Toyo Miyatake: The Eyes of Manzanar

Portrait of Toyo Miyatake who smuggled his lenses into camp, building a box around each to make homemade cameras, and took over 40,000 images. (Photograph by Ansel Adams. Manzanar, 1943. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Toyo Miyatake couldn’t hold it in anymore.

His 17-year-old son Atsufumi, better known as Archie, was outside their barracks at Manzanar, hanging out with a friend, when Toyo stepped to the door and called him in.

Archie thought he was in trouble. Instead, his father sat him down and took him into his confidence. “I have to show you something,” he said.

Toyo pulled out a wooden box about the size of a lunch pail. He opened it to reveal a camera. An unusual camera, Frankensteined together out of parts and pieces, but unmistakably a camera.

In the hands of a Japanese American after Pearl Harbor, a camera was contraband, hardly less of a weapon of war than a rifle or a bayonet. Yet months earlier Toyo had smuggled a lens, shutter, and film holder into Manzanar inside a bulky winter coat. He spent his first weeks at the camp fashioning those components into a functioning device.

Archie studied the camera and grew alarmed. This could mean trouble. But Toyo didn’t waver. “As a photographer, I have a responsibility…to keep a record of what’s going on here, so this kind of thing will never happen again.”

A significant part of that visual record was baseball—games and teams seen from the unique perspective of an artist, an inmate, and a proud Japanese American.

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Toyo was born in 1895 in Zentsuji, a small town in southwestern Japan. His father, Junryo, immigrated to the US and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he opened a confectionery shop in Little Tokyo in 1907. Toyo, his mother, and two brothers joined Junryo two years later.

Miyatake dropped out of school to help his father in the store, but he had a different vision for himself. Oil painting was his first love, but his parents insisted that was no way to make a living. They weren’t over the moon about photography either, but it beat painting at least. Although he only earned $3 a week, Miyatake somehow managed to squirrel away $26 to purchase his first camera.1 When he needed a little extra scratch to support his new passion, he would head up to Fresno to pick grapes.2

For a young man looking to forge a career as a photographer, Little Tokyo was a great spot. It was home to a vibrant avant-garde artistic scene with photographers everywhere you turned. Miyatake took lessons from respected portrait photographer Harry Shigeta and the modernist master Edward Weston before opening his own studio in 1923.3

There were two sides to Miyatake’s work. One consisted of the workaday jobs that photographers take to pay the bills: wedding photos, family portraits, commercial projects. Unlike many of his competitors in Little Tokyo, he spoke English fluently, which helped him get business not just from his Japanese neighbors but from White clients, as well.4

“His métier consisted of poetic abstractions. His landscapes captured no humans, just the delicate shadows of bushes, falling like brushstrokes over snow-covered hills. The figures in his Little Tokyo cityscapes exist only as silhouettes. His dancers, gestures of shadow and motion.”7

Although Miyatake had a wife and family, with three sons and a daughter,8 it was photography that became his obsession—seven days a week, year-round, nonstop. Archie remembered that his father couldn’t leave his work behind, even on the occasional family day trip to Mount Wilson. “Even then he would have his camera with him,” Archie said. “He’d park the car, you’d look around for him, and he [was] gone. You’d never see him until about four or five o’clock…All that time he is roaming around taking photographs of scenery.”9

On the morning of December 7, 1941, everything changed. Toyo and Archie were headed across the First Street Bridge on the way to photograph a wedding when the car radio blasted the news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Although the wedding went off without a hitch, FBI agents crashed the reception in search of several guests of Japanese descent who now were perceived as the enemy; they found them and dragged them off in their tuxedos.10

That time soon came for all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. In May 1942, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans, the Miyatakes were dispatched to Manzanar—assigned identification number 9975. Families were allowed to bring just two suitcases of personal effects. Everything else was sold, destroyed, or left behind. Many people lost their homes and some of Toyo’s artist friends lost their life’s work.

