established in early 1942. - [Woman] The artist's
grandmother, on December 12th, five days after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, wrote this in her diary. - [Woman] I spent all day at
home, starting from today, we were permitted to
withdraw $100 from the bank. This was for our sustenance of life, we who are enemy to them. I deeply felt America's large heartedness in dealing with us. - [Woman] What an interesting statement, referring to the government
of the United States as large-hearted, in allowing
them to withdraw $100 from their bank account. - [Woman] It reads very strange to us now. There is a large part of
her that did feel gratitude to the Untied States, dealing
with a difficult circumstance and she's trying to understand
their point of view as well. - [Woman] We notice a
few things immediately. One is that she's not in an American home. We see her rather in this very traditional
Japanese environment. - [Woman] She is pictured
as a young woman, she's wearing a kimono, there
are tatami mats on the floor, translucent rice-paper screens around her. She's writing her diary
but she's looking off into the distance, and behind her, you can see the silhouette
in this shoji screen, of Superman and he's standing there, and he's this large heroic looming figure. His cape rustling in the wind. - [Woman] But he has a menacing presence. - [Woman] The presence
of Superman can be read in two separate ways. You can take him in a very straight way, looking at her diary and equating Superman to the large-hearted American, and obviously Superman is a heroic figure, he's a protective figure,
he might be standing outside of her house to protect her, but at the same time, I think
you're also getting part of the artist's own perspective. Roger Shimomura, read his
grandmother's diary in translation and came across that notion
of the large-hearted American and puzzled over it, and said is this really
as she intended it, although she kept 56
diaries over her lifetime, only 37 of them remain, and she actually burned
a number of diaries that she kept during and after the war. So, there's the sense that
she may have destroyed the diaries that were not so
sympathetic to the Americans, so here, we can see Superman
looking over her shoulder and watching what she's writing. We are surveilling her. - [Woman] We do see
him in the comic books, defending the United States, and going after the Axis powers, going after Hitler,
going after the Japanese, who are depicted often in the comic books, in a very offensive stereotypical way. - [Woman] Superman was used
in American war propaganda and he was often wrestling with these stereotypical Japanese figures. - [Woman] And actively looking for imagined Japanese conspirators,
who are looking to undermine the United States
government war efforts. - [Woman] This looks like
a very Japanese image, it looks like a ukiyo-e print, but when you think about his grandmother, she had come to the United States in 1912, she was an American at this point, she would not have been
wearing Japanese clothes, she did not live in a Japanese house, so by putting her in this very traditional Japanese environment, Shimomura is actively stereotyping her, so she was always a
Japanese person in the eyes of the American government. - [Woman] And this was
something that Shimomura himself experiences, kind of discrimination. - [Woman] He would often
encounter people who said, how do you speak English so well, since you're Japanese? - [Woman] And he couldn't
even speak or read Japanese. - [Woman] He grew up on comic books, and when he was a young
artist, he was a pop artist, and you can see a lot of
the same formal qualities of pop art and comic books
and traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints, they're very similar. They have these black outlined figures, these large planes of flat vibrant color, so he saw his own
identity as a pop artist, and someone interested in comic books, mixed in interestingly with
traditional Japanese culture. - [Woman] She's got this
beautiful kimono on, these lovely yellows
and purples and oranges and greens and then the space
outside is also rendered in those colors, but
on either side of her, these silhouettes, the
grays, the cream color, it feels almost like a more threatening environment around her. And even the grid becomes here,
like the bars of a prison, and reminiscent of the internment camps, the prisons that were set up for people of Japanese descent. His family was in Idaho in
a place called Minidoka, that actually had eight guard towers and a barbed wire around it. - [Woman] There's definitely
the sense that she's living in this beautiful environment, but that there are shadows
looming around her, while this depicts a scene that, was before the interment camps, Roger Shimomura knows the history, knows what's going to happen
so these shadows looming are real shadows and this
is a history that profoundly affected his family, it
profoundly affected all Japanese people living in the
United States at this time, and it's one that they
struggled to recover from. (upbeat piano music)