USA: remembering Japanese-American incarceration during WWII

A single word that implies so much: “gaman,” a Japanese term often translated as “perseverance” — patient, dignified endurance in the face of a situation that seems unendurable.

“It describes the feelings of Japanese Americans about being incarcerated in the camps,” says Shokichi Tokita. “You could translate it as ‘to withstand, to prevail.’”

Now 84, Tokita was a boy of 8 when his family was forced to leave their Seattle home. Merely on the basis of their ethnicity, the Tokitas were sent to the Minidoka “war relocation center” in south central Idaho. That ordeal lasted from 1942 to 1945. Then they were left to pick up the pieces of their interrupted lives.

When composer and conductor Christophe Chagnard learned about the resonance of “gaman” from Tokita, he decided to use the term for the title of his new work for Music of Remembrance (MOR). Now in its 20th season, MOR will present the world premiere of “Gaman: to persevere” at its annual spring concert on May 20, along with Shinji Eshima’s “August 6th” and other chamber pieces by composers who perished in or were affected by the Holocaust.

While MOR’s mission is to remember the Holocaust through music, its focus is also emphatically on the present-day relevance of humanity’s darkest chapters. Nowhere is this clearer than in the organization’s commissions of new works by contemporary composers like Chagnard, who is also familiar to local audiences as the co-founder and former director of the Northwest Sinfonietta and current music director of the Lake Union Civic Orchestra.

“This has been an organic evolution for us,” explains Mina Miller, MOR’s founder and artistic director. “We’re still faithful to our founding mission but are looking beyond the Holocaust itself to these reminders of what happens when others are excluded and persecuted — in this case, to the terrible moment in American history when Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and incarcerated in camps.”

Joining the list of MOR commissions — which now surpasses 30 — “Gaman” is actually the third of three new commissions the organization is presenting this season.

What led Miller to commission Chagnard to write a piece about the incarceration of Japanese Americans? “Over the years, I’ve found that the most successful commissions have been the ones that told stories and engaged you to think in different ways,” she said.

Miller says she was impressed by Chagnard’s narrative gift in writing pieces that confront troubling issues and mentions his compositions “Opre Roma,” which deals with the plight of the Roma, and “Terra Nostra,” a piece addressing climate change. “When I approached Christophe with the idea of a work about the Japanese Americans who were sent to camps, I asked him if he could tap into any art work or poetry as part of the piece.”

Chagnard consulted with the Seattle-based art historian Barbara Johns, who has published fascinating biographies of the artists Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) and Kamekichi Tokita (1897-1948), along with curated editions of the remarkable diaries both kept while at Minidoka. In “Gaman,” Chagnard creates a musical framework for his setting of excerpts from their diaries, with projections of related sketches and paintings by their authors as visual accompaniment. He found additional literary and visual sources in the poetry of Suma Yagi (a freshman at Garfield High when her family, like Tokita’s, was sent to Minidoka) and in paintings by Roger Shimomura. All of these sources come from artists with roots in Seattle.

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