Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

'Make Art, Not War" – Jimmy Tsutomo Mirikitani & Linda Hattendorf in THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI

"Make Art, not War" – Jimmy Tsutomo Mirkitani

THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI, now playing in Tokyo (Kaori Shoji's review and listings at this Japan Times link) captured my attention last year, while researching art and literature by Japanese-Americans incarcerated during the Second World War.
The film tells the story of visual artist Jimmy Tsutomo Mirikitani, who was imprisoned in the same haunted landscape, Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum security prison in the northern California desert, as psychologist and filmmaker, Satsuki Ina.

Not suprisingly, Mirikitani's life has parallels with the Inas. As with Ina's father, Mirikitani was a keibei, a person born in the United States and educated in Japan. While in Japan during the nightmare 1930's when violent militarists took over the government, both were sent home to the United States by their families who were fearful that their sons would end up as Japanese Imperial soldiers. Mirikitani returned to study art, and was living with his sister, Kazuko, in Seattle, when they were forcibly relocated, to separate prison camps, losing touch with one another for sixty years. As with Ina's parents, Mirikitani renounced his American citizenship under psychological duress, and was held, without charge, with hundreds of other renunciants after the war. While Satuski Ina turned to narrative filmmaking to express her experiences, Mirikitani did so through visual art, which he resumed after his release from forced labor at at food processing plant in New Jersey:

"Jimmy finally arrived in New York City in the early 1950's to attempt to resume his art career. When an art professor found him sleeping in Columbia University's library, Jimmy was referred to the New York Buddhist Church where he was provided with room, board, and training as a cook. For years he traveled the East Coast to do seasonal work in resorts, summer camps, and country clubs. While cooking at a restaurant on Long Island, he met Jackson Pollock.

"Jimmy's US citizenship was finally restored in 1959, but by then he had moved so often that the government's letter never reached him. Eventually Jimmy became a live-in cook on Park Avenue. But when his employer died in the late 1980's, Jimmy was suddenly without a home or a job. Within a year, he was living in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, selling his artwork to survive. He met Linda Hattendorf in Soho in 2001. She helped him apply for Social Security, SSI, and housing benefits, and in 2002 he moved into an assisted-living retirement center run by Village Care of New York. Later that year, he was reunited with his sister Kazuko for the first time in 60 years."

Even while homeless, living on the streets of New York City, he continued to do his art, selling paintings held down by rocks to prevent them from being blown away by the wind, at street corners in Washington Square Park and in Soho. Japanese American artist Roger Shimomura, incarcerated as a child, wrote about his first encounter with Mirikitani, posted at New York University's Asia/Pacific/American Studies Program & Institute's website:

"Despite the extreme differences in our life situations, we bonded immediately as two artists of Japanese ethnicity who were both incarcerated during the war, and chose to openly express this in our artwork. Jimmy's work encompasses a variety of themes. Most poignant are his drawings that reflect his incarceration at Tule Lake, the Atomic bomb disaster at Hiroshima that claimed the lives of his mother's family, and the World Trade Center disaster, perilously close to his street home. Some of the more popular themes that paid the bills during the street years are the compositions dealing with cats, tigers, flowers, forests, fruits, and vegetables. The third category is his collage work, in some ways the most interesting in that it reflects the widest variety of his encounters with his personal history, both past and recent. It has been a special experience knowing Jimmy. His life serves as a testimony to the basic art making process: you make one piece, and then you go on to make the next piece. Occasionally, maybe you'll sell something. But this process can be accomplished without invitations, opening receptions, interviews, or dinner parties. Besides these lessons, I have appreciated how Jimmy, through his amazing life stories, his unquenchable thirst for making art, and his indomitable spirit, has brought together so many different types of people."

Drawn to the creative power of his work –"whimsical cats, bleak internment camps, and the angry red flames of the atomic bomb" – filmmaker Linda Hattendorf befriended Mirikitani and returned to hear his stories:

"...childhood picnics in Hiroshima, ancient samurai ancestors, lost American citizenship, Jackson Pollock, Pearl Harbor, thousands of Americans imprisoned in WWII desert camps, a boy who loved cats... As winter warms to spring and summer, she begins to piece together the puzzle of Mirikitani's past. One thing is clear from his prolific sidewalk displays: he has survived terrible traumas and is determined to make his history visible through his art."

After the September 11 attack on New York, unable to turn away after witnessing Mirikitani choking on the toxic smoke from the aftermath, Hattendorf invited him to stay in her small apartment. She helped him through social welfare system and to reconnect with his family:

"In this uncharted landscape, the two navigate the maze of social welfare, seek out family and friends, and research Jimmy's painful past – finding eerie parallels to events unfolding around them in the present.

"Discovering that Jimmy is related to Janice Mirikitani, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, is the first in a series of small miracles along the road to recovery.

"Jimmy's story comes full circle when he travels back to the West Coast to reconnect with a community of former internees at a healing pilgrimage to the site of his internment camp Tule Lake, and to see the sister he was separated from half a century ago.
"Blending beauty and humor with tragedy and loss, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of art. A heart-warming affirmation of humanity that will appeal to all lovers of peace, art, and cats."

Mirikitani's and Hattendorf's spontaneous and genuine confirmation of each other (more on this at this Pacific Citizen interview) reminds me of what Martin Buber wrote about – that we can only become who we really are in mutuality, by being open to another as "the particular real person who confronts me...in his wholeness, unity and uniqueness." This film reveals the power of "seeing" and opening up to the unique person in others, and the life-affirmative and life-changing power of trusting dialogue that can flow from this kind of interaction. This film also reveals the healing power of art that springs from the soul, emphatically demonstrating "I'm here – This is what I experienced – This is how I see things." Art like this has kept countless artists from the precipices of the existential abyss, and has done the same for those who can "see" what this kind of art is about. This is a profound story about the incredible damage that depersonalization can wreak upon people and their lives, and a beautiful story of survival, mutual affirmation, creativity, and miracles at so many levels.

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