Inspired by his family history in carpentry, my grandfather was a young art student when he carefully carved this print on a slab of wood, brushed black ink over it, and stamped an image of a woman walking through Hiroshima where my grandfather grew up in Japan on a piece of paper. He entered a competition with this woodblock print and won a prize for it. Before the outbreak of WWII, my grandfather lugged this art piece and the carved woodblock across the Pacific Ocean to reunite with his parents in San Francisco. Unfortunately, all Japanese American families on the West Coast, including my grandfather's family, were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated at a War Relocation Authority camp under the guise of "national security" and racial pretenses. Fortunately, my grandfather was able to store his art in a wooden barrel at San Francisco's Buddhist Church while he was incarcerated throughout the war. After the war, my grandfather was able to maintain a cultural and spiritual connection to his homeland in Japan through his art and his new job as an architect.  By holding onto this woodblock art, it serves as a reminder for my family to spark conversations and memorialize our family history and negotiate the intergenerational traumas of Japanese American incarceration. My grandfather's transnational migrations between Japan and the United States reveals a more complex family history of negotiating cultural and national identities with the tensions and traumas of racism, anti-Asian sentiment, and exclusion from the late nineteenth century to the end of WWII. 

– Claire Nakamura

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant