Indiana University photography professor Osamu James Nakagawa is asking Bloomington to think about Japanese-American incarceration camps during World War II.
An exhibit of Nakagawa’s photos, titled Trace, is on view until Oct. 30 at Bloomington’s FAR Center for Contemporary Arts.
He traveled to former incarceration sites, photographing what remained and collecting remnants from the places where Japanese Americans had been held.
But when he arrived, he found that much of the physical evidence was disappearing.
“So it's nothing,” he said. “Nothingness was my first big reaction to this thing.”
“So it's nothing. Nothingness was my first big reaction to this thing.”Osamu James Nakagawa
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans quickly became targets of suspicion and racism, with many Americans treating people of Japanese ancestry as if they were responsible for the attack simply because of their ethnicity.
That fear eventually became government policy when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the military to remove Japanese Americans from parts of the country, forcing families out of their homes and sending them to incarceration camps.
The camps are part of a history that took decades for the federal government to formally acknowledge. Congress eventually passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, apologizing for the incarceration and providing compensation to surviving Japanese Americans who had been held. But that apology and compensation could not undo the years families spent separated from their homes, businesses, and communities.
As the physical reminders disappear, Nakagawa is asking how America remembers this history. He said the country has already changed how it confronts its past.
“The U.S. started to shift, as everybody's probably experiencing now,” Nakagawa said. “And you know, the current administration is trying to erase all this stuff.”
His exhibit asks visitors to look beyond what happened during World War II and think about how easily history can be repeated, forgotten, or erased.
Fort Bliss in Texas, for example, was used during World War II to confine people of Japanese ancestry. However, today the military installation is home to Camp East Montana, an ICE detention facility that opened in 2025 and can hold thousands of people.
The facility is not the same camp used during World War II, but the connection between the two brings that history into the present.
“I mean, former Japanese incarceration is now currently transformed to the ICE in Texas you know,” Nakagawa said.
