Picture Man: The Legacy of Southeast Alaska Photographer Shoki Kayamori

By Margaret Thomas

In 1912, Shoki Kayamori and his box camera arrived in a small Tlingit village in southeast Alaska. At a time when Asian immigrants were forbidden to own property and faced intense racial pressure, the Japanese-born Kayamori put down roots and became part of the Yakutat community. For three decades he photographed daily life in the village, turning his lens on locals and migrants alike, and gaining the nickname “Picture Man.” But as World War II drew near, his passion for photography turned dangerous, as government officials called out Kayamori as a potential spy. Despondent, Kayamori committed suicide, leaving behind an enigmatic photographic legacy.
In Picture Man, Margaret Thomas views Kayamori’s life through multiple lenses. Using Kayamori’s original photos, she explores the economic and political realities that sent Kayamori and thousands like him out of Japan toward opportunity and adventure in the United States, especially the Pacific Northwest. She reveals the tensions around Asian immigrants on the West Coast and the racism that sent many young men north to work in the canneries of Alaska. And she illuminates the intersecting—and at times conflicting—lives of villagers and migrants in a time of enormous change. Part history, part biography, part photographic showcase, Picture Man offers a fascinating new view of Alaska history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781602232464

Book preview

PICTURE MAN

The Legacy of Southeast Alaska Photographer Shoki Kayamori

MARGARET THOMAS

University of Alaska Press

© 2015 University of Alaska Press

All rights reserved

University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Margaret, 1959–

Picture Man : the legacy of southeast Alaska photographer Shoki Kayamori / by Margaret Thomas.

      pages       cm

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-1-60223-245-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-60223-246-4 (electronic)

1. Kayamori, Shoki, 1877–1941. 2. Japanese American photographers—Alaska—Biography. 3. Photographers—Alaska—Biography. 4. Japanese Americans—Alaska—Biography. 5. Immigrants—Alaska—Biography. 6. Japanese Americans—Alaska—Social conditions—20th century. 7. Alaska—Race relations—History—20th century. 8. Tlingit Indians—Alaska—Yakutat—Social life and customs—20th century—Pictorial works. 9. Yakutat (Alaska)—Social life and customs—20th century—Pictorial works. 10. Documentary photography—Alaska—History—20th century. I. Title.

   TR140.K38T46 2015

   770.92—dc23

   [B]

2014023690

Cover design by Martyn Schmoll

Interior design by Publishers’ Design and Production Services, Inc.

This publication was printed on acid-free paper that meets the minimum requirements for ANSI /NISO Z39.48—1992 (R2002) (Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Meiji Japan

CHAPTER TWO

The West Coast

CHAPTER THREE

The Aokis

CHAPTER FOUR

Cannery Life

CHAPTER FIVE

Yakutat

CHAPTER SIX

Spies

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Kayamori Collection

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book seems like a solitary effort. It is not.

My friend Larry Persily, then editor at the Juneau Empire, first introduced me to Shoki Kayamori in the mid-1990s. The paper ran a weekly column called Juneau Color, which spotlighted community members engaged in good works. I guess Larry was out of ideas. He joked that mine would be the first Juneau Color about a dead man. Twenty years later I sent him the first chapter of this book. He gave me the courage to go on to the next chapter. And the next.

Some of Kayamori’s history was hidden behind a language barrier. As a high school exchange student, I spent a year with a wonderful Japanese family, but my grasp of the language remains rudimentary. It was my friend Mayumi Yamamoto who unlocked the story of the photographer’s early life in Japan. A talented researcher and translator, Mayumi quickly located the Kayamori family in central Japan. The next time she went home to visit her own family she interviewed the Kayamoris on my behalf. An elderly great-niece wept and thanked her for bringing them news of a long-lost family member.

The Kayamoris cleared up confusion about the photographer’s first name. The people in Yakutat knew him simply as Kayamori. His first name appeared in Frederica de Laguna’s book Under Mount Saint Elias, probably based on interviews with Yakutat residents less than a decade after his death. She transcribed the name as Fhoki, a letter combination that does not exist in Japanese. The Kayamoris provided a family tree that showed his first name as Seiki. The same kanji can be read Shoki, a nickname he often used on official documents.

Mayumi’s success motivated me to return to Alaska for another look at the Kayamori collection, which was not yet entirely online. Serendipitously, I met the head of Alaska State Library’s Historical Collections, Jim Simard, who has from that day on unflinchingly supported this project. His positive comments about the manuscript and his offer to donate some seventy images from the collection were instrumental in the University of Alaska Press’s decision to publish this book.

Though I have never met him, UA Press acquisitions editor James Engelhardt can expect a hug if I ever do. He took a chance on an unpublished writer with a half-finished manuscript and guided me through the two-year process from inception to publication. His instincts about how to improve the text always did.

Without the two James’s backing, I could not have gotten generous grants from King County 4Culture and the Alaska Humanities Forum, or a dozen more Kayamori images from the Sealaska Heritage Institute. All of these built the momentum necessary to convince South Puget Sound Community College to give me a paid sabbatical to finish the book.