But not Toyo. He was ingenious, and he had connections. He was also, relatively speaking, lucky. A few years earlier, he had begun photographing the graduating classes at White Memorial Hospital, not far from his home. At the last minute, he was able to rent his place to one of the medical students. The Miyatakes left the pots and pans and furniture for their tenant to use, crammed most of their personal belongings in the four-car garage, and moved some of Toyo’s larger photographic equipment into storage. Each year when the lease ran out, the student living there found a new tenant, which guaranteed the Miyatake home remained in good hands for the duration of the war.

***

Once ensconced at Manzanar, Toyo set about the risky business of making that forbidden camera operational. He enlisted a carpenter to build a small box with a hinged lid so he could carry the camera without attracting notice. Meanwhile, a machinist, Carl Kurata, customized a piece of drain pipe and attached it to the lens to allow Miyatake to adjust the focus.11

The box itself was a work of art. It was composed of multiple species of wood of contrasting tones, meticulously planed, glued, and lacquered with beveled edges and lap joints. Whoever built this did things right.

“In the Japanese culture, when you take on a project, you make something awesome,” explained Toyo’s grandson Alan Miyatake. “I have a couple of end tables that were made in Manzanar, and they’re really nicely done. That was the pride that they had in their work.”12

But no camera could work without a steady supply of film. Those arrangements required a degree of derring-do and skullduggery worthy of an action thriller, but it was no hill for a climber like Miyatake.

California Hardware, which had a contract with the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to deliver supplies to Manzanar, operated a store in Little Tokyo. By chance, it was one of Miyatake’s early clients and he remained on good terms with one particular salesman, who was more than willing to help when he learned of his old friend’s plight.13

Each month when the salesman visited Manzanar to take the WRA’s order, he hung his jacket in a hallway. The camp’s police officers, who were incarcerees themselves, waited until the coast was clear and then moved in and rooted through the pockets. In there was film that the man from California Hardware had obtained from a dealer who also was in on the scheme. The officers stashed the film in their cars and hustled it off to Toyo’s barracks, although how Miyatake paid for it remains a mystery.

With that, he was finally able to prowl the grounds of Manzanar, mostly at dawn or dusk, documenting scenes of life behind barbed wire. He developed his photos in a laundry room that he converted into a makeshift darkroom, working through the wee hours so no one would catch on.

Eventually, someone caught on.

When camp director Ralph Merritt got wind of what Miyatake was doing, he surely considered confiscating the camera. Many people in his position would have done more than that. Instead, he became a most unlikely co-conspirator.

Merritt appreciated photography. He was good friends with Ansel Adams through their membership in the Sierra Club,14 and more importantly, Merritt and Miyatake had a mutual friend in Edward Weston, who had written Merritt asking after his former student. In the mid-1920s, Miyatake had arranged two successful exhibitions of his mentor’s work in Little Tokyo at a time when Weston’s career was on the rocks. He never forgot the favor.

In part due to Weston’s pleas, Merritt permitted Miyatake to become part of Manzanar Cooperative Enterprises, which was set up in October 1942 to provide detainees an opportunity to earn money through small businesses like a general store, a barbershop, and a laundry. In April 1943, Miyatake was announced as the official camp photographer, complete with a grand opening celebration in the ironing room of Block 30.15

A little homemade box camera wasn’t enough for that kind of work; he needed real equipment. As the story goes, Merritt lied to the WRA, warning them that the storage unit that held Miyatake’s gear was going out of business, so it needed to be shipped to Manzanar to save it from the landfill.

Miyatake’s official status came with absurd constraints. He was allowed to stage his photos, but to comply with the letter of the law, the shutter had to be clicked by someone not of Japanese descent. First, Merritt brought in a recent photography school graduate for this role, but he stormed off after Toyo chewed him out for accidentally exposing a roll of film.16

Plan B involved hiring the wife of a White camp employee, who sat in Miyatake’s studio for hours, monitoring him while he snapped photos. At the end of the day, she was to confiscate his lens and take it home so he couldn’t shoot anything unsupervised. One woman after another quit, bored senseless. Merritt soon figured, to hell with it; ask no questions, hear no lies. He told Miyatake, off the record and in so many words, that he was free to conduct his work however he pleased.17 “The camp director was a good man,” Miyatake later said.18

Toyo Miyatake family, Manzanar Relocation Center. (Photograph by Ansel Adams, Manzanar, 1943. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)