Painter created art schools against all odds in WWII-era internment camps

The highest aim and hope of art is a high, strong peace. In front of this high aim the evil side of humans—including racial discrimination, egotism, selfishness, and hatred—are simply exposed.
—Chiura Obata, Topaz Moon

Chiura Obata’s painting career was uprooted in the early 1940s after the employment of Executive Order 9066, a wartime order authorizing the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. Obata was forced to sell a sizable collection of his paintings before imprisonment in a faraway internment camp. However, despite the odds, he found a way to inspire creativity under dismal circumstances.

Born in Okayama, Japan, Obata immigrated to the United States in 1903 at the age of 17. The artist built a successful career in Berkeley, California, where he worked first as a commercial decorator, then as an illustrator and painter. By 1932, he was a popular instructor of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Ten years later, his career as an artist and educator came to an abrupt halt.

Obata and his wife, Haruko, owned an art-supply store near UC Berkeley’s campus, out of which Haruko offered ikebana lessons. In December of 1941, they were forced to close the store after a racially motivated attack following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and detention of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

In April of 1942, the couple, along with their daughter, Yuri; their son, Kim; and his wife, Masa, were interned at the Tanforan Assembly Center near San Francisco. Their second son, Gyo, was able to avoid internment because he was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. The camp was built at an old racetrack, and detainees were housed in horse stables and shoddily built barracks, with “just a hurried whitewash on the walls and linoleum over the manure-covered floors,” according to the Topaz Museum. Obata, his family, and approximately 7,000 others received minimal privacy, limited access to cleaning supplies, and rationed food. Despite the conditions, Obata created a space for himself and others to create things of beauty. Following approval from camp administrators, he opened an art school. 

Miné Okubu, whose color screenprint can be viewed upon request in SLAM’s Print Study Room, was one of 16 internees who taught at the school, which offered 90 classes per week in various art forms. The Tanforan Art School was entirely funded by its instructors and outside donors. By August, the school accumulated more than 600 students.

In September 1942, internees at the temporary camp were moved to the permanent Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. Conditions did not improve; internees were subjected to sandstorms and sweltering heat in the summer and to heavy snow and severe cold in winter. Obata started the art school again, with an expanded curriculum for the much larger facility. In addition to the classes available at Tanforan, the Topaz Art School offered classes in ikebana, sewing, knitting, leather craft, and more. In his book, History and Development of the Topaz Art School, cofounder Matsusaburo Hibi wrote: 

The Topaz Art School of today is inferior to the usual art schools in America . . . but nevertheless we believe it is superior in some respects. Our Art School is so well harmonized between teachers and students that, although the ages of the students range from five years to sixty-five years, the existing relationship is like that of parents to their children. The work of the students is progressing wonderfully, and some are good enough to be hung in any present day museum. 

Obata’s positive influence over the camp granted him favor with its administrators, who offered the family overnight excursions away from Topaz. However, that favor led to discontent among his fellow detainees.  

Resentment grew when internees were forced to swear fealty to the United States and denounce any loyalty to Japan. This “created a dilemma of conscience and polarized emotions within the camps,” according to Kimi Kodani Hill, Yuri’s daughter and Obata’s granddaughter. In her book, Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment Camps, she features Haruko’s recollection of the controversy: “One day the administration said everybody had to sign a paper: Are you going to obey America or obey Japan? So [Obata], what can he do? He said he and I could go back to Japan, but the children will never go back. . . . We chose our life in America.” 

The Obata family’s decision to declare loyalty to the United States placed the artist in a vulnerable position. On the night of April 4, 1943, he was attacked by another internee. Rumors had begun to spread that Obata was a spy for the FBI. “The attack brought about the end of Obata’s life as an internee. After nineteen days in the Topaz hospital,” Hill wrote, “Obata was released permanently from the camps to insure his safety.”

Obata and his family moved to St. Louis in May 1943. They settled in Webster Groves, close to Gyo, who was still studying architecture at Washington University. Obata and Haruko began working at the commercial art firm, Advertiser’s Display and Exhibit, Inc. His short-lived residence in St. Louis was busy—as a full-time employee, father, and active community member—but in his limited free time, the artist was able to create Autumn Scene. In this watercolor work on paper, bright orange leaves saturate the composition. Hues of green and blue fill the background, a reflection of the vibrant change midwestern trees undergo during this season. This work is viewable upon request in the Print Study Room.

There are three other works by Obata at SLAM, including one of his most famous, Setting Sun of Sacramento Valley. Created in 1922, this monumental painting depicts a glowing California sunset. Most of the composition is devoted to the dusk sky, which is energized by flame-like clouds over a blue-tinged landscape. Obata was first introduced to the dramatic natural landscape of the Sacramento Valley in the early 20th century while working in the valley’s hops fields.

The Obatas lived in St. Louis until the end of WWII in 1945. The lifting of the exclusionary Executive Order 9066 allowed Obata, Haruku, and Yuri to rebuild their lives in Berkeley. Obata resumed his position as a professor of art at UC Berkeley in October of 1945, where he remained until retirement in 1953.

The artist’s life and work left an indelible mark on the Bay Area art world and beyond. He continued painting long after retirement, lecturing around the state of California, and in 1954, he and Haruko began leading art tours to Japan. Obata died in 1975, but his legacy lives on through his work, his teachings, and his descendants—Obata and Haruko’s son Gyo, who remained in St. Louis, became a world-renowned architect, cofounding the St. Louis–based global architecture firm HOK (originally Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum) and designing well-known public buildings like the McDonnell Planetarium at the Saint Louis Science Center and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.