American Guardian

Roger Shimomura is an American painter, printmaker, and performance artist of Japanese descent renowned for his piercing critiques of cultural and racial prejudice. American Guardian is the artist’s satiric rejoinder to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order of 1942 directing the U.S. military to forcibly remove and detain American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan living on the West Coast of the United States. As World War II raged in Europe and the Pacific, more than 120, 000 men, women, and children were deemed a potential threat to national security and imprisoned for nearly three years in American concentration camps. An official U.S. government study later concluded that the actions were not justified by military necessity, but based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Shimomura’s print depicts a scene in the Minidoka Japanese internment camp in Idaho from the vantage point of one of the guard towers that surrounded the camp. The armed sentry closely observes a boy riding a tricycle, a reference to Shimomura himself, who was incarcerated in the camp with his family when he was just four years old. The irony of the scene is palpable. According to the artist, the lithograph’s composition was inspired by the centuries-old Japanese tradition of painted folding screens decorated with narrative scenes, calligraphy, and gold leaf.