No Justice For All: Three Suites on the Internment

Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States government forcibly relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coastófrom Washington to Californiaóto remote concentration camps in the nationís interior. Roger Shimomura --a child at the time--and his family were sent to Minidoka Concentration Camp, Hunt, Idaho.

No Justice For All: Three Suites on the Internment explores self-identity, ethnicity and politics inspired by Shimomuraís early years of camp life and by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother. While the work portrays the Japanese American experience, it metaphorically refers to issues experienced by other people of color, in particular to recent U.S. government discussions regarding the possible internment of Arab and Middle Eastern people living in this country.

No Justice For All includes three suites, or movements. The first series, ìYellow No Same,î composed of twelve prints, portrays the failure of the United States government to distinguish between the Japanese enemy and the Japanese American people. The prints illustrate what resulted from this failure: the Japanese on the outside of the barbed wire fence, and the American citizens on the inside.

ìMemories of Childhoodî represents Shimomuraís first ten vivid memories of life, which occurred in Minidoka Concentration Camp. These include his third birthday, the familyís move to camp, the constant long lines for the bathrooms, the quarantine of the artist and his mother when Shimomura caught chickenpox, and his sadness over his uncleís departure from camp to go fight in the war.

ìMistaken Identities,î a series of six figures in the traditional Japanese dress of kimono, geta, and typical headdress, refers to Americaís anti-Japanese bias during WW II, which saw the enemy in every Japanese-looking face. This discrimination was initially expressed by the 1942 proclamation by General DeWitt, Commander of the Western Defense: ìA Japís a Jap Ö.î  

Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura received his BA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and his MFA from Syracuse University, NY. He has had over 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces nationally. He is the recipient of over 30 grants, among them four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at over 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. In 2002, the College Art Association presented him with the ìArtist Award for Most Distinguished Body of Workî for his four-year, 12-museum national tour of the painting exhibition, An American Diary.

At the University of Kansas, where he taught since 1969, he was designated a University Distinguished Professor in 1994, the first so honored in the history of the School of Fine Arts on that campus. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Higuchi Research Award, the highest annual honor awarded a faculty member in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In the fall of 2002, he received the Chancellorís Club Career Teaching Award for sustained excellence in teaching and dedication to students at the University of Kansas. In 2006, he was accorded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Washington.

Shimomuraís personal papers are being collected by the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art.  

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