What These Relics From World War II Incarceration Camps Can Teach Us About Resilience
These wooden carved birds suggest a shared longing: escape.
By the time Junso Kawamoto entered Arizona’s Gila River “relocation center” in 1942, he’d shed nearly all his possessions—but not his copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, which he consulted while whittling exquisite wooden birds during his family’s three-year confinement. Carving intricate bird pins was a popular pastime among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent forced into camps during World War II, says Delphine Hirasuna, the author of two books about the crafts created there. Art, she says, was embraced by those confined as a means of enduring injustice with patience and dignity—a concept called gaman in Japanese. As dehumanizing as the camps were, Hirasuna suggests, birds might have represented “the ability to fly beyond all that.”
When photographer Haruka Sakaguchi encountered Kawamoto’s birds, the National Geographic Explorer was struck by their artistry and moved to think of how carving bird after bird must have channeled the craftsman’s yearning for freedom. “They weren’t just objects he made,” she says. To Kawamoto’s seven children, the pins later became treasures—tokens of a father imagining, perhaps, his imprisoned family taking flight.
