Pain, Injustice, and Pain Again
“Hatsuki Wasaka Shot by M.P.” is an 11 inch by 15 ½ inch sumi-ink-on-paper painting by Chiura Obata from 1943. It depicts the infamous incident of James Hatsuki Wasaka, a Japanese-American prisoner who was shot and killed by a sentry of the Military Police at the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Wasaka, a 62 year old Issei (an immigrant from Japan to North America), had been walking around the camp’s fenced perimeter when the guard shouted four times for him to halt. But Wasaka with his auditory impairments was unable to comply, and was subsequently shot by the guard (Obata 95). Most onlookers believed that Wasaka was confused and couldn’t understand what was being shouted at him. Court-martial proceedings took place for the sentry, after which he was pronounced not guilty (Yellin 275). The
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painting shows Wasaka reeling in pain and falling to his gunshot wound as his dog watches helplessly.
Obata has used several elements of art such as lines, light, color, texture, shape and space to recreate the scene of the shooting. The most dominant feelings this work of art invokes in a person are pain, despair, distress, pity and an overwhelming sense of injustice. The pain is clear on the face of the man while a closer look at the dog’s expression shows nothing but despair and distress, with the pity and injustice being felt by the viewer.
This paper first discusses the elements of art that Obata has used in his work. We see that Wasaka has company: his dog stares in despair while his master gives way and the barbed-wire fence stands throughout, rugged and forbidding. Bold and strong lines have been used to make Wasaka the focus of the work along with the fence of the camp while lighter and thinner curved lines have been used to bring closure and completeness to details like the wrinkles in the man’s clothes or the secondary outline of the dog beside him. Horizontal lines have been utilized to mark the barbed wire and in order to give the viewer a sense of a vast expanse of wilderness
and hills that has been decreed to serve as the prison camp. The Sun, although it hasn’t been shown in the picture, has been implied as a natural source of light to be somewhere to the back of Wasaka and facing the dog. The shadows of man and dog both appear blurred and not exactly true to life, which could be indicant of a late-afternoon setting. We also see sides of the hills and wilderness that are facing the dog as darker shades of grey, which again shows the position of the sun in this scene. Curiously, no shadow has been shown for lone post that has been shown between two stretches of barbed-wire, but this could be because of the artist’s inclination to give centre stage to the man and the dog. The colors here are shades of gray rather than black and white, which goes well with the loose and expressionistic brushwork texture than has been used to show the whole scene in a gloomy light. Also, a rough texture has been given to the man and his surroundings, which is fitting as to the conditions in prison encampments. Care has been taken in order to give the man and dog a nearly flat shape reflecting poor health conditions while the fence and hills have been given a fairly large mass, which exhibits their strength and fortitude. The organic shape of Wasaka shows a man bent and broken while that of the dog shows it leaning forward towards his master in concern. The viewer’s area of vision is shown that of someone standing barely ten feet from Wasaka. There is a lot of empty space behind Wasaka where some wildnerness and hills have been shown in a foreshortened manner and in lighter color to show a huge desolate area. This lighter color is achieved by varying ink density. With the elements of art now aside let us take a look at the principles of art that we see in use in this painting. On the first look there is no mistaking the fact that Wasaka is the focal point of the scene. The emphasis on him is clearly a result of the delineating and lighting techniques discussed above. In this way Wasaka becomes the psychological focus of the picture since the eye is automatically drawn to the prominently defeated shape of the poor man. Sizing and proportion have been attempted to be realistic as in the foreground we expectedly see the man, the dog and the fence in much bigger size as compared to the wilderness in the middle ground and the hills in the background. The balance of the scene is lopsided to the right as that is where Wasaka is seen in agony, while the dog provides a much less impressive counterweight to the left of the picture. “Hatsuki Wasaka Shot by M.P.” is a two-dimensional artwork and the artist has done his best with well-defined and blurred lines, varying intensity of color and lighting and shadows to give his work an illusionistic three-dimensional appearance. The subject matter is recognizable as the portrait of a man dying in prison, but to get to know the story behind the needless death we require contextual info related to the scenario. While the title tells of the identity of the killer, it doesn’t show much regarding the nationality and ethnicity of Wasaka, and neither does the painting itself. We only see that a man named Hatsuki Wasaka is shot by someone from the Military Police. In order to get to what got Wasaka there in the first place and why he was shot, we have to dig a little deeper than what we are shown. The overall scene is a picturized version of the man’s torment, the dog’s distress and the injustice of it all.
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Gesensway, Deborah and Mindy Roseman. Beyond Words, Images from America’s Concentration Camps. New York: Cornell University Press, 1987. Print.
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