Roger Shimomura's 'Chinese Imposter Number Five'

Getting toys taken away, ripped away from home, losing contact with the outside world, being deprived of friends, and shipped away to the middle of no where; who is to complain about a time out? The much despised “time out” seems like a walk in a park when compared to being shipped out as child to an internment camp. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, argues that people’s toddler years determine their adult mental health. Roger Shimomura lived just this, at the age of three he was shipped with his family to internment camp Minikota in Hunt, Idaho, where he spent two years of his childhood imprisoned. Living through this during his early childhood explains the artist he is today. People think Roger Shimomura shows hostility towards

Roger Shimomura depicts this in his piece “Chinese Imposter #5”, he paints himself blending into the Chinese crowd of a Chinese work force propaganda poster. Shimomura “addresses those Americans (particularly during the World War II internments) who claimed not to tell Japanese and Chinese apart [in] the ‘Chinese Imposter’ series” (Ponnekanti). Shimomura dislikes being confused as Chinese because white people already see him as a knockoff American, and when he is not identified as Japanese and confused as Chinese is even a bigger insult because he has no where to turn to, he feels like Japanese people have no identity, they are seen as Chinese knockoffs. Yes, it is insulting when Americans cannot tell Japanese apart from Chinese but this confusion acts like a double sided sword, the Japanese benefitted from this confusion during World War II as well. In his piece, “I am Chinese” he portrays a Chinese man smiling in front of barbed wire fence and barracks in the background. This acknowledges how Chinese people were able to keep their freedom and the Japanese didn’t, which is ironic because Americans couldn't tell them apart. Another point that can be taken from this image is that the Chinese man is an imposter, in reality he is an undocumented Japanese man who takes the identity of a Chinese man. In modern days, this occurs with Latinos who portray themselves as Italians to hide from white scrutiny. In Shimomura’s art, he addresses the confusion Americans face when identifying the Asian community and, in his work, he depicts how the confusion affected people when everyone was getting shipped to interment