Chiura Obata: Alien Enemy and Great American Painter

Immigration to the United States

Born in Japan in 1885, Obata was an art prodigy; he longed to move to Paris, which he considered the center of the art world. At 17, he immigrated to the United States, thinking this would be his first stop and an opportunity to make enough money to get to Paris.

However, Obata found community in San Francisco’s Japantown. Soon, he worked as an illustrator for Japanese-language publications, created scenery for the San Francisco Opera, and founded the Fuji Athletic Club, the first Japanese-American baseball team in the contiguous United States.

California Painter

A formative six-week camping excursion with friends to Yosemite National Park in 1927 changed the trajectory of Obata’s career. On this trip, he created over 100 works of art and later said, “This experience was the greatest harvest of my whole life and future in painting.”

Obata’s fascination with the region’s natural beauty coincided with the rise of the California School of Watercolor, a group of painters dedicated to showcasing everyday life and landscapes. Obata, with his training in Japanese ink painting, fit perfectly within this movement and also introduced new techniques to it. “Freehand brushwork must come from a free mind with boldness, vigor, strength, delicateness, and flowing expression,” he said.

Throughout the 1920s, Obata held solo shows featuring sketches, landscapes, silk paintings, and woodblock prints in San Francisco, San Jose, Monterey, Fresno, and Los Angeles. In 1932, he began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and his fame grew. He showed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and elsewhere.

Internment During World War II

All of Obata’s building success was sidetracked when President Roosevelt used the Alien Enemies Act—the same law that is used to justify deportations in the United States today—to call for the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. In April 1942, months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Obata learned he had ten days to prepare to leave his home for the Tanforan Assembly Center.

Surrounded by an exhibition of 120 of his paintings that he had sold to help students impacted by the war, Obata gave a farewell talk and painting demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time of his detention, his painting Struggle, depicting a giant sequoia in a snowstorm, still hung in the University of California art gallery.

Within days of his detention, Obata began organizing an art school and signing up other detainees as students. Friends and students from Berkeley donated time and supplies. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which decades later would acquire Obata’s art, donated material as well. By the end of June, just a few months after his internment, he’d collected 87 student works and organized a show hung at Mills College.

When Obata was transferred to a detention center in Topaz, Utah, he continued to produce and teach art with the same energy. With permission, he lectured at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. By the time Obata and his family were finally let out of detention, he’d produced over 500 paintings.

One of these paintings was Moonlight over Topaz, Utah, a watercolor on silk commissioned by the Japanese American Citizens League and gifted to Eleanor Roosevelt. While the first lady did not publicly rebuke her husband’s detention of Japanese Americans, she visited the camp at Gila River and urged closing internment camps, stating that Japanese immigrants posed no threat. Obata’s Moonlight Over Topaz, Utah, hung in Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom until she died in 1962.

Legacy

In 1943, Obata was released from Topaz, but living in California as a Japanese American wasn’t possible, so he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and stayed there until the government lifted the exclusion order. In 1945, Obata returned to Berkeley and taught for nine more years before retiring. He continued to lead art tours to Japan and to publish books about his painting techniques.

With time, and through the efforts of Obata’s granddaughter, Kimi Kodani Hill, Obata is remembered for resilience, humanity, and his continual pursuit of beauty. The Whitney, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian own his work.

For several years, Yosemite National Park has commemorated Obata with the Obata Art Weekend. This August would be the fifth annual event, though with federal budget cuts, plans remain uncertain. Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman says, “It will depend on park conditions and staffing levels.”

Throughout all of the turmoil in Obata’s life, nature was the great redeeming constant. His granddaughter Kimi Hill said, “He felt that he could embrace this beauty and the beauty also embraced him—no matter what was going on in the rest of the country, nature was always there for him.”