Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Looking for Jiro is a short video by San Francisco-based performance artist and writer Tina Takemoto. Takemoto combines historic footage of military propaganda and men’s bodybuilding with her own campy performance in the role of Jiro Onuma, a queer Japanese American man who was imprisoned in a World War II Japanese internment camp in Utah.

Following his death, Takemoto began a project about Onuma for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Archives when she came across a small box of Onuma’s possessions. Although she is a scholar who works in both queer and Asian American studies, this was the first time Takemoto had come across an account of a queer experience in the internment camps; accounts of LGBT people living in the camps were generally unheard of. Takemoto saw Onuma’s narrative as a way to bring this experience to light.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.