The Hope of Another Spring

"Although Fujii created an impressive body of paintings and drawings, he rarely displayed them publicly, so his work is virtually unknown. Barbara Johns makes an important contribution that expands our knowledge of Issei artists who were active in the mid-twentieth century."—Jasmine Alinder, author of Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration

"Like her subject Takuichi Fujii's diary in drawings and words, Barbara Johns's book records and interprets the events and, especially, the places of the forced incarceration and 'relocation' of the artist and his family during World War II as seen keenly by the Issei artist. But whereas Fujii's art implicitly evokes its current, historical, and cultural contexts, Johns's book, deeply researched, explicitly considers those contexts and the work of her predecessors in the scholarship of Asian American art history as well as archival details she herself has recovered. Including the translated text and drawings presented by the art historian Sandy Kita and his collaborator Honda Shōjō, The Hope of Another Spring is itself a remarkable work combining visual, verbal, and scholarly art and the profound social criticism they make—for us, today."—Stephen H. Sumida, author of And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai'i