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Takuichi Fuji
Takuichi Fujii (Sept 26, 1891- July 16, 1964) was a Japanese American artist. He is best known for his diary, in which he had many pages of watercolor paintings and ink drawings depicting the experiences of Japanese Americans inside WW2 era incarceration camps. Although Fujii kept his diary private, his grandson Sandy Kita chose to share it with the world and work on its translation. Further work was written on Fujii and his diary in Barbara John’s book, “The Hope of Another Spring”. She believed his work was an accurate testament to his time and showed how incredible his perseverance and resilience was. Additionally, his abstract paintings made after his incarceration have been put on exhibition twice at Navy Pier.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Fujii and his family were forcibly removed into the Puyallup Assembly Center, and then transferred to the Minidoka Incarceration camp where they remained from 1942 to 1945. Fujii began making entries into his diary when his family was forcibly removed from their home, and continued chronicling his experience until the closing of the Minidoka Incarceration camp. His work is one of the longest and most comprehensive visual accounts of the Japanese American experience during this time period.

Pre war/Early life
Takuichi Fujii was an Issei born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1891. There is a lack of information about Fujii’s life before World War II, as documents are inconsistent. However, there is some information known surrounding his early life and when he moved to the United States and became a well-known artist. He attended grammar school in Hiroshima and completed the first level of high school (which was two years) at the private Shudo school. Eventually in 1906, he departed for the United States when he was 15 years old. He arrived in Seattle with his father, who shortly after returned to Japan. Soon after he arrived, and for the next eight years, he worked for the Main Fish Company. In 1916, when Fujii made a return to Hiroshima, he had met and married his wife Fusano Marumachi. They had two daughters together and their names were Satoko (Satoko Mary Rose Fujii Kita) and Masako (Masako Fujii Nelson). By 1917, Fuji opened his own business as a fish merchant. After three years or so maintaining a stall at Seattle’s Public Market, he opened a wholesale and retail fish store at Twelfth and Jackson eastward of central Nihonmachi. Until the mid 1930’s he maintained this store but eventually from about 1937 to 1939, Fujii’s family moved to Chicago. During this time it is unknown what Fujii did during this period. While maintaining his business, Fujii had been involved in Western art practices since the 1920’s. One of his paintings, Fishing Boats, was accepted in the 1931 San Francisco Art Associations national juried exhibition and the same year was awarded Honorable Mention in the Northwest Annual. He also became a founding member of Seattle’s progressive Group of Twelve Painters in 1935. Fujii presented and exhibited his work frequently in Seattle while he lived there as well as the San Francisco Bay area in his years in Seattle. When his artistic career was interrupted during his move to Chicago (his reasons for moving to Chicago are unknown) he still exhibited once at the Art Institute of Chicago’s regional juried annual. Eventually he and his wife Fusano moved back to Seattle in 1939, while their daughters remained in Chicago but would eventually return home. Fuji and his wife began a new business together, called the Mary Rose Florist shop. Fusano was mostly in charge, while Fuji continued painting and participating in regional annual exhibitions. But soon, Takuichi Fuji, his wife, and two daughters along with most others with Japanese Ancestry along the west coast were incarcerated with the start of the war.

Incarceration
From 1942-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt's signed Executive Order 9066 in which 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (including U.S. citizens) were forcibly incarcerated in isolated detention centers. In May 1942, Takuchi Fujii and his family were living in Seattle Washington, when the U.S. government removed them from their home, relocating them to the Puyallup Assembly Center, euphemistically named “Camp Harmony''. This detention center acted as a temporary site for rush processing of Japanese Americans living in Western Washington and Alaska while the government prepared more permanent sites for large-scale removal. Fujii and his family stayed at the Puyallup detention center until August 1942, when they were sent to the Minidoka War Relocation Authority camp in Idaho. When Fujii’s family arrived, the center was unfinished, and the flush toilets could not be used, and for the first few months had to use outdoor pit latrines. In one of Fujii diary entries, he commented on the site’s conditions saying, “Since we evacuated our bowels into a deep hope, it is very unsanitary”. Minidoka was located on 17,00 acres of desert land with a record capacity of 9,397 incarcerees. The facility had 35 residential blocks, each including 12 housing barracks, a mess hall, recreation building, latrine and laundry facility. During Fujii’s time in the camp, he maintained his passion for art, illustrating the details of the camp, from multiple points of view. He also kept a diary documenting his personal experiences from his time at the camp. Fujii’s daughters were allowed to leave the camp early on work release in 1943, however, he and his wife had to stay until the facility’s closing in October 1945.

Post-War
After Minidoka was closed and the war was over, Fujii and his wife moved to Ogden, Utah. This was where their older daughter had moved on work release, but they made their final move to Chicago in 1947. By the next year, the entire Fujii family was reunited back in Chicago. The family included two grandsons, the youngest, Sandy Kita, was the one who translated Fujii’s diary that he wrote in the camps. Inspired by his grandfather’s work, he also became a scholar of Japanese art. Fujii and his family lived in the Near North neighborhood of Chicago which was developed as a result of the WRA’s dispersal and resettlement policy. For a short time, Fujii worked in a lithography shop, but later retired to focus on his family and art.

After the war, Fujii continued to create several paintings that experimented with abstract art and black and white colors. Rather than taking inspiration from the camps, Fujii painted the seasonal landscape from his home in Chicago. In the late 1950s his paintings were displayed twice at Navy Pier in large exhibitions. In 1956, he was also reported to have visited Japan, and the reason is unknown. Fujii created a collection of black and white abstract expressionist paintings until his death in 1964 due to complications of lung cancer. Most of his art and achievement was unknown to the world, including those who knew him in Seattle, until art historian, Barbara Johns, published The Hope of Another Spring, a book which encompassed Fujii’s life and art in the context of the time in 2017. Fujii’s work was stored by three generations of the Fujii family. This included his wife, his older daughter, and his youngest grandson, Sandy Kita, who acknowledged the importance of his work and brought it to light. Kita also took on the responsibility of translating Fujii’s diary, half of which is reproduced in Johns’ book.

Diary/Art
Takuichi Fujii’s collection of work has been called “the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration.” From a very young age, he did private study in brush work, and ink painting. In 1930, the first record of Fuiji's artistic production came when his oil painting was selected for the Northwest Annual juried exhibition. He painted in an American realist style with attention to modernist currents at the time. Later on, Fujii exhibited his work frequently in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming years.

Fujii, his wife, and daughters were incarcerated during World War II. During his three years of incarceration, Fujii kept a diary in which he illustrated daily life and routines of the incarceration camp. Furthermore, the diary entries include self-portraits, sketches, and landscapes. Almost each ink drawing is accompanied by text that varies, some of them are brief captions identifying a place or event, and elsewhere there are pages in which he describes his move from freedom to incarceration.

The diary brings an Issei perspective during the incarceration, some of those pages were stricken by the anxiety he felt, and the racism and descriminitaion he experienced. It also contained images of  armed soldiers, barbed wire fences and watchtowers. He pictures the daily routine, leisure activities, describes the stark environment, the mandatory inactivity, the lack of privacy, and the endurance of cold and heat in substandard housing. Throughout the diary, Fujii declares himself a witness as he describes his viewpoint in surveying the grounds at Puyallup and Minidoka and pictures himself sketching in public view. After the Incarceration, Fuji produced 130 watercolors and larger ink drawings that are related to the diary in which he reflected on the wartime experience.

Photographs in the incarceration camps were mostly prohibited, but drawings and paintings were permitted. On account of Takuichi Fuiji’s work, everyone is able to picture how the Japanese Incarceration looked and we get to appreciate the details that were provided in the diary.