See Gambatte! Before It Closes

It’s almost your last chance to see the exhibition Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit. Closing April 28, the exhibition features contemporary photos taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Paul Kitagaki Jr. displayed next to images shot 75 years ago by War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Clem Albers during World War II. Each pairing in the exhibition features the same individuals or their direct descendants as the subject matter. Paul spent years tracking down the formerly unknown subjects in WRA-era photos. After countless hours at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and through tips from family, friends, and the public, he found more than 60 individuals or their descendants to photograph. One such pair of photos in the exhibition features Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa.

Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa was two years old in 1942 when she was photographed waiting at Los Angeles’s Union Station, not far from her home in Little Tokyo, for a train that would take her and her mother to the Manzanar concentration camp. In the photo, she’s holding a partially eaten apple in one hand and a tiny purse in the other. Peeking out from her corduroy jacket is is the paper family identification tags worn by those forcibly removed, serving as a reminder of their second class status during this time. Photographer Clem Albers captured the far-off look in her eyes–a look of confusion and uncertainty. This now-famous photo has become representative of innocence lost during that time in history.

In 2005, Paul Kitagaki Jr. traveled with Yukiko on her first visit to Manzanar since her incarceration. He took her photo in a field near the camp’s Block 2, where she had once lived. Among the last of the incarcerees released, she and her mother left Manzanar in October 1945 for Cleveland, Ohio, where another Japanese American family sponsored them. Her mother went on to work as a cleaning woman and later as a seamstress. Yukiko went to Lake Forest College in Illinois and then graduate school at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Today Yukiko Okinaga Llewellyn (née Hayakawa) is a retired Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Registered Student Organizations at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she worked with Asian student groups and helped establish the university’s Asian Studies program. She taught about the incarceration experience and was active in the redress movement.In fact, in the fall of 1986, she wrote to her congressman, Representative Terry Bruce, and spoke with his staff about the movement. Through her persistence, the “little girl with the apple” helped win Rep. Bruce’s support. To this day, Yukiko continues to educate others about what happened to Japanese Americans in the 1940s in the hope that it doesn’t happen again to someone else.

To learn more about this exhibition and to see additional exhibition photos visit http://www.janm.org/exhibits/gambatte/

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