this dark rainy night

The title of the exhibition, this dark rainy night, is excerpted from a poem by Keiho Yasutaro Soga. It speaks of his arrest in 1941, when he was taken from his family and home and incarcerated in camps in New Mexico.

During the Second World War there were two camps in the state that unjustly incarcerated Japanese men without evidence of any crime committed. They were imprisoned solely for being Japanese. These camps were the Santa Fe Detention and Internment (Incarceration) Camp and the Lordsburg Internment (Incarceration) Camp. In Santa Fe 4,555 men went through the camp.

(Throughout the interior of the United States about 120,000 Japanese and American citizens of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated.)

Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Christian minister from Hawai’i, also incarcerated in New Mexico, found a branch from a tree in camp and carved a small cat. The carving is hidden in a display case in the New Mexico History Museum.

Some of the incarcerated were permitted to leave the Santa Fe Camp to work in apple orchards in Tesuque. (There are apple trees in Tesuque that are over 100 years old.)

On July 27, 1942, 147 men were being transferred to the Lordsburg Camp from Bismark, North Dakota. After departing from the train station they were to walk several miles in the middle of night under a full moon. Two men, Hirota Isomura and Toshiro Kobata, both from California, were too ill to keep up and trailed behind. The guard who walked with them shot and killed both men in the night. Their lives disappeared with the desert dew.**

Isomura and Kobata were buried in Lordsburg. After the war Isomura’s remains were transferred to Ft. Bliss Cemetery in El Paso, Texas. Kobata’s were transferred to Riverside Cemetery in Brawley, California.

The exhibition will consist of various elements:

• Two glass marbles shaped with earth collected from Lordsburg.
• Photographs of the current gravesites for both Kobata and Isoumura.
• Ceramic cats inspired by Watanabe’s woodcarvings made with the public in workshops in Santa Fe in September.
• 100 lost cat flyers photocopied and stapled across Santa Fe.
• Apple pies with apples picked from Tesuque made with miso and buckwheat will be sold each Saturday of the exhibition.***
• Tanka poems by Keiho Yasutaro Soga, Sojin Tokiji, and Muin Otokichi Ozaki are screenprinted on the pie boxes.
• Each apple pie is baked with a ceramic cat.

Pies are available by pre-order and can be picked up on Saturday mornings at Axle Contemporary, from 10 AM–1 PM in front of SITE SANTA FE on October 4, 18, 25, and November 1. All pies cost $35, including tax. Slices and a limited number of pies will also be available at Axle, while supplies last. Pies may be ordered online here or by phoning 505-670-5854 with a credit card.

* Horvitz's work flock of wingless birds (2025) is currently on exhibit at Finquita in the 12th SITE SANTA FE International: Once Within a Time. The work addresses the Santa Fe Detention and Internment (Incarceration) Camp.

** On August 2, 1942, in services spoken in Japanese for Kobata and Isomura, Kawasaki, a civilian camp leader, made the following statement: Our two brothers, who arrived at this camp from North Dakota, ailing in poor health, and who didn’t even have the opportunity to become acquainted with the other internees here, sadly disappeared from the earth along with the desert dew…

*** The apple pies are made using recipes developed by Leif Hedendal in San Francisco and Giles Clark of Cafe 2001 in Los Angeles.