Michael Tanimura’s parents—both nisei, or American-born children of Japanese immigrants—were in their early 20s in 1942, and living in Gardena, California, when they were forcibly evacuated to an internment camp on Arizona’s Gila River Indian reservation. They were among more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans removed from their homes during World War II, allowed to bring only what they could carry. In Arizona they lived in mostly unfurnished tarpaper barracks without plumbing, insulation, or cooking facilities, surrounded by barbed wire and watched from towers by guards with machine guns.
Most Japanese-American internees were held until the Supreme Court declared their detention unconstitutional in 1944. Drawn by light manufacturing and grocery jobs, as well as the belief that there was less anti-Japanese discrimination in Chicago than elsewhere in the country, Tanimura’s parents were among those who swelled the local Japanese-American population from 390 in 1940 to nearly 30,000 by 1945. (It shrank back down to around 10,000 in the late 40s.)
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Aoki, meanwhile, had been trying to get his documentary off the ground for several years; the heightened cultural consciousness brought on by the anniversary exhibit helped get the JASC behind it. Founder of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, Aoki had first collaborated with the JASC when his Miyumi Project Big Band performed his musical composition Rooted: Origins of Now at a JASC photo exhibit about the internment at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. A mostly instrumental, nearly hour-long set of four suites, Rooted combines jazz and Japanese musical idioms to tell the story of Japanese immigration and resettlement in Chicago. Still, Aoki says, “There were things I could not express through the abstraction of music. I wanted to do more with the oral tradition.”
Aoki began weaving Japanese classical influences into his own film and music, and helped establish the Japanese classical music education and performance programs Tsukasa Taiko and Toyoaki Shamisen, which were absorbed into the JASC in 2004.
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Twenty-five minutes of this work in progress will be screened, along with Joe Fox and James Nubile’s Passing Poston: An American Story and Sheldon Candis’s The Dwelling. Tatsu Aoki and Michael Tanimura will be present. aSun 4/5, 3 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2600, siskelfilmcenter.org, $7-$9.
