The Life of Shiro Miyazaki: An Itinerant Artist of the 1930S Through His Letters

By Shu Miyazaki

This book is about the never ending trials and tribulations Shiro Miyazaki encountered during his short years remaining in his life. These are covered in his letters. This book contains 89 letters he wrote to two artist friends living in Seattle during these eight years . The letters were preserved by George Tsutakawa, who later became a professor of Fine Arts at the University of Washington and Dr. William S. Gamble, who later became a professor of Fine Arts as well as Art Education at Michigan State University. In these letters, he opens his heart, mind and soul, forever think of how he can continue his art studies and become a better artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781426979491

Shu Miyazaki

Shu Miyazaki was born on December 12, 1925. He graduated Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Waseda University School of Science & Engineering in Tokyo, Japan, in 1952. He’s now retired and currently lives in Woodridge, Illinois, with his wife of 53 years, Lynn Miyazaki.

Book preview

THE LIFE OF

SHIRŌ MIYAZAKI

An Itinerant Artist of the 1930s

Through His Letters

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© Copyright 2012 Shu Miyazaki.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4269-7948-4 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4269-7949-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011912392

Trafford rev. 01/11/2012

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Contents

Dedications

Forward

Introduction

Letter #1

Letter #2

Postscript

Letter #3

Letter #4

Letter #5

Letter #6

Letter #7

Letter #8

Letter #9

Letter #10

Letter #11

Letter #12

Letter #13

Letter #14

Letter #15

Letter #16

Letter #17

Letter #18

Letter #19

Letter #20

Letter #21

Letter #22

Letter #23

Letter #24

Letter #25

Letter #26

Letter #27

Letter #28

Letter #29

Letter #30

Letter #31

Letter #32

Letter #33

Letter #34

Letter #35

Letter #36

Letter #37

Letter #38

Letter #39

Letter #40

Letter #41

Letter #42

Letter #43

Letter #44

Letter #45

Letter #46

Letter #47

Letter #48

Letter #49

Letter #50

Letter #51

Letter #52

Letter #53

Letter #54

Letter #55

Letter #56

Letter #57

Letter #58

Letter #59

Letter #60

Letter #61

Letter #62

Letter #63

Letter #64

Letter #65

Letter #66

Letter #67

Letter #68

Letter #69

Letter #70

Letter #71

Letter #72

Letter #73

Letter #74

Letter #75

Letter #76

Letter #77

Letter #78

Letter #79

Letter #80

Letter #81

Letter #82

Letter #83

Letter #84

Letter #85

Letter #86

Letter #87

Letter #88

Letter #89

Postscript

Appendix I

Postscript

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Appendix V

Appendix VI

Appendix VII

Appendix VIII

Appendix IX

Dedications

This book is dedicated to the following five persons with gratitude from the bottom of my heart.

First and foremost, to the memory of my brother, Shirō Miyazaki, a struggling artist who endeavored to become great but couldn’t beat the odds that were stacked against him and died at the young age of 30. Had he not written these letters, this book would not have been possible.

George Tsutakawa, Shirō’s loyal and true friend and buddy, to whom he was able to open up his mind and heart, keeper of his artworks and letters.

Dr. William Gamble, whose critique of Shirō’s art encouraged him to continue his work and for storing his art and letters during World War II.

Mary Ikeda Shigaya, life long friend,who by her conversation with Ayame, George Tsutakawa’s wife, made it possible for me to obtain my brother’s art and letters and to give them back to the world.

Grace Arimura, dear friend, who forever keeping after me to publish this book.

Forward

In the summer of 1992, an old friend in Seattle, Mary Shigaya, called to tell me of an event that had happened to her recently. My friend who was a teacher of Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arrangement, was traveling by car with a fellow teacher to a flower show. During the trip, Mary was telling her friend of the Japanese families that used to live in her neighborhood in Seattle back in the 1930s. One of the names she mentioned was Miyazaki. Her friend wondered out loud, I wonder if they were related to Shirō Miyazaki. Mary said, Yes, in fact we visited Shirō’s brother last year in Illinois. Her friend told her that her husband had been trying to locate Shirō’s relatives for years without success. Her husband was the renown artist and water fountain sculptor, George Tsutakawa, professor emeritus of fine arts at University of Washington. She said that George had kept my brother’s art from before the war and was thinking of having a one last exhibit for him and dispose of my brother’s works as George was getting along in years. My brother had died in 1940.

Taking up Mary’s suggestion, I called George and he was happy to find a kin after all these years. He asked if we were going to be in the Seattle area in the near future and I told him that we were going to a wedding in Los Angeles in August and could stop by on the way.

I remembered George since he used to visit his uncle who lived just four houses away from us and I used to played with one of his cousins who was of my age. Of course, he probably didn’t remember me except possibly as Shirō’s little kid brother, Shirō being fifteen years my senior.

