Beauty in enormous Bleakness

The Interned Generation of Japanese American Designers

“If I hadn’t gone to that kind of place, I wouldn’t have realized the beauty that exists in enormous bleakness.”

-Chiura Obata, sumi-e painter, former incarceree, and father of Gyo Obata

Clipping of January, 1958 Japanese Americans Citizens League newsletter. Image courtesy of Rod Henmi (back). Photograph of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 5. by Dorothea Lange. Image courtesy of  Library of Congress (front).

About the Project

Beauty In Enormous Bleakness, a multi-layered investigation into the lives of Japanese American architects who survived the Japanese Incarceration of WWII, explores American architecture's relationship to issues of immigration, exclusion, and cultural identity in the 20th-century.

The project centers four Washington University in St. Louis College of Architecture alumni—Richard Henmi, Gyo Obata, George Matsumoto, and Fred Toguchi—who made vital contributions to the post-war design landscape of the United States within residential, commercial, landscape, and large-scale industrial architectural spheres. 

Granting attention to their unique experiences as Japanese Americans within the 20th-century, Beauty in Enormous Bleakness underscores the lasting effects of unconstitutional detention, the significance of receiving an education in a historically racially tense midwestern city, the pressures to assimilate to post-war American suburbia, and the architects’ involvements in Japanese American cultural and political advocacy. 

Beauty in Enormous Bleakness encompasses several distinct yet mutually-informing activities

  • Historical and ethnographic research, including the use of oral histories.

  • Analysis of the architects’ careers and activities, with attention to impactful projects.

  • Collection of stories and artifacts associated with the lives and achievements of the interned generation of Japanese Americans, especially with regards to WUSTL students.

  • Development of a catalog for the exhibition “Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Design Legacies of the Interned Generation of Japanese Americans,” which showcases objects, images, designs, and other material related to the designers’ first-hand experiences and connects users to their work.

  • Production of a podcast series focusing on sites associated with these architects. The podcast begins in St. Louis, with those that loom in the architects’ own and/or the public imagination: the iconic “Flying Saucer” Council Plaza building on Grand Boulevard; the Priory and Lambert International Airport buildings; the Henmi family residence built with Henmi’s father and brother; the city’s beloved Japanese Garden at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, created with the support of the St. Louis Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL); and WUSTL’s Steinberg Hall, designed by Fumihiko Maki of the College of Architecture.

We seek to document and preserve the histories and experiences of the interned generation of Japanese Americans and to expand the public imagination for the complex cultural legacies and inheritances of WWII. Given the ongoing efforts to “decolonize” design, and more broadly, to reckon with racial violence, Beauty in Enormous Bleakness writes an urgently needed new chapter in design and architectural history, acknowledging the signal contributions of Japanese Americans, Issei and Nisei alike, to post-war cultural life—indeed, to the very fabric of its cities.

Granada Relocation Center (known as “Amache” or “Camp Amache” by incarcerees) in Colorado, 1942. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress (back). The Brentwood Lanes, built in 1954. Image courtesy of the Brentwood Historical Society (front).