In the striking photograph, a Japanese American girl is dressed in a plaid peacoat and round hat, her face wearing a pleasant expression that could read as a smile.
She and her mother are also wearing paper tags dangling from a string on their lapels, like they are pieces of cargo.
The photo, taken by Dorothea Lange in Hayward of young Mae Yanagi and her family, captures the moment just before she and her family boarded a bus in May 1942 to be relocated to a concentration camp. The lives of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and, two months later, issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing their roundup and detention.
If you go
What: “BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration,” by Masaki Fujihata
When: Open through Dec. 27.
Where: Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland
The image is one of several in the archives of Lange, and another photographer, Russell Lee, that captured the attention of Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata. These images form the raw material for an immersive augmented reality (AR) exhibit that opened Sept. 18 at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), titled “BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration.”
Fujihata enlarges the iconic photograph of Yanagi until her eyes take up an entire wall at the entrance of the exhibit. The closeup allows visitors to notice the reflection in her eyes, which appears to show the shadowy figures of several people. One is likely Lange, the photographer. Fujihata suspects the others are government officials and maybe military police, and for him it opened up a new interpretation of Yanagi’s expression. In fact, he notes, her eyes are not smiling at all. “Photography contains the story behind the surface,” he said.
The exhibit, open through Dec. 27, uses photos from Lange and Lee that they took under the auspices of the government agency that supervised the roundups, the War Relocation Authority. Several of them were taken in Oakland. Using AR, a visitor can experience the moments just before hundreds of families were taken away to camps.
“This is our first contemporary art exhibition focused on this story,” said Carin Adams, senior art curator at the Oakland Museum, which holds Lange’s archives. “It’s the most complex, mediawise, that we have attempted.”
Reporting to 1117 Oak St.
The 1930s was the peak of social documentary photography, with Lange as one of its most famous practitioners. Her most celebrated image is “Migrant Mother,” the Depression-era photo of a mother’s worn look as she holds her infant and her two young children bury their faces in her neck. Lange made that image while working for the Farm Security Administration.
Fujihata’s exploration of Lange’s archives started through UCLA’s Yanai Initiative, where he produced a similar exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, that opened in 2022 to commemorate the events 80 years later.
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For the Oakland exhibit, Fujihata explores a particular historical moment that occurred very near the Oakland Museum, at 1117 Oak St., now the home of Alameda County Law Library. This is where many Japanese American residents of the East Bay had to report just before being removed to Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno. From the East Bay alone, thousands of people ended up at Tanforan, including Richmond and El Cerrito’s 23 Japanese American flower growing families and thousands from elsewhere in the East Bay.
“Store owners, students, seniors, teachers, community leaders were among those instructed to report to this building, bringing only what they could carry,” Dorothy Lazard, who was for many years the Oakland History Room’s historian and librarian, wrote in a post about that time for the Oakland Public Library.
The people, mostly U.S. citizens, were later shipped off to a wartime concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.
The executive order and ensuing exclusion orders gave people little time to prepare to leave the life as they knew it. The show includes photos that Lange took on the museum side of the street, where there was once a row of Victorian homes. We see piles of luggages in front of two homes, a reminder to viewers that people had to pack up their entire lives into what they could fit in a few bundles and suitcases.
Historic documents show that 1,790 people of Japanese descent lived in Oakland in 1940, just before the removal order — among the largest Japanese American communities in the state. Oakland’s Japanese American community was vibrant. There were churches, including the Buddhist Church of Oakland, now 125 years old. There were robust businesses, from nurseries to produce markets and dentist offices. And there were homes throughout Oakland, largely concentrated near Chinatown and West Oakland.
Another famous photo by Lange shows a Japanese American-owned storefront there with the words, “I AM AN AMERICAN” displayed in bold letters. The photo was taken at 8th and Franklin streets, where a Chase bank now resides, in present-day Chinatown.
Just after the war, “the total number of people that returned [to Oakland] was 906,” according to Jonathan van Harmelen, the staff historian at Densho, an educational nonprofit that archives the history of Japanese American incarceration during the war, citing data collected by the War Relocation Authority.
Van Harmelen said this population decline tracks with broader patterns of post-war resettlement. Many people lost their homes and businesses during the war. When they tried to return to the West Coast, some faced hostility. Many young adults resettled in the Midwest and along the East Coast.
These historic events may resonate for visitors to the exhibit today, Adams said, as green card holders and US citizens are being detained, and sometimes disappeared, by ICE, including those who have committed no crimes.
