Teresa Tamura, Portraits of Roger Shimomura and Lawrence Matsuda, 2001 and 2007, respectively, published in her book Minidoka: An American Concentration Camp, and featured in Honoring Shiren: The Japanese Experience at Minidoka, Student Union Fine Arts Gallery 2020; Gift of the Artist to the University Permanent Art Collection, 2018
A third-generation Japanese American, Roger Shimomura was born in Seattle, Washington, before being forcibly removed with his family to Minidoka. A distinguished military graduate from the University of Washington, Shimomura served with the First Cavalry Division in Korea. In 1967, he received his MFA from Syracuse University, New York; he began teaching at the University of Kansas, in 1969. Throughout his career, he received four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. Shimomura’s work is collected in over 100 museums nationwide.
Born in the Minidoka internment camp in 1945, Lawrence Matsuda is an award-winning poet, author, and educator. Matsuda attended the University of Washington where he earned his BA, MA, and PhD. He served 6 years in the Army reserve while finishing his education and later began a long career in teaching. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Matsuda fought against social injustice and was an integral part of the growing, local Asian movement, e. g. the 1972 campaign that elected Washington state’s first Asian American State Legislator, John Eng. His latest novel, My Name is Not Viola, was published in 2019 with an introduction by Tess Gallagher.
In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to incarcerate Japanese and Japanese Americans, as well as Germans and Italians, from the West Coast. Under this order, 10 war relocation centers were created; Minidoka, in Jerome, Idaho, was one of those sites. The United States government imprisoned more than 122,000 men, women, and children during World War II under EO 9066, and more than 9,000 of those individuals were held at Minidoka. The Nisei Trilogy examines the consequences of this government policy.
The print Return Home includes a derogatory word used to terrorize people of Japanese and Japanese American heritage as they returned to their homes and businesses after the war. It is printed here and explained at the request of the artists as a reminder that fear of Asian Americans and anti-Asian discrimination still exist as demonstrated nearly 100 years after the end of WWII in recent violence reported throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional images:
The Nisei Trilogy: The Attack, The Camps, Return Home,and Colophon, Roger Shimomura and Lawrence Matsuda, 2015, lithographs on paper