Shiuko Sakai was a beloved elder in the Japanese American community, a world traveler, a decorated civilian administrator for the US army, and a painter. Once Shiuko moved back to the West Coast in retirement, she volunteered as a librarian and archivist at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. Her passing earlier this year was a huge loss to the community, and we are so grateful that she generously donated a collection of over 700 documents, artifacts, and photographs to the museum in 2008 so that we can continue to remember her life through her archives. These watercolors—made when she was a young adult in Minidoka—are on view for a limited time in our library.
Shiuko didn’t consider herself a great painter (we beg to differ); it was just something that she enjoyed doing. Seeing the paintings and hearing her words gives a vivid picture of both the oppressive conditions and the beauty of nature that she experienced in camp:
“I liked to paint, so I just looked out the window, maybe look out and see the canal, then go out there and paint a little canal scene. Or…I’d see the barbed wire fence, I’d see a guard tower in the distance…part of the barrack next to me. So, I have a corner of that. Then it was, I think, close to sundown, and the sky was bright orange, it was pretty. So, I painted that. And other times I’d look out where the canal was, and I’d see beautiful skies. I didn’t paint that, but I just liked to look around and see different things that I could paint.”
The paintings on view depict the scenes that she describes above, plus a few more related to her time at Minidoka and the Puyallup Assembly Center.
Near the end of WWII, Shiuko was one of a handful of young women who received leave clearance to work outside of Minidoka, and she moved to New York City to be a secretary for the National Lutheran Church. After the war, she worked for the US Army in Tokyo. During that time, she travelled extensively across Japan, taking photos along the way and capturing the destruction left by the war as well as communities working to rebuild.
Images from left: Shiuko on a tour of Kasuga Shrine in Nara, Japan, March 1947. Gift of Shiuko Sakai. Lily Kajiwara and Shiuko Sakai at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, where they both volunteered, 2014.
She eventually moved back to the States to work at the Pentagon for the Army Intelligence Service, where she received many awards from the Department of the Army for Meritorious Civilian Service. She continued to work there until her retirement from Federal Service.
(Quote from oral interview, Densho Digital Archive, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection.)