Charles Isamu Morimoto

Watercolor and oil painter who exhibited frequently before the war and taught portrait and life painting classes while incarcerated at Manzanar and Tule Lake during World War II.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Charles Isamu Morimoto (1903-53) immigrated with his mother to the United States in 1916 at age thirteen, following his father, who had ventured to California earlier and began living and working in Long Beach, California. After graduating from Pasadena High School, he won a scholarship to Otis Art Institute (1925-30), where he earned much praise for his work and received rave reviews while winning many local competitions. During this time he also studied at the Art Students League (1928) with numerous other Nisei artists under Stanley Macdonald-Wright, whose influence is apparent in Morimoto's work. Of Morimoto's work in the 1929 Younger Painters exhibition, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote, “Charles Morimoto goes the furthest toward abstraction with his three designs evolved from figures.” ^[1] In 1929, he won the Huntington Assistance Prize at Otis.

In 1931, Isamu returned to Japan with his parents, who had achieved enough financial success to return to Hiroshima. He met and married Kibei Shizuye Doi around 1931 in Japan and returned to the United States, where they briefly settled in a residential hotel in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. The couple subsequently had two daughters, Miyoko and Keiko. ^[2] Unable to pursue a commercial art career, Morimoto became a window designer for the Owl Drug Store chain.

After the issuance of Executive Order 9066 , the Morimotos were incarcerated at the Manzanar concentration camp. Isamu chose to volunteer" early and arrived at Manzanar in March 1942. With the support of the Hollywood Congregational church, who offered to store furniture and personal belongings for the Morimotos, Shizue and her daughters followed Isamu to Manzanar in early April. At Manzanar, he was able to return to his painting practice and taught classes on abstractions and figures in 1943. He exhibited his work at the Visual Education Museum along with fellow artists Henry Fukuhara, Toyo Miyatake, Kango Takamura, and George Okazaki, and others, in May 1943. In February of 1943, while Morimoto was teaching still-life and life study art classes and painting scenes of Manzanar that documented the lives of the inmates during the early period of incarceration, the War Relocation Authority issued a loyalty questionnaire that all inmates over seventeen were required to answer. Based on his responses to the questionnaire, Morimoto and others were deemed "disloyal" by the government and segregated at Tule Lake concentration camp, where he again taught art classes and painted landscapes of the area surrounding the camp. His daughters, Miyoko Mizuki and Keiko Kano, recalled that during this difficult time they and others were taught about Japan and how wonderful it would be to return when the war was over—an obvious ploy to rid this country of some "undesirable" aliens. ^[3] Morimoto ultimately decided to return to Japan with his family to his hometown of Hiroshima in December 1945, even though many parts of the city were destroyed by the atomic bomb. He worked as an interpreter for the occupation forces at Kure military base, near Hiroshima, and also taught art to U.S. military officers' wives and children. When a cultural center opened in Hiroshima, he was hired there as a commercial artist. ^[4] His daughter Miyoko returned to the United States to attend bible school in 1952. In the remaining years of his life, Morimoto taught art classes to the Australian Occupational Forces and produced a number of abstract works. He died on November 8, 1953.

Seven years after his death, his family returned to the United States and have attempted to locate Morimoto's prewar works that were allegedly stored in a Los Angeles church, but have been unsuccessful in finding them. ^[5] Many of his wartime drawings and paintings are in the collection at the Manzanar National Historic Site collection.