Elena Tajima Creef

In Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body, Elena Tajima Creef argues, “The visual history of the Japanese American representation in the United States has always contained to some degree lessons in the success or failure of how we are supposed to read Asian bodies. Such (mis)readings certainly mark much of the visual representation surrounding Japanese Americans from the internment camps of World War II to the 1992 Winter Olympic games in Albertville, where racial difference is both defined and contained within the framework of enemy aliens, model minorities, and an idealized notion of white American citizenship” (pg. 6-7). Creef further argues, “With respect to twentieth-century Japanese American representation, there is no single other defining historical event or moment than the mass relocation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II” (pg. 8-9). Finally, Creef argues, “There is a distinct visual rhetoric in the symbolic and cultural representation of Japanese Americans in the mid- to late twentieth century, where the racist hysteria of World War II unjustly framed this ethnic community as disloyal citizens of the nation” (pg. 9).
Creef examines the photography of Ansel Adams, Dorthea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake, arguing “In the twentieth-century history of Japanese American representation, the mass relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans continues to stand as the defining moment of the visual and psychic colonization of the Japanese American body that has yet to be fully resolved” (pg. 18). She concludes in her examination, “The interned photographer’s [Miyatake] outlaw camera remains a profound symbol for that which was initially – and officially – forbidden: the autonomy of the Japanese American gaze. That Miyatake was allowed by the Manzanar camp director to set up his camera and frame each shot, but had to wait for the authority of a white camp worker to trip the shutter and take the actual picture, raises disturbing and unresolved questions about the ownership of the historical gaze and the power of self-representation” (pg. 68-69). Creef writes of the impact of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians and projects such as Beyond Words, “The years 1980-81thus became a watershed moment where the public breaking of Japanese American silence about the camps became part of national American history and collective memory” (pg. 75).
Turning to historical memory of internment, Creef writes, “What remains fascinating is that even fifty years later, invoking World War II memories continues to stir up old wounds, and wartime discourses of loyalty, patriotism, and the inviolability of the nation-state, mostly from those who are old enough to remember those years” (pg. 122). In this way, Creef draws upon the work of John Dower. She writes, “Even though thousands of visitors trek annually into this desert site, Manzanar continues to be a place on the American map that many would still like to forget” (pg. 135). Turning to the 1992 Winter Olympics, Creef writes, “While figures of monstrous Japanese are plentiful in World War II propaganda, the threat of the Yellow Peril is typically depicted in images that are bestial, menacing, subhuman, sexualized, and almost always constructed as masculine. Indeed, the feminine is largely rendered invisible in the masculine construction of such militarized minority representations” (pg. 151). This influenced the media portrayal of the two favored contenders in figure skating, Japanese American Kristi Yamaguchi and Japanese Midori Ito. Creef writes, “While the showdown between Yamaguchi and Ito was dubbed that of the ‘artist’ versus the ‘athlete,’ it was also embroiled in old narratives of Euro-American superiority and the threat of machinelike Japanese athleticism, technology, even physical beastliness” (pg. 153). The images constructed during wartime continue.… (altro)