Japantown, San Francisco, Japantown, San Jose, and Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. These are the only three remaining Japantowns left in America, all located on the West Coast. As a Japanese-American born and raised in Northern California, I find it important to learn more about the history behind one of the culturally-rich areas of Japanese immigrants. As a result, I have decided to specifically focus on Japantown, San Francisco.
I have been inspired by the works of Andy Acres and Joseph Cornell, the latter being an artist that worked from the 1930’s to early 1970’s. His signature art form was using shadow boxes to create a dream-like theatre for his curated displays based around theatre, ballets, and the opera. Andy Acres is currently working London-based artist who works in set design and model making, creating highly detailed miniature scenes in custom-made boxes. I have also found inspiration from a graduate exhibition at the San Francisco Center for the Book. The various pieces on display combined the art of book binding with beautifully written poetry to create a wide variety of 3D displays from an unfolding book box to an accordion-style book that folded out to create a kaleidoscope. For my project I will convey the stories of the current residents of Japantown through shadow boxes. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans were forced to leave their homes and enter internment camps in remote locations throughout the United States. They had to prove their loyalty by leaving everything they knew behind, or else they would be considered loyal to Japan instead. However today’s understanding of Japan has been washed over with fascination of Japanese culture, food, and its popular animations. This leads many tourists to the Japantowns of California in the belief that they will “find Japan”. Yet with so few Japantowns, the revenue built off of the tourism helps keep the local shops running. These two contradictory forces of tourism versus cultural preservation and education have been at constant odds for a long time. There is also the matter of passing down the culture and traditions to future Japanese-American generations. With these inspirations and issues in mind, I came up with the idea for my project to be based around shadow boxes that will highlight the voices of the residents of Japantown. I will be interviewing current residents on their views of the issues that I have mentioned before, as well as their ties to Japantown today. From there I will take highlights from the interviews and putting the recordings of them in the shadow box, along with found objects that relate to their conversations. The boxes will play around with the idea of transparency and layers as there are multiple layers to each resident’s story by relying on backlit images behind the foreground of real objects and see through fabrics that are printed with collages based on the resident’s stories.
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AuthorAya Kusumoto is currently in her third year at California College of the Arts based in San Francisco, California. Her main area of interest is in designing sustainable clothing and sourcing new 'sustainable' materials whether they be natural or manmade. She is interested in the intersection of technology and fashion since she is a native to the tech-forward Bay Area of Northern California. She is particularly interested in new technologies such as fermented fibers (Bolt Threads) and biotextiles (ZOA). Aya wants to create sustainable and ethically-made clothing that is both affordable and appealing to her generation of wearers/users. |