Veiled Inscriptions

Veiled Inscriptions is an ongoing project about a collection of letters that fell out of a downtown Denver building's wall in 2012. Hidden for nearly 70 years, the letters were mail orders written by Japanese Americans who were illegally removed from their homes and incarcerated in “relocation camps” during the Second World War. The hand-written notes were sent to one of the few Japanese American businesses that was still functioning during the war. That store, T.K. Pharmacy, was owned and operated by my uncles, Thomas Kobayashi, M.D. – known as “T.K.” – owned the building and Yutaka Terasaki, my father’s oldest brother. 

Executive Order 9066 resulted in the forced removal of Japanese Americans from most of California, Washington, Oregon and much of Arizona. Letters were written from all ten of the War Relocation Authority sites where Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

I am on a journey to photograph all of those sites. I make photomontages to reunite the T.K. Pharmacy letters with the locations where they were written. My pictures are about loss. Loss is in the lives that were torn apart by the forced relocation. Loss is the passing of an older generation that refused to speak about the disruption. It is in the farms that have eliminated evidence of the camps and now reap crops from the labor and knowledge of the incarcerated that once lived there. And young men’s lives were lost on distant battlefields as they proved their citizenship for a government that had brutally taken away their rights as citizens. The letters are important not only for what they request – hair dye, skin lotion, dignity – but as a timely warning about the fragility of human rights in the face of social disruption.

Letters courtesy of the T.K. Pharmacy Collection, Densho.