Archie Miyatake: The Son of Manzanar's Secret Photographer

Written from Archie Miyatake's oral history interviews.

A family of photographers

• Archie's grandfather, Junryo Miyatake, came from Zentsuji, Japan, around 1902, opened a confectionery in Los Angeles, and retired to Japan around 1925.
• His father, Toyo Miyatake (born 1896), came around 1915, married Hiro (born 1904) in 1922, and opened his own photo studio in 1923. He won international awards for his artistic portraits of dancers, actors and others. Hiro hand-tinted photographs and ran the business.
• Atsufumi Archie was born in Little Tokyo in 1924, followed by Bob (1930), Richard (1936) and Minnie (1938).

When Archie was nine, the family sailed for Japan to help his ailing grandfather, who died during the voyage. Toyo came back within a year; Archie, his mother and brother stayed two more years. Classmates in Japan called him "Yankee," and he was glad to return. He grew up in Boyle Heights, with white, Latino and Japanese American friends.

Pearl Harbor

Archie could not believe the radio news on December 7, 1941 — he had thought Japan and the United States were friends. That day his father was photographing a wedding when the FBI arrested guests at the reception and led them away in their tuxedos. Toyo was not arrested.

Manzanar

The family went to Manzanar with the people of Little Tokyo on May 9, 1942, renting their house — furniture and all — to a doctor; everything was still there when they came back.

• On the train they were told to pull the shades. From Lone Pine, buses took them to camp. "What a desolate place," Archie thought. Dust was blowing.
• They stuffed canvas bags with hay for mattresses. Seven people shared their room, including a cousin who had volunteered early to help set up the camp.
• School began with students sitting on the floor, but improved. Archie took carpentry and built benches for the outdoor theater and furniture for the family's room.

The secret camera

One day Toyo called Archie inside: "As a photographer I have a responsibility to record camp life so that this kind of thing will never happen again." He had smuggled in a lens and film holders, and would have a carpenter build a box around them — a secret camera, though cameras were forbidden to Japanese Americans. Archie feared his father would be caught and taken away. Toyo shot early in the morning when few people were about, and a white friend smuggled film in.

In time people wanted family portraits — children were leaving for jobs or the Army, and parents feared they might never see them again. The camp director allowed Toyo to open a studio, first in the Block 30 ironing room and later in a mess hall. It employed about six people, Archie and his mother among them, and charged little.

• Archie and a friend were disc jockeys for camp dances. "Don't Fence Me In" was a hit. At a dance he met Take Maeda, whom he married in 1949; they had two sons.
• The loyalty questionnaire made him bitter — imprisoned, and then asked to serve. At a hearing he told the director he would swear loyalty to the United States and renounce any allegiance to Japan, but would not join the Army because he did not believe in killing.

After the war

• Archie was on Broadway in Los Angeles the day the war ended, when strangers began screaming, cheering and kissing.
• As the camp emptied he worried about the old people with nowhere to go; he recalled two elderly bachelors, one of whom took his own life.
• In September 1945 he and his father spent two days photographing people and their crafts at the Poston and Gila River camps for a book, Beauty Behind Barbed Wire.
• In November 1945 they returned to Los Angeles. They had come with two suitcases each; they left with three truckloads. Housing was scarce: they turned part of the garage into rooms, and for a while about 30 people shared their little house, eating in shifts.

Toyo died in 1979, Hiro in 1972. His portraits were outstanding, Archie said, because he cared about people — sometimes he talked so long he forgot to take the picture.

What amazed Archie most was his father's foresight: while everyone else worried about what would happen to them, Toyo was sneaking in a lens, knowing how much his record would matter. Archie devoted himself to keeping his father's work alive. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he noted, Middle Eastern people could easily have been rounded up as Japanese Americans were; he hoped Manzanar National Historic Site would help prevent that by teaching what happened.

Sources

Based on "Atsufumi Archie Miyatake," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families, drawn from his oral history interviews; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers." Toyo Miyatake's photographs are not reproduced here.