Chikaji Kawakami

Chikaji Kawakami (1882-1949) was a plein-air watercolor painter who produced a body of work reflecting life at the Topaz concentration camp in Utah, and taught at the Topaz Art School .

Issei artist Chikaji Kawakami (1882-1949) was born in Kagoshima, Japan, where he attended art school and adopted the name "Nanpo" (south side). ^[1] On December 17, 1904, he immigrated to San Francisco, California at age 22, via the S.S. Mongolia, from China. ^[2] He established himself in Berkeley, Alameda , and Oakland in the East Bay region, where he worked in a motorcycle repair shop and in a laundry and dry-cleaning business. ^[3] He married his first wife, Yono, in 1905, ^[4] who was a private practice doctor, and had two daughters, Eva and Takyo, and two sons, Iwao and Yukio. ^[5] Yono died in 1920 of unknown causes, and he remarried to Matsu Kawakami, an English editor for a Japanese newspaper. He and Matsu had seven children together: James Chikaharu, Umeko Mae, Frank, Takako, Jack Chikashi, Joe, and Lily. ^[6] Matsu died in Berkeley in 1933, leaving Kawakami a widower again.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan on December 7, 1941 , two of Kawakami's sons tried to volunteer for the U.S. Army, but were denied due to their race. ^[7] At the age of 60, Kawakami was incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center and the concentration camp at Topaz, Utah with the six youngest children from his marriage with Matsu, who ranged from ages 12-19 years old. ^[8] His two sons from his previous marriage to Yono (Iwao and Frank) were also detained at Topaz. At Topaz, Kawakami reignited his interest in art, documenting scenes from daily life at the concentration camps through dozens of sketches, paintings, and sumi-e ink drawings, using a piece of slate he found in the desert as a suzuri inking stone. ^[9] Beginning in mid-January 1944, he taught watercolor classes at the Topaz Art School. ^[10] Kawakami befriended Ella Honderich, a Swedish immigrant artist whose husband, Walter, managed the Topaz Co-Op, and thereby lived in the camp administration section. From 1942-1945, Ella Honderich created roughly 80 drawings of daily life at Topaz, including a portrait of Kawakami painting inside his barrack entitled "The Artist, Mr. Kawakami, at Work." ^[11] According to a 2005 interview with Kawakami's son Joe, Honderich gave his father her dog when she left Topaz, and that Kawakami humorously painted the family's barrack address 12-4-D and brown eyeglasses on the dog. ^[12] The majority of Kawakami's extant watercolor paintings from camp are in the California plein air style of landscape painting, and depict outdoor scenes of the broad expansive skies, clouds, barracks, and other buildings at Topaz, surrounded by the stark Sevier Desert. One self portrait that survived the war depicts Kawakami in formal kimono, posing with a biwa, which suggests that he might have played this traditional, short-necked lute in camp, maintaining a practice of this Japanese cultural art despite the War Relocation Authority's emphasis on assimilation and Americanization.

Kawakami's poet and journalist son Iwao also lived at Topaz with his then-wife, poet Toyo Suyemoto, and worked as an editor and writer for the Topaz Times newspaper . Iwao published a volume of poetry, "The Parents and Other Poems," in 1947 by the (then) newly-founded Nichi Bei Times , where he worked as a sports editor and columnist. ^[13]

After his release from Topaz, Kawakami settled in Chicago, Illinois and it is unknown if he continued to paint and draw. He died on February 3, 1949 in San Francisco, California at age 67. ^[14] His artwork was included posthumously in the seminal art exhibition, " The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945 ," in 1992. A collection of 87 of Kawakami's works on paper was donated to the Monterey Museum of Art in 2023. ^[15] From August 22-December 15, 2024, the Monterey Museum of Art hosted an exhibit of his paintings, titled "Under the Guard Tower: The Watercolors of Chikaji Kawakami."