SAN GABRIEL >> In one of the most famous photos documenting the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, three boys stand behind a barbed-wire fence at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.
That photo still hangs above the front desk at Toyo Miyatake Studio, located in the San Gabriel Village area since moving from Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles in 1985.
The studio’s namesake, Toyo Miyatake, was the camp photographer at Manzanar, one of the 10 camps that housed more than 110,000 relocated Japanese-Americans beginning in 1942.
Miyatake is well known for taking both authorized and unauthorized photos depicting life in the camp, located 230 miles north of Los Angeles.
•Photos: San Gabriel photographer continues legacy founded in Japanese internment
Next to the photo of the boys is another taken at Manzanar last August. In it, those same boys, now in their 80s, are posed again, with the barbed wire, looming guard tower and Sierra Nevada in the background.
That photo was taken by Alan Miyatake, who continues to run his grandfather’s eponymous studio. Seventy-five years after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to mandate Japanese internment, the studio continues to help tell the story of Japanese internment both during and long after World War II.
The family legacy
As a result of his photography in Manzanar, Toyo Miyatake became the Los Angeles area Japanese-American community’s most relied upon photographer after he reopened his Little Tokyo studio in 1945.
Toyo Miyatake’s story had already become the stuff of legend. Before he was made camp photographer, he used a camera made by hand with a camera lens he had smuggled in, using contraband film brought into the camp by a wholesaler and former customer to shoot photos.
Toyo Miyatake retired by 1960, leaving the studio in the hands of his son, Archie Miyatake, who was a teenager while he and the family were in Manzanar.
Archie Miyatake often found himself having to come out from behind the camera when people wanted to interview him about both his father’s and his own experiences during internment.
For decades, Archie Miyatake served as the family spokesman, but just before last Christmas he died at the age of 92, leaving his son Alan as one of the last people who can share the family’s stories.
Alan Miyatake started small, answering questions from eighth-graders working on U.S. history projects, but he has slowly stepped into that spokesman role. The trouble, he said, is balancing his reponses given that he has no firsthand experiences being interned in the camp.
That task is especially difficult these days, with comparisons being drawn to President Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim registry and executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, Alan Miyatake said.
“Today’s generation knows that this isn’t something we should sweep under the rug,” he said. “It should always be remembered, but maybe not all of us need to express a lot of bitterness.”
Forming an individual identity
Both as a person and a photographer, Alan Miyatake has sought ways to both honor his family’s past while also being his own person.
In his youth, being “Archie’s son and Toyo’s grandson” meant his dates’ fathers wouldn’t give him a hard time.
In his teenage years, he realized he wanted to be known for something on his own, and he thrust himself into basketball, but it didn’t prove to be a career.
After high school, he began working in the family studio, and while he never acknowledged that photography and running the studio could be his career, he eventually developed a passion for it.
“It’s still something I would give up if I was ready to retire,” Alan Miyatake said. “I still enjoy doing it, but I could see giving it up, too.”
If he were to give it up, the 63-year-old said he would continue to curate his collection of his grandfather’s photos.
“The photos help us remember what happened,” Alan Miyatake said. “I would still want to make sure everyone who wants to see them gets to see them.”
Steeped in past, looking to the future
When digital photography first became popular, the business suffered, Alan Miyatake said. People were taking their own photos instead of coming into the studio.
While business from the Japanese-American community continues to make up more than half of his clients, he said he’s had to expand his scope to shoot more school and sports teams and to include more commercial photography.
That keeps his schedule busy, which sometimes conflicts with community events like Saturday’s Day of Rememberance 2017 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, set to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066.
Knowing that Archie Miyatake was a fixture at community events like the Day of Rememberance sometimes makes it difficult to miss them, Alan Miyatake said, but he continues to be active with the Manzanar National Historic Site and visits about four times a year.
“As things evolve, you do, too,” Alan Miyatake said. “But camp is always going to be a part of this place. That’s our history, and people aren’t going to forget.”
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