Henry Fukuhara 1913 - 2010

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Painting by Henry Fukuhara, "View of Manzanar near Mt. Whitney." When he painted scenes from the camp, Fukuhara focused on symbols such as the guard tower, the entrance gate and the Sierras in the background to create vibrant, not downbeat, images.

I've visited Manzanar and did a few posts about it here, here, and here.

LATimes

Henry Fukuhara, a California watercolorist and teacher who attracted many of the field's most accomplished artists to annual painting workshops at the Manzanar relocation camp in Owens Valley, where he and thousands of other Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died of natural causes Jan. 31 at a nursing home in Yorba Linda, according to his grandson, Paul Niwa. He was 96.

Fukuhara started the Manzanar workshops in 1998, taking participants -- many of whom had been interned at Manzanar -- on painting excursions to various outdoor sites around the camp, including the Alabama Hills and the nearby town of Lone Pine.

In 1941, his family, which owned a retail nursery in Los Angeles, was just beginning to regain its financial footing when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched the United States into World War II. They managed to sell the nursery and store some personal belongings before arriving at Manzanar in April 1942.

By then a husband and father, Fukuhara worked in the camp's drafting department, surveying plots for graves. "Seemed like a joke," he told The Times in 1992, "but that's what we did." He lived in one room with his wife, daughter, parents, brother and sister-in-law.

In 1943, when internees who agreed to move away from the West Coast were permitted to leave the camp, Fukuhara and his family departed for Long Island, N.Y. With his father and brother he started a flower business that prospered over the next four decades.

Fukuhara was not bitter about his Manzanar experience, shrugging it off, he said, "because it's part of war" and "so many young men didn't return." When he painted scenes from the camp, he focused on symbols such as the guard tower, the entrance gate and the Sierras in the background, creating vibrant images.

His Manzanar paintings and workshops were an attempt at reconciliation, his grandson said, "a way to bring others to experience Manzanar . . . and help us find our own significance in the event."

You're a kinder and wiser man than I am, Mr. Fukuhara. Sayonara to another fine representative of the Greatest Generation.