Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in Seattle's Japanese American immigrant community. By the 1930s he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene and allied with the region's progressive artists. On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed Tokita started a diary that he vowed to keep until the war ended. In it he recorded with expressiveness and insight the events, fears, rumors, and restrictions-and his own emotional turmoil-before and during his detention at Minidoka. This beautiful and poignant biography of Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it. It contextualizes Tokita's paintings and diary within the art community and Japanese America and introduces readers to an amazing man who embraced life despite living through challenging and disheartening times.

Born in Japan, acclaimed Seattle artist Kenjiro Nomura (1896-1956) came to the United States as a child of ten, received artistic recognition by age twenty, and in the 1930s became the best-known artist of Japanese descent in the Northwest, his artwork widely exhibited regionally and nationally. Along with more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from the West Coast, Nomura was incarcerated during the war but continued to paint, leaving a visual record grounded in place and circumstance. In postwar years he developed a new abstract style that brought him recognition once again. In Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist, Barbara Johns presents Nomura's life and artistic achievement within their historical context. Her account depicts Seattle as a stronghold of prewar Issei artistic activity, and Nomura's work as providing a meaningful contribution to the history of American art. The book is generously illustrated with artwork tracing Nomura's entire career. David F. Martin, curator of the Cascadia Art Museum, expands the context of Nomura's accomplishment with an account of the artists with whom Nomura associated. This publication is distributed for the Cascadia Art Museum.

Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) left Japan in 1906 to make his home in Seattle, where he established a business, started a family, and began his artistic practice. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the rare find of a large and heretofore unknown collection of art produced during World War II. The centerpiece of the collection is Fujii's illustrated diary that historian Roger Daniels has called "the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration." Barbara Johns presents Takuichi Fujii's life story and his artistic achievements within the social and political context of the time. Sandy Kita, the artist's grandson, provides translations and an introduction to the diary. The Hope of Another Spring is a significant contribution to Asian American studies, American and regional history, and art history.

This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it. Tokita emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in Seattle's Japanese American immigrant community. By the 1930s, he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene. His art embodied the greatest aspects of American Realism and added a personal inflection that is unique and surprising.

On the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, Tokita started a diary that he vowed to keep until the war ended. In it he recorded with great vividness and insight the events, fears, rumors, restrictions, and his own emotional turmoil both in the time leading up to the internment and during his incarceration at Minidoka. Tokita's diary is a rare personal account of this time written as events were unfolding and by a person of maturity and stature.

This book contextualizes Tokita's paintings and diary within the art community and Japanese America. It also introduces us to an amazing man who embraced life despite living through challenging and disheartening times.

Barbara Johns is an art historian and curator. Her previous books include, and "Anne Gould Hauberg: Fired by Beauty."