Advent in Exile

What can a Japanese American’s humble still life painting teach us about Advent?

By Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

H

enry Sugimoto’s little canvas Rohwer Camp, from 1944, hardly looks like a Christmas painting. It’s unassuming and not very festive, just a humble still life of pears, apples, yams, and Chinese cabbage sitting on some newspapers. And yet, this simple painting links a dark chapter of Asian American history with the Christian season of Advent in a challenging, beautiful way.

The fruits and vegetables are sketchily outlined with quick, gray brushstrokes then filled with patchy color. They almost seem to quiver, uncertain if they are solid objects or apparitions. The elevated horizon line and closely cropped composition tip the newspapers towards us, their headlines easily legible. We can see “Christmas” emblazoned across one in the top right and “Happy New Year” in the bottom left. 

But it’s the central masthead that suggests that more is going on than we might initially realize. Underneath an all-caps “EXTRA!!,” we see the newspaper’s name, Rohwer Outpost, and the urgent headline: “Mass Exclusion Lifted.”

The “mass exclusion” referenced here was the forcible removal and incarceration of over 127,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, racialized xenophobia fueled the belief that all people of Japanese ancestry were a threat to the security of the United States. Thousands of Japanese Americans, about two-thirds of whom were American citizens, lost their property, businesses, and freedom. Henry Sugimoto and his family, who were living in the San Joaquin Valley, were first sent to the Fresno Assembly Center, then the Jerome Internment Camp in Arkansas. Towards the end of the war, they were transferred to the Rohwer camp, also in Arkansas. 

The camps were all located in barren, windy deserts, far from the coast. Inmates were crammed into hastily built, uninsulated barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with armed guards. They were asked repeatedly to prove their patriotism. Many second-generation men, Nisei, volunteered for segregated U.S. Army regiments and died serving a country that imprisoned their families. 

In the midst of exile, Japanese Americans found different means of standing against this injustice. Some refused to submit to government efforts to extract unqualified loyalty oaths. Others filed lawsuits protesting the violation of their constitutional rights. 

Some also resisted the dehumanization by simply living. They started schools, published newspapers, ran sports leagues, practiced traditional Japanese crafts, met for Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian worship services, and tended to gardens. Sugimoto taught art classes.

With all this in mind as I look at Sugimoto’s painting and his collection of fruits and vegetables, I am reminded of the prophet Jeremiah giving instructions on how to live in exile. Writing to the displaced Jews in Babylon, Jeremiah writes: “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce….Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.” (Jer. 29:5, 7). 

Even in a land that is not their own, God’s people are called to cultivate good things. This was true for the exiled Jews, it was true for the Japanese American internees, and it remains true for all Christians today, called to live as “strangers and immigrants on earth” (Heb. 11:3). 

Sugimoto himself was a devout Christian, and several other of his paintings make explicit connections between the Japanese American internment and Christ’s suffering. Here, dislocated and laboring in the middle of a bleak Arkansas winter, he seems to resonate with people of Israel, a people forced from their homes, living under unjust rule, and awaiting deliverance. And yet, he knows God’s promise of restoration in Jeremiah 31. He knows that exile will not last forever.

And indeed, in the middle of December 1944, the federal government declared the end of the “mass exclusion.” Japanese Americans would be allowed to return to the West Coast. The Rohwer Outpost, the inmate-run newspaper at Sugimoto’s camp, ran a special edition on December 20, reprinting the government’s announcement. In his painting, though, Sugimoto actually altered the headline, making the point much clearer than the original issue’s more subdued announcement. “Mass Exclusion Lifted!” he jubilantly exclaims.

This reimagined newspaper also lies next to the Christmas issue. I wonder, as he prepared for his third incarcerated Christmas, if Sugimoto heard the messianic prophecies of Isaiah in a new way. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; a light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness…For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Might God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace” (Is. 9:2, 6). Sugimoto believed that this prophecy was completed in the person of Jesus. That fulfillment, in turn, offers a guarantee that Jeremiah’s promise of future restoration from exile will also come to pass. The wrongs Sugimoto and his family experienced would someday be made right.

The federal government’s restitution to internees and their families wouldn’t come until 1990, the year of Sugimoto’s death. Although he fought determinedly for that acknowledgement of wrong-doing for many years, I think he also knew that the euphoric, overflowing renewal described in Jeremiah 31 ultimately points to Christ’s return and the remaking of this broken creation. Immanuel has come and he will come again.

Sugimoto’s painting adopts the Advent posture of waiting in the darkness for hope, pointing to God’s promises for hope of restoration to come. In exile, Sugimoto and others planted gardens. Do we have courage to do the same now?

Photo Courtesy of Japanese American National Museum

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Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Elissa is currently Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections of race, gender, and representation, and explore the potential of art to model and encourage empathy. Website: http://elissa.weichbrodt.org | Instagram: @elissabrodt | Twitter: @elissabrodt