Appropriately located in the George Tsutakawa Art Gallery of the Wing Luke Museum, Kamekichi Tokita, Kenjiro Nomura, and Takuichi Fujii’s paintings are memorialized from the 1930s in an exhibit called Side by Side, curated by Barbara Johns, an expert on these artists.
The paintings in the exhibit focus on Seattle’s thriving Nihonmachi, or Japantown, before World War II and the subsequent U.S. government-sanctioned incarceration of Japanese Americans. Avoiding the narrative of Japanese Americans as monolithic victims of the forced removal, Johns proves to the public that the beginning of Japanese American history did not start with Executive Order 9066.
These artists’ paintings often have unique focal points that could have only been chosen by those who knew the city the way these artists did. For instance, half of the Smith Tower might be cut off, but the ground level and the signs above the shops that occupied it would take up most the frame; Tokita and Nomura were Nihonmachi signmakers, and this neighborhood was their home.
These two artists could often be found painting scenes “side by side,” a clear symbol of their own sense of comraderie, as well as that which they shared with their neighborhood. The artists’ focus on the details of the city, like the signs and the textures of the buildings, portrays the beauty of the mundane that was overshadowed by taller downtown buildings — and still do.
Two paintings in particular share a sort of visceral intimacy: Nomura’s detailed and textured “4th Avenue and Yesler Way” from the standing point right above a walking path sits next to a more zoomed in piece by Tokita of a slightly different angle with a Texaco station more in view. They painted these pieces separately, but together, standing on the same hillside.
“I remember that Texaco station. When we rode our bikes down Yesler, if our tires were soft, we’d stop to pump our tires. The station was still there after the war but didn’t last too much longer” said Shokichi Tokita, Tokita’s son.
These paintings of the neighborhood as a thriving part of Seattle are actively juxtaposed with the current-day Chinatown International District’s inclusion on the 2023 National Trust for Historic Preservation list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
“Although this is a sad distinction for our neighborhood, it is a positive step to have this acknowledged and recognized. It will take a concerted effort to sustain and safeguard our community from gentrification and other economic pressures to develop the area. Imagine Seattle without this special neighborhood that we call home,” said Binko Chiong-Bisbee, co-owner of KOBO at Higo.
Another portion of the exhibit is the hallway between the two rooms that houses photographs of Nihonmachi before the war. They give a glimpse into what it felt like to stand exactly in the same place, in a drastically different time — a time when the thriving area had tackle and printing shops and numerous other mom-and-pops that lined the roads, many still unpaved.
“It’s almost like a feeling of homesickness for a time I never experienced,” said Blake Nakatsu, an local artist and Wing Luke staff member.
Johns related this feeling to that of topophilia, the cognitive and emotional connection to a place or environment, but in this case, that of a century ago. The paintings and photographs of a neighborhood so familiar and yet inconceivable to many offer an emotional duality of grief over the vibrant past and hope for the future.
This exhibit is about everything in between. The alleyways, bridges, and liminal spaces that provided unique subjects the artists chose to paint; the love they all had for Nihonmachi that itself is in between all the hubs and freeways of Seattle; and the intrinsic intimacy of simply painting beside one another.
The exhibit runs at the Wing Luke Museum through May 11, 2025.