Fujihata wanted to focus on the pivotal moment when people were about to board the bus, a moment that everyone who was forced into the camps shared. Once in the camps, their lives diverged and became more complex, with 10 main camps spread across multiple states away from the coasts, which were deemed exclusion zones. None knew what was to come.
“Some of the people thought the war would end in three months,” Fujihata said. In fact, many families were locked up for three and a half years.
‘Photographs of people at their most vulnerable’
The main exhibit is indoors, featuring massive reproductions of Lange’s photos and a new video by Fujihata of people reading the executive order, filmed in Oakland with East Bay residents.
In an interactive portion of the exhibit, you can take on the role of photographer during this moment in history. Walk up to a table to borrow a replica of the large-format Graflex camera that Lange often used. Wear it around your neck and look down into the viewfinder. You will be transported, via AR, to a scene where people are waiting to board a train in Little Tokyo. You decide what photos to take by pressing a button; there’s an iPhone inside the case, and the photos you take suddenly appear on a nearby wall, drawing attention to the choices you make.
Next to this AR experience are some of Lee’s photos of people waiting to board trains at the Santa Fe train station in Los Angeles, waiting with their luggage. In contrast to many of Lange’s more intimate portraits of families, Lee’s images zoom out to include news photographers and government officials within the frame, highlighting how many were witness to these forced incarcerations.
Fujihata’s exhibit poses some complex questions: What choices did those photographers make at the time? And what choices would you make in their shoes? Would you take photos of the officers enforcing the removals? Or would you take a photo of a child’s face as she sits and waits?
Today, we have phones available at most times, and we can choose document many things. What do we document? What rights do vulnerable subjects have?
Adams, the curator, sees Lange as a “humanist” and notes that her images of the removals were suppressed during the war. “She was living her values as a person and as a photographer that aligned with her view of justice,” Adam said. “But they’re still really complicated images. They’re photographs of people at their most vulnerable.”
Outside on the Oak Street Plaza, you can check out an iPad from a staffer at a table. When you look around the plaza through the screen, the space appears populated with dozens of people milling around or sitting with their suitcases. “They are actual humans,” Fujihata said, not AI. Fujihata filmed the scenes in Tokyo during the pandemic, and later in Los Angeles. The actors are everyday people alongside some professional actors. A few of them are elders who lived through the incarceration camps. Others are children or descendants of people who were incarcerated. One of the figures is Fujihata himself.
If you look through the iPad out beyond the museum, you’ll see the buses waiting. The moment is a recreation of when families departed to Tanforan on a Thursday on May 7, 1942.
Many are wearing formal clothes; Fujihata had a costume designer find clothing characteristic of the 1940s. The scene is a reenactment, Fujihata said, but “when the public comes here to experience it, they will see it as something that happened in this space.”
He suspects that this part of the exhibit may bring up the deepest reactions, since visitors will be experiencing it so close to where the historical events occurred.
The exhibit also includes a resource area, where people can learn more about this history or take action. A series of postcards directs people to organizations, including Densho and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, which each host collections of photos and historical records. There’s a link to write a letter opposing the Trump administration’s plans to close the National Archives in San Francisco, located in San Bruno. The archives hold historic records dating back to the 1850s.
“The ground you’re standing on is where the events happened 80 years ago,” van Harmelen, who saw the exhibit in Los Angeles, said. “It helps people rethink where they are.”
OMCA has a permanent exhibit dedicated to the history of the Japanese American incarceration experience in the history gallery, called “Sent Away,” and some of Lange’s photos from this time period are featured in the gallery that displays items from the museum’s permanent collection. All of Lange’s photos for the WPA are in the public domain.
Lange continues to inspire new artforms. Poet Tess Taylor studied the archives at OMCA, which includes Lange’s notebooks from the time, and wrote a theatrical production called “Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.” Pop-up scenes from the play will be staged on Oct. 17 at OMCA’s James Moore Theatre.
More than 40 years after Mae Yanagi and her family were rounded up and forced to live in the camps, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and reparations of $20,000.
In Richmond, a longtime effort to honor the flower growing families is blooming in the form of city park, where a series interpretive signs explain the site’s unique past.
Adams said her mother, now 91, was incarcerated at the camp at Tule Lake as a child. She said Fujihata’s view as an outsider, from Japan, gives the public an opportunity to see things in a new light. “He’s offering us a way to see things we wouldn’t have seen without his intense curiosity,” she said.