Support from strangers is always surprising and gratifying, but my mother Hilda Merrick’s interest in this project and the improvements she made to portions of the text will always matter most to me. Thanks, Mom.

Finally, writing a book is for long stretches a solitary effort. One thing that helped me stay at the desk was knowing that my sweet, cheerful husband would be home at the end of each day. A more gifted writer than I, Ralph read the manuscript and saved me the embarrassment of typos and other errors. He celebrated with me many minute milestones, and sent a bouquet when the publisher finally officially approved this project. The card read, Your persistence is inspiring. His love and unwavering support made that possible—even fun.

Note: Only those photographs from the Alaska State Library Historical Collection and from the Sealaska Heritage Institute (tagged with a (K) throughout this book) were taken by Shoki Kayamori. The four images where he is pictured presumably were taken with a self-timer or by someone else using his camera.

INTRODUCTION

Mountains remind us of our insignificance.

Japanese photographer Shoki Kayamori was born under one great mountain and buried beneath another. He was part of the throng of Japanese laborers who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. And he was among the nameless, faceless Asians who labored on West Coast farms and railroads, in laundries and fish canneries. In 1941, his was one of the tens of thousands of lives unhinged by the U.S. government’s decision to intern Japanese aliens and their American-born children.

If not for the legacy he left, Kayamori would be all but forgotten by now. Three octogenarians, his great-nieces living in central Japan, are the only family members who still remember his name—though not his face.

After the war, his younger brother sent an undated letter to members of the extended family:

I hope you are doing well and staying healthy in this time of food shortage. Please don’t worry too much about me since I am healthy even though life is difficult.

Thank you for your concern about my older brother, Shoki. I sent a letter inquiring about him about three years ago through the Red Cross. I received a reply from the Red Cross on the fifth of this month informing me that he passed away on December 11th in the sixteenth year of the Showa Era [1941]. We had a private, simplified Buddhist memorial service for him at the Myo-eji [temple] on the ninth.

We would like to express our appreciation for your kindness toward him while he was alive. We would also like to ask you not to send any offerings since he does not have an immediate family.¹

Family members still remember what the letter was too polite to say: According to the Red Cross, Shoki shot himself in a U.S. internment camp. The account wasn’t exactly accurate, but the family was ashamed. In his memory, they placed a small, empty ceramic dish—intended for ashes—in the family graveyard.

In 2005, Kayamori’s descendants cleared out a family storehouse, destroying the many letters he had sent from the United States more than sixty years before. It was a few months later that they learned his photographs were part of the Alaska State Library’s Historical Collections, a touchstone for a remote Southeast Alaska Native community. This photograph collection . . . serves as a memorial to him today, reads the collection guide.

Shoki Kayamori was not forgotten.

CHAPTER ONE

Meiji Japan

The taxi driver adjusts the radio, grips the wheel with white-gloved hands and looks straight ahead. If he breaks the silence, the gaijin (foreigner) in the backseat might expect him to summon school-days English. My own limited Japanese squelches any attempt at chitchat from my quarter.

I’m glad we don’t have to talk. I want to take in the neighborhood, known at the turn of the century as the village of Denbo. In heavy traffic, we dip down into a densely populated valley. Centered in the windshield is the blue-gray silhouette of the mountain. Like an upended funnel it dominates the horizon, its sharp apex collared by clouds. If Shoki Kayamori saw Denbo today, Mount Fuji might be the only thing he would recognize.

I imagine I am some reincarnation of the man, returning more than a century later for a look around. Our acquaintance actually began in the 1990s at a small newspaper in Juneau, Alaska, when my editor asked me to write about the Alaska State Library’s new photo exhibit: The Kayamori Collection.

No one knew much about the photographer, but more than seven hundred black-and-white negatives, many on glass plates, captured a seminal time in the remote Tlingit village of Yakutat. In the early 1900s, the Tlingits sometimes embraced and sometimes reluctantly accommodated Western ways. Perhaps it was his own early experience with cataclysmic cultural shift that gave Kayamori the perspective to document the change, though that does not appear to have been his intention. Perhaps he gave little thought to ethnography, artistry, or posterity and was just intrigued by what he saw and eager to test the cameras’ capabilities and his own.

EARLY LIFE IN THE PAPER CITY

Kayamori was born in 1877, on Suruga Bay, a mountainous region in central Japan, still known for its tea, rice, Mandarin oranges, and an abundance of fish and forest products. Once a stop for foot traffic along the old Tokaido Road, today Denbo is part of the hazy metropolis of Fuji City, with a population of more than a quarter million, about an hour by bullet train south of Tokyo.

Fuji City is known as The Paper City, and papermaking accounts for more than a third of the industry in one of Japan’s most industrial cities. The Kayamori family played a prominent role in the area’s papermaking history.

Up until about a decade ago, some three hundred smokestacks encircled the city. People said, If you kick a stone, it will hit a chimney. But air pollution and the stench from the paper mills choked the city, and something had to be done. Government authorities shut down about a third of the stacks, and now there are fewer jobs in paper manufacturing and no noticeable odor—just a permanent scrim of haze and a sparse perimeter of tall skinny chimneys plumed with dark smoke.

The Fuji River forms a wide delta fed by