Inquiry, Research and Creative Activity at
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio.
Issue: Spring 2000
Odyssey in Art

by Jeanne M. Hoban

Masumi Hayashi has made a name for herself capturing the beauty in ugliness. Her panoramic photo collages of abandoned prisons, EPA Superfund sites, and industrial locations have made their way into galleries, publications, and private collections across the world.

One of the latest projects by the Cleveland State University art professor is more personal. The Japanese-American artist started out searching for her birthplace and wound up on an eight-year odyssey.

Prof. Hayashi of the College of Arts and Sciences was born on the Gila River Relocation Camp in Arizona during World War II. Her parents were among the more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent forced into internment camps between 1942 and 1945. Prof. Hayashi decided to search for the site while on sabbatical in 1990. "I wanted to see it, to find the relocation camp that I was born in," she recalls. "It took me a few days to find it. There were no markers or anything, so it's really hard to find. It wasn't on a map."

She finally located the camp with help from the wife of a local Buddhist priest who had been interned there. The Gila Camp would have been easy to miss without a knowledgeable guide-a few markers remain, including a monument, water tank, and the foundations of a sewer. Prof. Hayashi photographed what was left of the site and created one of her signature photo collages.

"The sewers are always on the outskirts and they're still there. Most of my photographs (of the camps) are of the sewers, because they're too big to destroy," says Prof. Hayashi. "There's farmland all around here, so that's all that's left after 50 years."

The camp project grew out of Prof. Hayashi's work on prisons. That series is based on Michel Foucault's notion that 19th-century prison architectural plans were designed as panopticons, so guards could see all of the prisoners from any location. Prof. Hayashi's prison photos provide a similar 360-degree panoramic view of the spaces. She used that concept to create the Gila River piece, which was originally exhibited with the prison images. The work was so successful that Prof. Hayashi was encouraged to produce similar pieces.

"People wanted more of the camps," she says, "I didn't think it would be hard to do. I didn't realize how involved I was going to get."

Ten years later, the project includes not only Prof. Hayashi's image of her birthplace, but panoramic collages of each of the other 10 relocation camps in the United States and a few in Canada. With the help of her son, Dean, a website designer, she created a website, which, in addition to the camp images, includes personal snapshots and recollections of internees titled "Contraband: the Camera, the Photograph, and the Family Album." An exhibition by that name was displayed in the University Art Gallery in 1996. She also has contacted several writers about working with her on a book.

Her efforts were recently rewarded with a grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which was established by the federal government to sponsor research and educational activities dealing with the exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II. Prof. Hayashi also has used some of the redress money she received as a camp survivor for the project.

When displayed in galleries, the camp photos are accompanied by audio recordings of Prof. Hayashi's interviews with internees and text documentation such as Executive Order 9066, which gave the military authority to intern Japanese Americans on the west coast, and President Clinton's 1993 apology for the internments.

Prof. Hayashi first began working with sound in the mid-1980's with her post-industrial project. She took an audio workshop to learn how to abstract her voice, and read original poetry to accompany her images of steel mills and other industrial sites. "It was sort of collaging the story, the way my collages are," she says.

A second attempt at using sound faltered with the EPA Superfund project. Prof. Hayashi had intended to interview activists about Love Canal and other waste sites, but fear of lawsuits kept people from participating. Instead, Prof. Hayashi displayed text panels next to the photo collages explaining each site.

"The text adds another edge. It's a totally different reality," notes Prof. Hayashi. "It adds another sense of irony."

With the internment camp project, Prof. Hayashi considered using text to tell the stories of the internees, but decided to let survivors speak for themselves. She has produced compact disks of these oral histories, with the help of Cleveland State's department of music, to accompany her artwork. While she has had several successful interviews with American internees, she has found their Canadian counterparts to be more hesitant to speak on tape.

"It's really difficult to get people to talk because they also had internment camps (in Canada), but they were run differently. The men were separated and were told to work on building roads, and railroads," she says. "They were treated pretty harshly and people are even now fearful of talking.

"They're closer to Japanese culture, too, so some of that inculturation makes them hesitant in revealing or saying anything too negative."

Prof. Hayashi speculates that her "outsider" status also may explain why some Canadian internees are dubious about her motives. "Here, I'm one of the internees. But there I'm coming in, into their history. They wonder why."

After her success in photographing and interviewing American internees, she was surprised by this stumbling block.

"Three years ago, I had decided, "well, I'm going to start the Canadian camps. I thought they would be just as easy as the American. Well, not as easy, but not that difficult," she says.

Working on the American camps was anything but easy. Before she could photograph them, Prof. Hayashi had to find them.

The government established 10 relocation camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Idaho, Montana, and Utah. Only one of the sites, Manzanar in California, has been designated as a monument in the national park system. "The government has not really done too much," Prof. Hayashi says. "Usually it's the local JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) or groups that were interned there, and they're dying out."

Prof. Hayashi has relied on help from such groups to locate the camps.

"I'll get one name and then I'll start calling and then I get two names," she notes. "It just progresses. It's like a spider web."

Local JACL president Hank Tanaka, for instance, has put her in touch with individuals in communities near other sites, such as the Minidoka Relocation Camp in Idaho. There, a local man drove three hours to meet her and went with her to explore the site.

"We went together to the camp site and found this area I wouldn't have seen, because he was willing to open doors and try to peek into things. So he found a root cellar. He mucked around. And we figured out that it was from that time period," she says. "Later I went to another camp and found another root cellar. After awhile, I could start dating them."

While individual referrals have proved invaluable in locating sites, they also have helped the project take on a life of its own. "When I started the project, I didn't think it was going to be a big project. For the longest time I thought it was only going to be four sites," Prof. Hayashi says.

To expedite her research in Canada, Prof. Hayashi signed up for a tour of sites in Vancouver. Unfortunately, only two or three others registered and the tour was cancelled. Prof. Hayashi decided to go anyway. When she called for maps, the tour planner decided to accompany her, along with a professor from the University of British Columbia. The trio traveled to a lake in the Kootenays mountain range around which several former camps are located.

"It was good to travel with them because I don't know how I would have found the sites otherwise. They're not marked," says Prof. Hayashi. "I stayed three or four days longer, because I had to shoot by myself. I don't like people around me when I shoot."

Prof. Hayashi hopes to wrap up the project this year with a few more interviews with Canadian internees and photos of Canadian sites.

"I hope this is the last year. I think it could keep going," she says. "I just have to stop. It's like a lifetime."

The completion of the relocation camp project will allow Prof. Hayashi to devote some time to another personal photographic journey. On a recent visit to Japan, Prof. Hayashi visited Fukuoka, and participated in a family service for her father at the family Buddhist temple. She also visited Koyasan, a temple village, and was inspired to begin a new series of collages.

"It's about ancestral worship. I think I was going to do it anyway, but I didn't know I was going to do it in Japan," she says. "I think I was going to shoot in Thailand and Cambodia. But it got very specific when I got to Japan, being at that temple. It's very powerful-a sense of history and connection."

To get to the temple in Fukuoka, Prof. Hayashi had to hike up a mountain trail lined with tombs. Those graves and others will provide the subject matter for the new project-hardly surprising given the foci of her previous works.

"It creates an irony, the beauty of these very tortured places," she says.