I Become a Nisei

0/5 ( ratings)

I Become a Nisei collects an essay by Isamu Noguchi written from a prison camp for Japanese Americans in 1942 during the Second World War. The book includes artwork and related correspondence from this period from The Noguchi Museum Archives.

Noguchi voluntarily entered the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona in May 1942 with ambitious plans to reinvent it as a model community with gardens, recreation areas, and arts programs. He arrived into the entirely different reality of what we now know to be concentration camps, with scant resources, intense heat and dust storms, and no support for his plans. To the management he was a prisoner, and to most of the other prisoners he was suspicious due to his background.

From this place of alienation, he responded to a request from DeWitt Wallace of Reader’s Digest for an article on the situation with a complex and moving piece which went unpublished at the time. The text intertwines observations on the daily realities of the camps with personal reflections on cultural identity, community, and formative articulations of visions and conflicts that would resonate in his later work. At the heart of the essay, Noguchi questions what the democracy of the American government stands for, and if it will come out on the other side of the War to meet Japanese Americans as its rhetoric preaches. This moment in American history has been for the most part left out of the narrative of the fight against fascism during the War, and American fascism on its own land.

The book includes a foreword by Brian Niiya, Content Director at Densho, an organization which preserves stories of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans in order to promote equity and justice today.

Published in collaboration with The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Typesetting, letterpress printing, and binding by Jon Beacham. Book design by Jon Beacham and Amelia Grohman.

Printed letterpress from hand set metal type. Includes 8 color plates of artworks, drawings, and a letter to the photographer Man Ray. Sewn and bound by hand, and laid into a letterpress printed dust jacket. 32 pages, 6 x 8.75 inches.