When we visited George at his lovely home atop the hill overlooking beautiful Lake Washington, he took us up to his attic where he had stored Shirō’s artwork. He told me that Shirō had bold strokes and believed that he could have become a great artist had he not died at such a young age. George said that he wanted to keep just one painting and that he would send me the rest. He also gave me all of Shirō’s linoleum blocks including an uncut unfinished block of an Oklahoman migrant family standing by their broken down jalopy, next to a billboard touting, Next time try the train.

Also included was a bundle of letters Shirō had written to George and Dr. Bill Gamble¹ while in California. Since I was only six when he left for California and fourteen when he died, Shirō was practically a stranger to me; therefore, when I read his heart rendering letters, it was then I first realized the hardship he had to endure pursuing his love for art.

The letters and postcards in this book were written by Shirō to his dear friends and artists George Tsutakawa and Dr. William Gamble, both living in Seattle when the letters were written. Shirō’s letters to George were all in Japanese and I have translated them the best I could. I was surprised at his command of the Japanese language. It must have come from his love to read and a sharp mind. He knew many Japanese phrases and kanji characters I never knew or even heard before, though I somehow had graduated from a Japanese university. Using two kanji (Chinese character) dictionaries, two Japanese language dictionaries and two Japanese-English dictionaries, I still had trouble and still doubt that I was able to grasp his thoughts adequately. Kanji phrases are difficult if you don’t know its pronunciation and/or meaning. Frequently, two or more kanji characters are combined to make a word that has an altogether different meaning than the meanings of the two individual characters added together. When I didn’t know it’s meaning, and couldn’t find the combined characters in the kanji dictionaries; after determining its pronunciation, I first looked it up in the Japanese-English dictionary. If it was not in there, then I tried my luck with the Japanese language dictionary. If I still couldn’t find it, then I took the meaning of each character from the Jigen Chinese Character dictionary and tried to combine them and come up with a meaning that made some sort of sense with the rest of the text. Many times, I used a direct translation in order to be as close to the phrases as he wrote them so the reader could look into his poetic mind, rather than using a more generalized term. (e.g. ‘footsteps of the rain’ as he said it, rather than ‘the pitter patter of the raindrops’.) Some Japanese words or phrases, I left in Japanese, especially in his poems, and put the English translation in brackets [ ].adjacent to them.

The letters from Shirō to Dr. Gamble were all in English so I copied exactly as he wrote them. His spelling and punctuations were not changed in order to convey his command of English or lack thereof. It also gives the letters another flavor beyond his quaint descriptions and phrases. I first started to add (sic) after each misspelled word to denote that it is not a typographical error but finally decided against it, since the reader should have little difficulty in deciphering the misspelled words or the intent of the sentence.

As background information, I have also included as Appendices, some correspondences of my father’s that George had, which were written to him and to Shirō. Also included is father’s so-called Will. It sounds more like the Ten Commandments and was written to our mother when he first set sail alone for America in 1915. Also included are translated excerpts of eulogies written in a San Francisco Japanese Language newspaper’s memorial edition following Shirō’s death.

Anything in brackets [ ] are my personal comments or interpretations and are not a part of Shirō’s letters.

In reading Shirō’s Japanese letters to George, you may notice that the date of the letter and/or the recipient’s name are at the end of the letter. This is the common practice in Japanese letter writing.

In Japanese words, places and names, wherever long vowels are used, I have used the characters, ā, ē, ī, ō and ū. This is because there are many words that are written the same except for the vowel being either short or long. (e.g. the surname Satō with a short ‘o’ could mean sugar or village. I have a friend who’s last name is Nōmi. However, nomi is a flea so one has to be careful.

Also in Japanese, each vowel is pronounced only one way. A is always pronounced as the first A in away. E is always pronounced like the first E in ever. I is always pronounced like the I in Italy. O is always pronounces like the O in Oklahoma and U is always pronounced like the O in woman or woo, not the U in ugh or ugly. Now pronounce the car, Honda. It’s not Handa as you always hear in the television commercials. Handa, incidentally is also a surname just like Honda.

Shū Miyazaki

Introduction

A short introduction delving into the family history is necessary to better understand Shirō’s tumultuous life.

Our father, Hideo, was born on July 24, 1888, in a small fishing village of Tsubaki-domari in Tokushima prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Japan. During the last year of middle school² (equivalent to our 11th grade), he applied and was accepted to both the Army and Naval Academies but chose the Army. Illness cut short his military career and he became an elementary school teacher in Kōbe.

Our mother, Kuni, was born on September 10, 1889 and raised in the city of Gojō in Nara prefecture. Her father was a fairly well-to-do merchant who owned a kimono store. I don’t know how the two met, but according to my stepmother, they met when they were both patients in the same hospital. When they married, he was taken in to our mother’s Shimamoto family as a yōshi (adopted son); however, he planned eventually to leave the clan and set up his own lineage with the Miyazaki name.

