Kakunen Tsuruoka

Printmaker, painter and antique dealer Tokutaro (Kakunen) Tsuruoka (1892-1977) was born in the Tokyo neighborhood of Ueno on February 27, 1892 and orphaned at the age of four amidst a typhoid epidemic. He immigrated to San Francisco in the 1905 when he was thirteen years old. Soon after arriving in San Francisco, Tsuruoka found work in exchange for room and board with the prominent Asian art importer and antique dealer on Grant Avenue, Takezo “T. Z.” Shiota whose wife, Shizuko (née Tsuruoka), was a cousin of Tokutaro. ^[1] A 1920s census record documents the Tsuruoka as married to Dai Tsuruoka, living at the same residence as the Shiota family, and curiously listed as Shiota's brother-in-law, although the validity of this relationship has not been confirmed. The couple had three children, Matsuko, Shotaro, and Sara (Teiko).

While learning the art dealer and antique business, he began producing using traditional Japanese painting techniques and materials such as ink and watercolor on paper and silk, signing his work under the artist's pseudonym of “Kakunen.” By 1915, he was proficient enough to be included in a folk art festival in San Francisco, sponsored by the YMCA, and listed to do a demonstration of Japanese free-hand drawing. ^[2] Beginning in the mid-1930s, when interest in Japanese woodblock prints was extremely popular, Tsuruoka began creating woodblock prints of flora, fauna, and California landscapes such as the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco City Hall, and Half Dome, in Yosemite, which were printed and published in Japan. In 1918, Shiota purportedly met writer, artist and civil liberties attorney, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, when Wood visited Shiota’s shop. When Wood learned that Tsuruoka was not paid only board wages, he encouraged him to take Tsuruoka to court, which he did, winning a settlement that gave him the funds to set up his own antique and art dealership. ^[3]

During World War II, Tsuruoka and his family were incarcerated by the United States government at the Poston, Arizona camp from Reedley, California, presumably because the family moved outside the first restricted military zones to avoid evacuation, only to be rounded up anyway. While at Poston, he taught in the Poston art classes and painted haunting watercolor images of the surrounding desert landscape and flora, usually devoid of the barracks, guard towers or people. He also made craft objects of inlaid wood and set up craft exhibitions to display the work in camp. ^[4] On March 10, 1943, the Poston Chronicle newspaper reported on the opening of the Mojave Room in Poston III (located at 310 5-A), an installation which featured sixteen paintings lining the room illustrating “Rows of lighted barracks in the twilight, Roku Two as seen in the mist of an early morning, and striking mesquite trees." Kakunen was referred to as the designer of the 'famous Mohave Room' and painter of sixteen paints that lined the walls. ^[5] which was also decorated with “other art and craft work, crepe paper flowers, cards and articles made by the sewing department..." ^[6] Five of Tsuruoka's watercolors were presented as a gift to the camp administrator Wade Head and were included in the “Relocation Center Art Exhibit” in May 1943, that was subsidized by the Friends Center in Cambridge, Massachusettes. One of these paintings, “Poston After Sundown” won a special award with a $20 cash prize. These five watercolors are now in the collection at the Arizona Memory Project in the Arizona State Library.

After the war, he and his family moved to the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City, where he began a small business manufacturing artificial flowers, a skill that his wife Dai had perfected while incarcerated in Poston. His other businesses included Judy’s Arts and Gifts (Judy was Dai's 'American' name) and the Daruma Art Framing Store and Gallery. ^[7]

He died in 1979 in New York. Today, surviving Tsuruoka's paintings from Poston are in the collections of the Arizona Historical Society and the Arizona Memory Project in the Arizona State Library.