Toyo miyatake biography for kids

The father of the family pictured, Toyo Miyatake, was also a photographer. “Manzanar was a devil’s playground,” said Fukiko Elisabeth Komatsu, imprisoned with her mother and siblings, “and the dust storms came through at 60-miles an hour to make our lives even more harsh and miserable.” Nor did Miyatake live at the Tule Lake concentration camp, the prison for the radicals, which Konrad Aderer’s documentary Enemy Alien (2011) calls the Guantánamo Bay of the Japanese American incarceration experience.

Akemi Ookas, the daughter of one of the boys, reconvened the three subjects, now in their eighties, for the 2017 documentary Three Boys Manzanar, a project not unlike Lee’s 2014 restaging of Andrew J. Russell’s 1869 golden spike photograph—taken in Utah to commemorate the completion of the transcontinental railway—to include descendants of Chinese rail workers.

If the boys stood outside looking in, this meant Miyatake positioned himself inside the prison.

Both he and the photographer Corky Lee were forced by Pacific wars and spatial segregation into becoming community archivists, but they traveled in opposite directions. Additional primary sources, children’s literature,  lesson plans, and resource guides offer suggestions to extend learning with classroom activities that connect to the episode.

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They are testing the boundary. 

While it is tempting to reduce Miyatake’s photographs to documentation, Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire was more constructed than it appears, the scholar Jasmine Alinder writes: the boys actually stood outside the camp and looked in. Cameras were prohibited, so Miyatake snuck in a lens and fashioned a wooden box into a body for his surreptitious camera.

He spent the remainder of his life photographing Little Tokyo. His métier consisted of poetic abstractions. His landscapes captured no humans, just the delicate shadows of bushes, falling like brushstrokes over snow-covered hills. While Lange’s images are generally seen as better than Adams’s, both had one thing in common. When viewing the colonial archive, we often search for how oppressed people understood their own predicament.

Shocked by this brazen declaration, my new acquaintance pointed out that he was gay himself, and the children of immigrants. In Citizen 13660 (1946), Miné Okubo writes that the prisoners at the Topaz camp in Utah “went wild with excitement” over a snowball fight. A guard tower stands behind them.

The episode is designed for K-5 children, and is accompanied by a Teachers Guide.

The Teachers Guide includes curricular connections to NCSS standards and the C3 framework.

He courted his wife by taking her picture, yet his most libidinous portrait shows Michio Ito, the charismatic performer who danced alongside Martha Graham and inspired W. B. Yeats’s Noh theater experiments. There, prisoners were shackled in the camp stockade, shot at by battalions of tanks, or simply executed in broad daylight.

In a photograph for the 1944–45 Manzanar yearbook, a hand holds up pliers, positioned as if to sever the barbed wire slicing the background. When the war ended and the camps opened, some, rather counterintuitively, did not want to leave.