“Side by Side: Nihonmachi Scene”

by Matthew Kangas

Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, Washington

Continues through May 11, 2025

Takuichi Fujii, “Minidoka,” no date, montage with fence and landmarks, watercolor on paper. Courtesy collection of Sandy and Terry Kita, copyright the artist.

After she served as curator at the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums and executive director of Pilchuck Glass School, Dr. Barbara Johns turned to independent work on a forgotten chapter of Pacific Northwest art history: the Japanese American artists who were interned during World War II. The epitome of her research to date, after — resulting in several exhibitions and studies, is the exhibition and publication, “Side by Side: Nihonmachi Scenes.” Building on books she has already written on Paul Horiuchi (1906-1999), Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) and Kamekichi Tokita (1897-1948), Johns has assembled a tightly focused but deeply interesting group of paintings done before the 1942-45 internment. We see street scenes and portraits from Seattle’s shrinking Japantown, or “Nihonmachi,” the area between Jackson and Weller Streets on one side, and Fifth and Twelfth Avenues on the other. Besides homes, the district featured community social centers, hotels, language schools, restaurants, grocery and clothing stores.

Besides two of her previous book subjects, Tokita and Fujii, Kenjiro Nomura (1896-1956) completes the trio of “Side by Side” artists. Tokita and Nomura were business partners in their No-To Sign Painting Company. Fujii would meet up with them on Sundays to paint street scenes before they all joined the New Deal predecessor to the WPA, the Public Works Administration (PWA). Fully integrated into Seattle’s Asian American communities (Chinese, Filipino, Pacific Islanders), the three artists were invited to become part of the Group of Twelve, a mixed-race circle of artists who formed the core of the city’s elite painters and which included University of Washington faculty members and one of the Big Four “mystics,” Kenneth Callahan.

Takuichi Fujii, title page of diary, ca. 1942-45, ink on paper, 8 x 5 1’2”. Courtesy of Sandy and Terry Kita Collection.

All went well until 1942, with the issuance of Executive Order 9066 ordering the evacuation and internment of all Japanese-American citizens within 500 miles of the Pacific Coast. Johns includes Tokita’s and Fujii’s wartime diaries (both of which she edited) in a display case (both of which she edited) and displays photo-reproduced pages of their impressions of the camps. All three were confined for the duration of the war. Afterwards, Tokita and Nomura returned to Seattle while Fujii moved to Chicago.

The majority of the works on view are striking fin the apparent similarity among the three artists. They often painted the same street scene together. For example, two untitled works from the 1930s by Fujii and Nomura depict a stretch of Fifth Avenue north of Yesler Way, the original Skid Row. Tokita’s views of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street, Fourth Avenue and the Yesler Way overpass (with its Texaco sign), and the Seattle Art Museum collections of “Billboards” (1932) consistently evoke Edward Hopper and early Stuart Davis. Nomura’s “Street” (1937) is a Yesler Way view which won the Baker purchase award at the Seattle Art Museum’s Northwest Annual, and other works such as “Puget Sound” (1933) were acquired by Tacoma Art Museum. Nomura’s “Yesler Way” (1934) completes the trio’s encounters with the ascending street.

Kenjiro Nomura, “Street,” ca. 1932, oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 28 3/4”. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Paul Macapia.

Throughout the exhibit we are reminded time and again of the vitality and serenity of the urban mini-neighborhood populated mostly by Issei, or first-generation immigrants from imperial Japan. The “Side by Side” artists flourished in the bustling commercial environment of Nihonmachi, as reflected in their imagery of storefront laundries, bathhouses, and shoeshine parlors. One bathhouse remains until today in the basement of the Panama Hotel on Main Street, open by appointment for public tours. Visitors can see the hastily left-behind personal belongings of many of the bathers on the changing-room shelves. Like the bathhouse, the trio’s paintings have a haunting, elegiac quality to them, vistas of normal life before the catastrophe of incarceration.

Tokita’s documentary camera views of the Frye Hotel, Smith Tower, and Tashiro Hardware store (all still standing) are influenced by his interest in photography, another genre popular in Seattle’s Asian American community. His “Yesler Market” (n.d.) is a series of glances at alleyways, family houses, porches, and tugboats, but does not include people. All Tokita’s locations remain as objective sites for commemoration, like the memorial sites of evacuation on nearby Bainbridge Island, originally populated by numerous Japanese American truck farmers who supplied the Pike Place Market. All their land was confiscated.

Kamekichi Tokita, “Backyard,” 1934, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Joe Mabel.

One anomaly is a picnic scene from 1929, by Genzo Tomita. In it a large family gathering outdoors is rendered in a highly expressionistic style. It complements a portrait of Fujii’s daughter, “High School Girl” (c. 1934-35). Her studious pose and solemn expression remind us that, despite prosperity and advancement before World War II, prejudice and discrimination still confined the residents of Nihonmachi.

While Tokita’s premature death in 1948 at 51 was precipitated by his camp experiences, Nomura and Fujii survived, each shifting to modernist abstraction of considerable quality and originality. Not a part of “Side by Side,” their post-war development would make sense as a culminating project in Dr. Johns’s worthy historic recovery.

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Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.