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A growing protest has so far failed to block an auction slated for Friday of hundreds of artifacts obtained from Japanese-Americans incarcerated in camps during World War II.
Rago Arts and Auctions of Lambertville, N.J., said Tuesday that the sale would go on, despite the outcry and an offer from the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation to buy all 450 items. The collection includes artwork, photos and handicrafts, including watercolors, polished stones and furniture as well as tiny birds in flight carved from scraps of wood.
The artifacts were gathered, mostly as gifts, by folk art advocate Allen H. Eaton, who visited internment camps in 1945 in hopes of staging a public exhibit showing how residents responded to the injustice of internment. Instead he published a book, "Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps."
"My reaction, when I first heard about the auction, was unfortunate and tragic; those were the first two words that came to mind," Carole Hayashino, president of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, said Tuesday, noting that she was speaking as an individual.
"He was hoping that through this book and through this collection, it might help to right a great wrong committed against Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated," she said. "It’s tragic because this collection, if auctioned as planned on Friday, will not be preserved for future generations. It’s going to be sold for personal profit."
A Facebook page, "Japanese American History: NOT for Sale," has helped spread the word about the auction and generated more than 3,750 "likes." An associated petition on change.org calls the sale a "betrayal of those imprisoned people who thought their gifts would be used to educate, not be sold to the highest bidder in a national auction, pitting families against museums against private collectors."
The auction house has not disclosed the name of the client who put the items up for sale. The client’s father was a friend of Eaton’s daughter, and had bought half of the collection and inherited the rest, according to Miriam Tucker, Rago Arts managing partner.
In a statement Tuesday, the auction house said it hopes a member or members of the Japanese-American community will buy the collection at auction "and find it a worthy home."
"We would gladly work in any way we could with such an individual, family or group," Tucker said. "We will donate our profit. We will provide the names of the academics, foundation directors and officials who have shown themselves interested in and capable of assisting such a donor."
Tucker said the family who has safeguarded the objects "is not in a financial position" to donate the collection, and "the consignor doesn’t feel remotely qualified to choose one institution over another."
"However misguided people believe him to be, he genuinely felt that selling at auction was the best way to expose the property publicly to all," she said.
The Honolulu chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League has added its voice to the protest.
"Morally and ethically we’re opposed to the selling of any artifact from an internment camp like this," Jacce Mikulanec, president of the chapter, said Tuesday. "Especially when they were gathered in the manner they were, originally for bringing light to the overall internment experience."
"Following on the heels of President Obama making Honouliuli (Internment Camp) a national monument here, we have a great sensitivity to the experiences of internees," he said. "It’s natural to us at JACL to lend our support to this effort to stop this auction."
His group co-signed a letter Monday as part of the Ad Hoc Committee to Oppose the Sale of Japanese American Artifacts, calling for a delay in the auction.
"There is no time before the auction to properly examine issues including provenance, ethics, and the propriety of disposing of our cultural patrimony by selling it off to the highest bidder," the letter said. "We request that you pull these lots from the auction and delay the sale until a proper examination can be undertaken."
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which preserves the story of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, asked the consignor to donate the items to Japanese-American institutions. When that was rebuffed, it lined up pledges from board members and friends to make a cash offer well above the estimated auction value of all the items, according to a statement issued Tuesday. It intended to work with other institutions to determine where the items should be preserved, housed and exhibited.
The auction house relayed the offer, but it was turned down, "not because it was too little, but because he has never strayed from the position that he does not want to make the choice as to which institution receives the property," Tucker said.
More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were interned during the war, most of them American citizens forced to abandon their homes and herded into camps because they looked like the enemy.
"The idea of making these pieces of art, which symbolize incarcerees’ efforts to make something beautiful out of a miserable experience, making them available to the highest bidder, reopens old wounds," Shirley Ann Higuchi, chairwoman of the Heart Mountain Foundation, said in a statement.
Some relatives have found photos of family members in the online catalog of items, as well as wooden nameplates that internees carved to try to personalize the tarpaper shacks where many were incarcerated.
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