Youth Fellowship

I graduated from the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering in 2022 and a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering in 2023. I work in the field of drinking water supply and treatment.
 

I am Japanese American on both sides of my family. I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii and came to Seattle for college. I found that on the West Coast, the shared experience of incarceration camps shaped Japanese American culture, community, and intergenerational activism in ways that I had not seen back home. I was encouraged to apply for the fellowship by previous Fellows and thought it was an excellent learning opportunity.

 

Favorite part of Pilgrimage

My favorite part was the Minidoka campsite tour. I underestimated the perspective I'd gain from standing in hundred-degree weather, looking out in every direction and seeing little except Idaho desert. I appreciated the efforts to preserve/reconstruct original camp features and learning about infrastructure like the irrigation canal and wastewater treatment facility.

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Project

For my project, I created a hand embroidery piece based on a shell corsage pin made in Tule Lake. According to Densho, “[t]he flower petals and leaves are made from various types of shells found at the camp. [The artist] used toothbrush bristles dipped in cornmeal for stamens and wound the stems by hand with fine green thread. Wire from screen windows was used to put the pin together.”

 

In an article titled The Art of Dignity: Making Beauty Amid the Ugliness of WWII Japanese American Camps, Lisa Hix interviews Delphine Hirasuna, a descendant of the Jerome incarceration camp and author of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps. From the article:

 

“[M]ost of these artworks were done by people without any professional training,” Hirasuna says. “When the powers that be take everything away from you, the only thing left is your own creative expression, what you have in your mind. And so art became in many ways essential to mental survival in the camps, to create something beautiful and say, ‘I made this.’”

 

I am a hand embroidery amateurist. I consider my work a labor of love, and so visiting Minidoka last July and hearing of art as an act of gaman called for reflection. Art artifacts like the corsage pin from Tule Lake exemplify a community’s will to survive and maintain dignity through extreme loss and humiliation. I chose to embroider the corsage pin design to honor camp creatives. I embroidered on a bag I received as a gift, chosen doubly to echo the “use what you got” mentality of the camps and to proudly include my Japanese American heritage in my self expression.