In a Richmond studio, Japanese American group taps into art’s protest power

With a slice of pizza in one hand and a brush in the other, Julia LaChica worked with about a dozen others in paint-splattered aprons Thursday on a banner that eventually would read: “Japanese Americans say: Stop repeating history. No more camps. ICE out of CA.” 

The art build, at the Richmond studio of art activist David Solnit, moved quickly from tracing to cloth cutting, to painting, and screen printing, ending in three large yellow banners and hundreds of small prints.

They will be used at a protest on Saturday at the Tanforan Memorial, site of a former Japanese American internment camp just outside of San Bruno. 

The group sees parallels between World War II internment camps for and recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions that have resulted in many immigrants being held in detention centers. The protest is a call to action against what they see as a similar injustice. 

“I am outraged that we’re spending federal dollars incarcerating families that just want to make a better world for themselves,” said Lindsay Imai Hong, cutting fabric for screenprinting. “I’m horrified with how families are being torn apart.” 

Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during World War II also were forced into detention with little notice. About 112,000 people, most of them American citizens, were sent to makeshift camps. Mike Ishii’s mother was a child in a camp, leading him to co-found Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American social justice organization that is one of the main groups leading the Tanforan protest.

“Many of us are survivors or descendants,” Ishii said, adding that Tsuru for Solidarity has “given a lot of purpose to a lot of us.” 

Tsuru for Solidarity started in 2019 after a group of Japanese Americans went on a pilgrimage to the former site of the Crystal City Internment Camp in South Texas and found out that hundreds of mothers and children from Central America were being held at a detention center in nearby Dilley, Texas. They called upon their community to send tens of thousands of origami paper cranes to decorate the fences around the detention center because cranes are a symbol of transformation, healing, and nonviolence in Japanese culture. The crane and barbed wire inspired the Tsuru for Solidarity logo, which activists painted on the last large banner in Solnit’s Richmond studio.  

Solnit has been organizing art activism for decades in California and across the country He is assembling art kits that people can use to create banners for demonstrations against the Trump administration, ICE, climate change and the war in Gaza. 

At his studio, Solnit flitted between screen printers to a larger group painting banners. 

“It’s nice to create art and beauty together when we are standing up against destruction and hate,” he said. 

Like Latin American immigrants, Japanese Americans also were separated from their families and forced to live in difficult circumstances. At Tanforan, which used to be a racetrack, some people were housed in horse stalls.

For Akagi, whose grandmother was interned with her family at the Manzanar camp in California, the protest is a way to do something meaningful as she sees history being repeated. Using a screen printer, she laid black paint over a stencil, while LaChica carefully moved the finished prints to a drying rack.  

LaChica joined Tsuru for Solidarity, a few weeks ago, after seeing online posts. 

“Part of wanting to be here is so I can keep my sanity,” she said. “Every day it’s something new. The administration is infringing on people’s rights everywhere on every level.”

By the end of the art build, the group had produced the three banners, 600 patches and 100 signs.

---

WCCUSD teachers approve strike vote, after talks hit an impasse