Convinced that there was no future for him in Japan, he decided to seek his fortune in America. Leaving his wife and five year old Shirō, he arrived alone in Seattle in 1915. He worked at the elite Rainier Club as a schoolboy while learning English. Later he worked on a railroad gang laying rails for the Great Northern and/or Northern Pacific RR and in Alaska at a whale oil rendering factory. In the early 1920s, he started his own exporting business in Seattle, shipping lumber to Japan. The great Kanto earthquake of 1923 worked in his favor as lumber was greatly needed to rebuild Tōkyō and Yokohama. He then landed a job as a special correspondent for one of Japan’s largest newspaper, the Osaka Mainichi , covering the Pacific Northwest. At the same time, to augment his income, he also became a life insurance agent for Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, selling life insurance to Japanese immigrants, covering an area as far away as Central Oregon.

Shirō was born in Gojō on May 24th, 1910 and lived with our mother at her parent’s home. In 1920, our father called our mother to join him in Seattle but decided that Shirō should get a Japanese education, so he was left in the care of his maternal grandparents and uncle. Being left alone in Japan without his parents, Shirō became a problem child and once left home and could not be found for several days. I believe he graduated middle school. I don’t know how much English he learned in middle school, but does write in one of his letters (Letter #45) that English was his weak point and got only Es and Fs. He arrived in the United States in 1929, went to Garfield High School in Seattle and graduated in 1932. The feud between Shirō and our father was well known within the Japanese community and is evident in the letter from father to son written in 1940 (See Appendix IV). Both being hard headed with neither side giving in, the father disowned and kicked Shirō out of the house after graduation, whereupon he left for California to seek his fortune. This is where his letters begin.

Shirō and George Tsutakawa’s friendship started when they both won awards in a national art contest, sponsored by Scholastic Magazine in 1932, in the linoleum cut print division. George won first prize and Shirō an honorable mention. According to George, they first met at a photo session honoring Seattle’s student winners. They soon became fast friends because of their mutual interest in art and as they both spoke Japanese better than English. George was born in Seattle, the same year as Shirō but was sent to Japan in 1917 and lived with his maternal grandmother until 1927 when he returned to the States. After graduating Broadway High School in 1932, he went on to study art at the University of Washington and later became a professor of fine arts there, retiring in 1983 and died in December 1997. He was especially renown throughout the world for his water fountain sculptures, some of which can be found at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., the Ala Moana Mall in Honolulu, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Anaheim and Fresno in California, as well as several in Japan. For the life and work of George Tsutakawa, read George Tsutakawa by Martha Kingsbury, © 1990 by the Bellvue Art Museum (ISBN 0-295-97020-0).

Shirō’s friendship with Bill Gamble started in 1934 when George Tsutakawa asked him to critique one of Shirō’s linoleum block prints. They met each other only once when Shirō returned to Seattle to attend our mother’s funeral in 1937. Dr. Gamble also graduated University of Washington and later became a professor of fine arts at Michigan State University with two doctorates, in fine arts and in art education. He retired and lived in East Lansing, Michigan until his death in 2009. My wife and I were fortunate enough to locate and visit with him in 1995.

As you will find in his letters, Shirō led a nomadic life moving from one farm to the next throughout the San Joaquin Valley during the growing seasons and then to San Francisco or Los Angeles during the winter months to work at whatever job he could find, yet continuing his art studies. Being constantly poor and living among the poor, he became a fellow traveler and joined the Communist Party but later wrote that he had quit the party. Since he could not keep his works with him as he was moving around so frequently, he asked George to keep them for him. During the war after President FDR signed the infamous Executive Order 9066, that authorized rounding up all Japanese American living along the Pacific Coast to placing them in concentration camps (FDR’s words) built in the remote and desolate areas of our great country, but generally referred to as ‘Relocation Centers’, Bill Gamble stored all of the art works George had as well as those of some other Japanese American artists, ,in his garage for the duration of the war.

After our mother died in 1937, our father returned to Japan taking my sister and me with him in the spring of 1940. I returned to the US in 1953. My only regret is that I never had the chance to get to know my brother. I am, however, eternally grateful to George and Bill for saving his art works and correspondences, that I was able to see his art works and though his letters, get to know of his accomplishments and the sad and cruel life he had to endure.

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Shirō at 6 months

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Shirō 2 years old

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Shirō 5 years old with parents

(July 1915)

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Shirō at age 15

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Shirō (19) with sister (6) and Brother (3 )

(Seattle August 1929)

Letter #1

From Shirō to Undisclosed Friends

Greetings to all,

I haven’t written for some time. What has happened to me since, is all written in my letter to Geo. so please read that.

The candies I received from you when I left, were so good we cleaned them all up. I’m not asking you