Brandon Shimoda Guides Readers Toward the Artistic Work of Five Japanese-Incarceration Descendants

Poet Brandon Shimoda reflects on the work of five artists who are descendants of those interred during the period of Japanese-American incarceration: Heather Nagami, Rea Tajiri, Aisuke Kondo, Brynn Saito, and Kevin Miyazaki. "Five is an arbitrary number," writes Shimoda for Lit Hub. "Absent from this list are other writers and artists whose work is meaningful to me and mine, especially Karen Tei Yamashita, whose book Letters to Memory ... is one of the great panoramic works on the afterlife of Japanese-American incarceration, and one on which I hope to someday write."

From Shimoda's reflection on Kondo's here where you stood:

Kondo’s great-grandfather was incarcerated in Topaz. Kondo (the great-grandson) was born and grew up in Japan, and is currently based in Berlin. After a year or so of corresponding, we met in person this year; we presented our work together at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Kondo told a story about how he was cleaning the hair (blond) out of a shower drain in a hostel in Berlin when he became dizzy and had a flash of his great-grandfather cleaning houses, years earlier, in San Francisco. In that moment, some kind of ancestral transference took place. Kondo felt like he was re-enacting his great-grandfather’s life as an immigrant.

Much of Kondo’s work is devoted to uncovering the truth and consciousness of his great-grandfather’s experience. One of the films he showed was here where you stood, in which he visits the ruins of Topaz. The film is short, six minutes. I keep thinking about what happens four minutes in. Kondo, wearing a black hoodie and carrying a cane, walks down a deserted road, then stops and starts swinging the cane at the air, as if beating the air with it, until, at the end, he breaks the cane on the ground. It was an accident. Kondo did not mean to break the cane. I became quite emotional, he said in an interview. The cane was his great-grandfather’s. His great-grandfather made it while incarcerated at Topaz.

I keep thinking about it, because what do you do when you arrive, after generations have passed, in the place, on the land, where your ancestors were dehumanized?

Read on at Literary Hub.