Shofuso exhibition explores untold history of Philly’s Nisei Japanese Americans

Rob Buscher’s grandmother’s life forever changed when she was 6 years old.

Her family had been living on an idyllic, 20-acre farm in Orange County, Calif., roamed by horses and livestock. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked. They lost everything: their house, their farm, their animals, their belongings.

As a result of the U.S. government rounding up and incarcerating roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, her family relocated to Utah, where they were in the extreme minority.

Buscher remembers his grandmother telling him that when kids were acting up in class, they would be punished by having to sit next to the “Jap girl,” as teachers and students referred to her.

“There’s this survival need to bury that, and not just the cultural heritage component, but also people were instructed to quietly succeed,” Buscher, of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP), said of the generational trauma inherited at the time. “There’s this Japanese expression, ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’ — you heard that a lot in that generation.”

That phrase lingers in Buscher’s mind when he thinks about the generation of Japanese Americans his grandmother belonged to, referred to in Japanese as Nisei: those who were American-born to immigrant parents.

Living through World War II, the Nisei were integral to securing civil rights and preserving cultural heritage for Japanese Americans — especially in Philadelphia. But the Nisei were also famously humble and quiet about their accomplishments, leaving the following generations to piece together and interpret their stories.

That never-before-seen history of the local Nisei is now on display for the public to experience at the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden in West Fairmount Park.

“Until my grandma passed, I don’t know that I realized how important [Shofuso] was for people like my grandmother and her generation, and even successive generations.”

Through oral storytelling and archival footage as old as 1957, the multimedia exhibition Okaeri (Welcome Home): The Nisei Legacy at Shofuso will tell the story of the Nisei and the connection and contributions to Shofuso over the decades.

“I just think about … wanting to make sure that people are given the credit that they’re due, and recognize, even posthumously, the incredible organizing and activist spirit that informed a lot of the interactions that the Nisei were having, particularly around organizing [Friends of the Japanese House and Garden],” said Buscher, the curator of the Okaeri exhibition.

When Buscher started working with JASGP two years ago, he stumbled upon a typewritten board roster from 1982 while going through the office archives. He quickly recognized multiple names on the roster — many of them were leaders of the civil rights organization Japanese American Citizens League.

Talking to elders in the Japanese American community about it a week later, Buscher was surprised to learn that Shofuso used to be a Japanese American organization. (Since he moved to Philadelphia in 2010, it has largely been a Japanese immigrant organization.)

Through more digging, he found out that it was a group of formerly incarcerated Nisei that ended up resettling in Philadelphia and building the organization. Formally established in 1982, their purpose was to reclaim the heritage that was stripped from them during the war.

“At its core, the exhibit is about giving credit where it’s due and recognizing the incredible labor and untold stories of this generation of community organizers,” Buscher said.

“But it’s also about thinking through, what is the role that arts and culture have within healing from traumatic events like the wartime incarceration, and more importantly, how does that help a community to become better organized and move forward together?” Buscher said.

From 70-year-old archival footage to interviews, this telling of the story of Philadelphia’s Nisei will be immersive and engaging.

The main focus of Okaeri is the nearly two-decade span from 1981 to 1999, when the Nisei were building the nonprofit Friends of the Japanese House and Garden, which will be told through a three-channel projection installation.

“I just think about … wanting to make sure that people are given the credit that they’re due.”

One channel will feature footage of Shofuso being constructed in Fairmount Park in 1957 (which Buscher and his colleagues had to transfer digitally from an 8-mm film reel), as well as footage of Japanese workers repairing the building’s roof in 1999.

Another channel will be a slideshow showcasing the cultural events and festivals, as well as community labor, organized by the Nisei during that time period.

Lastly, Buscher combined present-day oral history interviews of elders of the Japanese American community with oral histories taken in 1994, creating an audio loop for visitors to hear their stories while looking at the images on the three projection screens.

For Lucas Rotman, the installation told a history he rarely heard when he would visit Shofuso throughout his childhood. Rotman’s grandmother, Louise Maehara, is featured in the exhibition as a Nisei and one of the cofounders of the Friends of the Japanese House and Garden.

“In my experience at the house, there wasn’t really much talk about the Japanese American experience and what this place meant to Japanese Americans,” said Rotman, now 60.

“And I think that’s one of the things that was really so brilliant about the job that [Buscher] and company did — they really brought that out,” Rotman said. “Until my grandma passed, I don’t know that I realized how important [Shofuso] was for people like my grandmother and her generation, and even successive generations.”

In addition to the main installation, the exhibition will have display cases with more traditional artifacts, documents, and photos from that time period, as well as a historical timeline looking at the broader scheme of global history and U.S.-Japan relations.

Through oral histories, as well as archival documents and writings found, Buscher and his colleagues were able to piece together the Nisei’s stories.

Their conclusion: The Nisei were activists, creating this cultural hub in part to contribute to the redress movement of the 1980s, which advocated for Japanese Americans to get monetary reparations and a formal apology from the U.S. government for the wartime incarceration.

All of the leaders of Philadelphia’s redress movement were actively involved in Shofuso.

Shofuso, Buscher said, has been a place for the community to maintain Japanese culture for the generations to come.

“It’s a place for the community to maintain that culture for the next generation, to try and impart some of those Japanese cultural traditions to their third-generation children,” Buscher said.

That much has been true for Rotman, who until meeting Buscher a few years ago said he hadn’t had the vocabulary to grasp and showcase his cultural identity.

“It’s really the younger generations who started to connect those dots, because they have the language to talk about those things,” Rotman said. “For me, everything was survival mode growing up, because there weren’t many people like me — we were always focused on where we fit in.

“Activism can have many different forms, and creating [Shofuso] was a very heroic act that helped to maintain a marginalized community that didn’t have anything,” he continued. “It’s taken me a long time to get to the place where I can really appreciate that and that I can appreciate what my grandma did.”

It’s that cultural pride and nuance that Buscher hopes to convey with the exhibition.

“There’s this onus for people of color in the U.S. to justify their existence,” Buscher said. “And I think the work that this generation did not only said proudly, ‘This is who we are, we’re allowed to be Japanese,’ but it also opened that space for other Philadelphians from very diverse backgrounds to also embrace that and join that conversation.”

“Okaeri (Welcome Home): The Nisei Legacy at Shofuso” is open until the end of Shofuso’s 2023 season, which is Dec. 10.

The Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center is located at Horticultural and Lansdowne Drives in Philadelphia’s West Fairmount Park. Hours: through Oct. 29, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Nov. 4 through Dec. 10, Saturday and Sunday, 10 to 4. Admission (timed tickets only): $14 for adults; $9 for senior citizens, children (5-17), students, teachers. Information: 215-878-5097, japanphilly.org/shofuso, or info@japanphilly.org.