Asian Americans and the Color of Christ - Beth Hessel
Our third and final post in the Asian Americans and the Color of Christ round table comes from Beth Hessel, a PhD student at Texas Christian University where she is writing a dissertation on the role played by a group of furloughed white Protestant missionaries as mediators between incarcerated Japanese Americans and the federal government and general public during WWII.
Beth Hessel
Henry Sugimoto, "Thinking About Christ" |
The federal government’s decision
during World War II to forcibly incarcerate on the basis of ethnicity 120,000
Japanese Americans – seventy percent of whom were American born citizens and
the rest denied citizenship under American law – served as a catalyst for
re-imagining Christ in the Japanese American community. In sermons preached in early 1942 and
published in 1945 in a booklet entitled “The Sunday Before,” first and second
generation Protestant pastors challenged their flocks to align themselves with
the suffering Christ. The Christ evoked by these pastors differed sharply from
the triumphalist, masculine Christ who blessed America’s martial endeavors. Under
the brush of artists like Henry Sugimoto, this suffering Christ took on a
decidedly Japanese American face.
While some pastors drew upon Old
Testament exilic texts on the Sundays before removal, most of them linked the
desert wanderings of Abraham and Moses and their own forced evacuation from the
West coast with a Christ of exile and suffering. Born far from home, Jesus and
his parents became political refugees in Egypt. This peripatetic Christ
eschewed earthly trappings of power in favor of the sorrow and wounds inflicted
by a broken world. The Christ proclaimed by Nikkei pastors knew affliction as
the path to ultimate glory, and called all people to walk his road.
Pastor John Yamazaki drew from
Philippians 3:10 to portray a suffering Christ, a “victim who becomes a victor”
through his resurrection. This Christ drew no color lines and preferred no
nation. In their sermons, Reverends Kengo Tajima and Donald Toriumi insisted
that Christ extended God’s election to all oppressed people, and bound
Americans across racial differences in “Christian familyhood” through their perseverance
in times of distress. Japanese American Christians might find their own
redemption, their own victorious resurrection, by approaching the suffering of
their exile and the rejection inflicted by their fellow Americans as a
challenge to overcome, a pathway to salvation. As Christ atoned for the sins of
the world through his sufferings, so would the Japanese American community make
recompense for their own sins and the sins of their nation through their wartime
suffering.
By contravening dominant images of
a Nordic, victorious, unscarred Jesus, Japanese American Christians paralleled
African American artists and theologians who repositioned Christ as a man of
color who traveled with the reviled and oppressed. None of the pastors
explicitly spoke to Christ’s race or ethnicity, but their clear identification
of Japanese Americans with Christ in his trials and his ultimate resurrection
paved the way for the art of Henry Sugimoto.
Classically trained Sugimoto’s art
underwent a profound transformation during his years in the Jerome (Arkansas) camp.
Many of Sugimoto’s paintings of Jerome included crosses. Perhaps most stunning
are three works from 1943 that merge the cross with images of Japanese American
men. Thinking About Christ depicts the
intersection of the paths of a young Japanese American man carrying a dark
casket that contains symbols of the camp and Christ carrying his cross on the
path to Calvary. An open Bible is suspended between them, suggesting that the
man sees his life as a living parable of Christ.
The second work, In Camp Jerome, portrays a Japanese American soldier. Taking
leave from his mother, who is gifting him with a traditional senninbari (a belt containing one
thousand stitches given to soldiers by women), he seems to hang from a cross, a
stunning image of a brown Christ facing death in order to prove his people’s
loyalty to the United States. The Reverend Yamazaki, who invoked the “victim as
victor Christ,” serves as the subject of the third painting. Reverend Yamazaki was Beaten in Camp Jerome shows
two Japanese American men attacking the pastor, whom they believed served as a
stool pigeon for the Jerome Camp administration. Bleeding profusely from his
forehead, his dark suit rent in the side where one of the men is about to place
another hard kick, Yamazaki is held up in a cross-like position by the second
man.
The pre-evacuation words of the
pastors proved prophetic. During World
War II, Christ became a suffering and sacrificial Japanese American.
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