FBI Agents Taking Away an Internee

Watercolor by Gene Sogioka

An internee at Poston, Arizona, was commissioned by the U. S. government to depict scenes in the camp. In this scene, he represents the extent to which the FBI had become a harsh engine of retribution, suddenly removing community members from the camp and from their homes, as was the father character in When the Emperor was Divine. These images and other records of Japanese internment camps are preserved in the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Additional artwork and artifacts drawn from the archival collection, Japanese-American Relocation Centers Records (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library), were displayed in Olin Library (in the corridor to Kroch Library) and in Kroch Library (on level 2B) in an exhibition entitled, “An Enemy Race”: Documents on the Internment of Japanese-Americans. The exhibition examined the internment process and internment camps through documents and artistic renderings of daily life in the camps.