Synopsis
“Make Art Not War” is the motto of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani. This 80-year-old Japanese American artist survived the trauma of WWII incarceration, the loss of his ancestral city of Hiroshima, and a harsh life on the streets of New York City by making art.
As tourists and shoppers hurry home in the cold, Mirikitani sits alone on a windy corner in Soho drawing whimsical cats, bleak incarceration camps, and the horrific red flames of the atomic bomb. When a neighboring filmmaker stops to admire his drawing of a cat, a friendship begins that will change both their lives. In sunshine, rain, and snow, she returns to document his art, trying to decipher what it can reveal about why this elderly man is unhoused. Eager to share his story, Mirikitani’s tales spill out in a jumble: ancient samurai ancestors, childhood picnics in Hiroshima, lost American citizenship, Jackson Pollock, Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese Americans imprisoned in WWII camps, a boy who loved cats…
As winter warms to spring and summer, the puzzle of Mirikitani’s past is slowly revealed. One thing is clear from his prolific sidewalk displays: he has survived terrible traumas and is determined to make his history visible through his art.
September 11, 2001, thrusts Mirikitani once again into a world at war and challenges the filmmaker to move from witness to advocate. In the chaos following the collapse of the World Trade Center only a mile away, she finds herself unable to passively photograph her new friend coughing in the toxic smoke and invites him to take shelter in her small apartment. In this uncharted landscape, the two unlikely roommates navigate the maze of social welfare, seek out family and friends, and research Jimmy’s painful past — finding disturbing parallels to events unfolding around them in the present.
Discovering that Jimmy is related to Janice Mirikitani, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, is the first in a series of small miracles along the road to recovery. Jimmy’s story comes full circle when he travels back to the West Coast on a pilgrimage to the site of the Tule Lake incarceration center.
Blending beauty and humor with tragedy and loss, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of community, art, and cats.
Featuring
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani (1920-2012)
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani was born in Sacramento California in 1920 and spent his youth in Hiroshima, Japan – the ancestral home of his immigrant parents. A “natural born artist,” he remembers painting a huge daruma on the white wall of his grandfather’s “treasure room” at the age of five. In the 1930’s he studied in Japan with the renowned landscape painter Gyokudo Kawai and Buddha artist Buzan Kimura
At 18, he returned to the United States to escape Japan’s growing militarism. He was living with his older sister Kazuko and her family in Seattle when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Executive Order 9066 authorized the mass forced removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Over 120,000 Japanese American men women and children were imprisoned for years in US “concentration camps” during WWII. Jimmy was forcibly removed to Tule Lake, in northern California, while his sister was sent to the Minidoka camp in Idaho. He would not see her again for 60 years.
After a “loyalty test” was issued in 1943, Tule Lake became a “Segregation Center” where those Japanese Americans deemed “disloyal” were transferred. Thousands there renounced their US citizenship in protest. Jimmy was one of these renunciants. Even after the war ended, he and other renunciants were still held in Tule Lake until March 1946. Now branded non-citizen “enemy aliens,” they were then transferred to a Department of Justice INS camp in Crystal City, Texas. Finally several hundred including Jimmy were sent to the other side of the country to Seabrook Farms, New Jersey for forced labor in factories and fields under “relaxed internment” until 1947.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed most of Mirikitani’s maternal relatives in Japan. He lost touch with his US family members after they were separated and sent to different camps hundreds of miles apart. After he was finally released from Seabrook Farms, Jimmy made his way to New York City. When Professor Ryusaku Tsunoda found Jimmy sleeping in the art library at Columbia University, he introduced him to The Buddhist Church of New York which provided him with room, board, and training as a cook. For decades after the war Mirikitani led a nomadic life, working seasonal jobs in summer camps and country clubs from Upstate New York to Florida. While cooking at a restaurant on Long Island in the early 1950’s, he met Jackson Pollock and the two became friends.
ACLU lawyer Wayne Collins struggled for years to help more than 5,000 renunciants reclaim the birthright citizenship they had lost in the camps under duress. Mirikitani’s US citizenship was finally officially restored in 1959, but by then he had moved so often that the government’s letter informing him of this never reached him.
By the early 1980’s Jimmy had become a live-in cook and driver on Park Avenue. But when his elderly employer died in 1986, he was suddenly without a home or a job. Within a year, he was sleeping on a park bench in Greenwich Village, selling his artwork to survive. He met filmmaker Linda Hattendorf in Soho in 2001 when she bought a drawing of a cat from him. After 9/11 she offered him shelter in her apartment and helped him apply for Social Security and housing benefits. In 2002, he moved into an assisted-living apartment building run by Village Care of New York. Later that year he was reunited with his sister Kazuko for the first time in 60 years and travelled to California for a Pilgrimage to the site of the Tule Lake camp. The Tule Lake community embraced him and he attended 5 more pilgrimages in the final decade of his life. He enjoyed appearing at the premiere of “The Cats of Mirikitani” in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006 and being surrounded by fans at screenings from his birthplace of Sacramento, CA to his ancestral city of Hiroshima, Japan.
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani passed away on Sunday October 21, 2012. He was 92 years old. True to his word, he continued making art until his final days.
Janice Mirikitani (1941-2021)
Multicultural visionary. Poet. Executive Director of Glide’s 52 programs. Janice Mirikitani with her husband Reverend Cecil Williams was a powerful force at Glide Memorial Church from 1965 until her death in 2021. Glide programs, recognized for their relevance, inclusiveness, and effective outreach to the most marginalized populations of the city, are comprehensive and designed to help break the cycle of dependency. These essential services include a free meals program, a health clinic, recovery programs, educational, tutorial, recreational programs for children and youth, counseling and job training services. As an author, Mirkitani has written and edited dozens of landmark books, journals, and anthologies, and her own three books of poetry. In 2000, her achievements as an author were recognized with the prestigious appointment as San Francisco’s Poet Laureate. She has one daughter. > More About Janice Mirikitani
Roger Shimomura
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints and theatre pieces address socio-political issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and his graduate degree from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and The Smithsonian Institution. At the University of Kansas where he taught since 1969, he was designated a University Distinguished Professor in 1994. In 2004 he retired from teaching and started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to support faculty research in the Department of Art. Shimomura’s personal papers are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. > More about Roger Shimomura.