Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment [Paperback]

Chiura Obata (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2000

Chiura Obata was one of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans forcefully relocated in 1942 from their homes and communities to the stark barracks of desert internment camps. As an artist faithfully recording the world around him, Obatas work from this period gives us a view into the camps that is at once honest in the details of austerity and hardship, and strikingly lyrical in its portrayal of hope and beauty even in incarceration.

Topaz Moon presents more than 100 of Obatas sketches, sumi paintings, and watercolors from the internment period. Lovingly collected and edited by his granddaughter, Obatas work gives testament to his artistic genius and a spirit undefeated by adversity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Japanese-born painter Obata (1885-1975) taught at UC-Berkeley from 1932 until December 1942, when the federal government forced 110,000 Japanese-Americans (Obata among them) from their homes and into internment camps. Detained at Tanforan, Calif., and then at Topaz, Utah, Obata used vivid watercolor, black-and-white sumi ink painting and other techniques to record events, impressions and scenes of the Japanese-American internment. He also set up art schools in both camps, encouraging others to paint and draw what they saw. This volume reproduces much of Obata's art from the internment years: 24 color pages present watercolors, while his numerous sketches, drawings and sumi work dominate the rest of the book. (Obata's elegant pre- and postwar paintings also appear, along with relevant photographs of his family.) Hill, the painter's granddaughter, has drawn on her family's collection of Obata's works, on historical records and on the memories of those who knew him to create a comprehensive record of the evacuation and detainment as Obata and those around him must have experienced it. Perhaps a third of her text is excerpts from Obata's letters and speeches, which urge calm and dignity amid awful circumstances. Some readers will treat this volume primarily as a historical record. Others will see in Obata an aesthetically remarkable blend of Japanese figurative conventions and Western-style documentary realismAone sketch recalls centuries-old ukiyo-e, the next suggests K?the Kollwitz. Obata's spare observations and vivid brushwork demonstrate pride and challenge as wind sweeps through redwoods, dismay amid the crates and huts of Tanforan and determination against Utah's stark landscapes, fences and dust storms. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA-This book is a chronicle of one Japanese-American family that was classified as "enemy aliens" and sent to an internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In February, 1942, Obata had lived in California for 37 years; he was 57 years old and was a professor of art at UC Berkeley. His wife was also an artist and taught ikebana. The family, along with 9500 other detainees, was assigned to the camp at Topaz, UT. Under armed guard, the internees endured harsh living conditions, extremes in temperature, dust storms, primitive sanitary conditions, and other hardships. Obata recorded these events by painting the details of daily life in the camps and the surrounding landscape. His granddaughter has collected this powerful collection of more than 100 paintings, photographs, and writings, giving an amazing insight to a remarkable family's story. Obata created art schools in both the Tanforan and Topaz Camps where hundreds of students learned to share his reverence toward the natural world. Through his teaching, he trained his students, both children and adults, to see beyond their condition and in doing that, lifted their spirits. His work is a testimonial to hope.
Turid Teague, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 147 pages
• Publisher: Heyday Books; 1st edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890771260
• ISBN-13: 978-1890771263
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 8.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling and fascinating work, March 22, 2000

By 

Alec H. Boyd (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment (Paperback)

Topaz Moon is a testament to the power of art, not simply as a mechanism for creating beauty, but also as a method of documenting history. Faced with the social disruption and indignity of relocation and internment in WWII, Professor Chiura Obata of the University of California at Berkeley chose to use his considerable artistic gifts to create what amounts to a visual diary of his internment experience. Seemingly hundreds of drawings, pen and ink paintings and watercolors (too many to count) document Professor Obata and his families experiences from the start of the war, through relocation to Tanforan, internment at Topaz, and beyond, in stark terms, quiet dignity and haunting beauty.

Unlike photography which can only memorialize the actual events of a moment, painting and sketching allows the artist to document his or her own emotional reaction to those events. Dorothea Lange, herself an admirer of Professor Obata, took photographs of the Tanforan relocation center, including Professor Obata's art classes, some of which are reproduced in Topaz Moon. However, compared to Professor Obata's own first hand sketches of the internment process, Lange's photos appear emotionless. This is because Professor Obata infuses his documentary sketches, which are remeniscent of Van Gogh's figural drawings, with the powerful emotional reactions he felt in witnessing scenes in which he too was a victim.

But Topaz Moon is a text which is more about creating community than casting blame. Kimi Kodani Hill, Professor Obata's granddaughter, has framed her grandfather's art with an insightful, succinct and compelling history of Professor Obata's life and the events of the time. The anectdotes relayed by Ms. Hill emphasize the support, assistance and sympathy given to the Obata's by their many freinds outside of the camps. I was struck by the fact the President of U.C. Berkeley, Robert Gordon Sproul, who himself was vocally opposed to the internment, personally rescued Professor Obata's life's work of art and stored that art in his official U.C. residence for the duration of the war.

While Topaz Moon is more than an art book, the art itself is more than merely documentary. Professor Obata's finished paintings and sumi-e works represent some of the best American artwork of the 20th Century. Works such as Moonlight Over Topaz (commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt while Professor Obata was still interred), Hospital Topaz, and Silent Moonlight at Tanforan Relocation Center would stand out in any museum. In their own way, these images are every bit as beautiful as his earlier Yosemite woodblock prints.

I highly recommend this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Topaz Moon": The Great Nature of Chiura Obata, March 15, 2005

By 

John Dziadecki (Louisville, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment (Paperback)

"Topaz Moon" is a slim little book that is filled with a selection of the interment imagery of Chiura Obata. The imagery is both in his writings and in his art. And both make lasting impressions.

The images range from simple line drawing to watercolors executed while a victim of Executive Order 9066 in which all West Coast Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in interment camps. It is amazing what he was able to accomplish in the face of circumstances beyond his control. Obata's work is excellent.

"Topaz Moon", "Obata's Yosemite" and "Nature Art With Chiura Obata" are the only three books currently in print about the remarkable artist and human being that was Chiura Obata. The three books present different facets of his life and all are worth reading and seeing. Highly recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great art and great social history, June 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. I bought it for the artwork which is fresh, inventive, and very skillful but the social history is equally engrossing. The text is clearly written and generous with quotes.

At 8.25" square it's smaller than your average coffee table book, but the pages are rich with intelligence, beauty and invention.