Oral history interview with Frank S. Okada, 1990 August 16-17

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Frank S. Okada, 1990 August 16-17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Frank Okada
Conducted by Barbara Johns
In Seattle, Washington
August 16, 1990

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Frank Okada on August 16, 1990. The interview took place in Seattle, Washington, and was conducted by Barbara Johns for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[Editor’s note: The transcript has been edited for content. A verbatim transcription is on file.]

Interview

[Tape 1, side A]

BARBARA JOHNS: [This is Barbara Johns]. I’m meeting with Frank Okada at my home. It’s Thursday, August 16. This is an interview for the Archives of American Art, the Northwest Asian American Project. Morning, Frank.

FRANK OKADA: Morning.

BARBARA JOHNS: Let’s start at the beginning, because your history is one both in Seattle and in Oregon, and New York and other places. You were born in 1931 in Seattle. Can you tell me about your family, your parents’ background, perhaps?

FRANK OKADA: Well, my parents were from Hiroshima, I believe it’s a smaller, kind of rural community. I think it’s called Nakashima-ken, but I’m not sure. And they came probably right after the First World War. My father had come earlier, like near ‘13 or ‘14, and worked on the railroad gangs in Montana, and then he went back and married my mother and brought her back. And all his life, with the exception of the Second World War, when they were relocated, he ran a small skid road hotel. And I think he ran, during his lifetime, three different locations.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did he own these, or was he the manager?

FRANK OKADA: No, he generally leased a building and ran these hotels. The [clients] were mostly bachelors, people who worked road gangs or people in heavy manual labor.

BARBARA JOHNS: And were these Japanese Americans?

FRANK OKADA: Most of them were Caucasians. I understand my brother John was born in the Merchant Hotel, which is down there off the square [Pioneer Square—Ed.], and I believe I was born in the Yakima Hotel, which is now the Salvation Army hotel—down there off of Dearborn? Sixth and Dearborn, it’s across the street from the Crescent Spice. Then after the Second World War, [when] he came back, a hotel called the Pacific Hotel, which is on Sixth and Weller, which is just south of Uwajimaya [a Japanese department store—Ed.]. They tore that down and they built this Chinese restaurant kind of thing. And so that’s what he did most of his life till he retired.

BARBARA JOHNS: Were the owners of these hotels Caucasian or Asian?

FRANK OKADA: I know the Yakima Hotel, the owner was Caucasian, but Pacific Hotel, one of his older friends, a Japanese friend, had owned the hotel.

BARBARA JOHNS: Had he intended to immigrate originally?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think most of the people, when they initially came, I think many of them thought that they would make their fortune and go back and retire. But I think the war years sort of made them change. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: I was thinking of your brother’s book [John Okada, No-No Boy, first published 1957] that I recently read.

FRANK OKADA: He [FO’s father—Ed.] felt that as we matured and made kind of different commitments, that he knew none of us would be going back to his home. You know, as eldest son, the farm would be his, because my grandfather owned a very large farm, relative for Japan. Traditionally it would have gone to my oldest brother. See, the property moves from. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Your father was an eldest son?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. And so his eldest son would receive it and his younger brothers wouldn’t, or something like that. I think that’s the way it goes. But he knew that none of us were going to go back and plant horseradishes and do things like that [chuckles], so he gave it to his younger brother. I think my brother John went there once, and I’ve been there maybe about three times. I go out there, and I can’t see any of my family running out there and weeding turnips.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was this typical that an elder son would immigrate? I often associate it with younger sons who don’t have an inheritance.

FRANK OKADA: I don’t know how that occurred, but I think it was a matter of making some money and going back maybe to establish a business or expand the farm or whatever. He just figured that all his children would probably just live and die in the States—which is fine with me.

BARBARA JOHNS: He was pretty young then to have worked on the railroad gangs.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, he was like fourteen—thirteen, fourteen—when he [arrived—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: Did he come with his parents, or come alone?

FRANK OKADA: I think my grandfather was a foreman, and brought him over. My memory of this is not very accurate. Because it’s word of mouth or what he said to me, or looking at old family photos, or something, that you sort of put it together. Visiting my grandfather’s home in Hiroshima, there.

BARBARA JOHNS: So your grandfather and your father had immigrated.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did your grandfather stay here, or did he return?

FRANK OKADA: No, he went back, probably in the 1920s or something and he never came back. I guess he just ran the farm.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you have any idea how long your father was over here when he was a teenager?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think he came over here when he was very young, and then went back and got married and came back with my mother.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was that an arranged marriage in the traditional fashion?

FRANK OKADA: Sort of. They had a relationship with another family named Otas. If he didn’t have a son—right?—you wouldn’t carry the family name or something like that. No, if you had daughter, and there was no way to sustain the family name, that you would take somebody in the family. . . . You would bring in male, you would arrange a marriage with a male, and he would take the family name.

BARBARA JOHNS: So it’s not adopting a son, it’s really arranging a marriage with the understanding that the male takes the woman’s names. . . .

FRANK OKADA: The family name. Yeah, it’s not unusual. Okada’s a fairly common name. It’s like Smith or Jones. So that’s the way that came about.

BARBARA JOHNS: And your father returned about what age, or what year?

FRANK OKADA: He was still probably very young. He simply went back and got married and came back. And he continued to stay here till he passed away in ‘82. He was about 86 or 87 at that time.

BARBARA JOHNS: And John then was the oldest child?

FRANK OKADA: No. There’s four blood brothers and there’s two sisters. But we had an older brother, who was a foster brother. He was a friend of. . . . His father and my father had worked the railroad. And his father went back [to Japan—Ed.] and so my father became his guardian, essentially. So he’s sort of like the oldest brother. I remember him very vaguely because he was killed the second day before the war ended in Europe.

BARBARA JOHNS: He was fighting in Europe.

FRANK OKADA: With the 442 [regiment—Ed.]. And then I had another brother—who’s still living—his name is Robert, or. . . . People call him Charlie or Charlie-horse, because evidently when he was young he got a charley-horse. So some people called him Charlie, or some people called him Horse. Some people called him Yosh, which is short for Yoshitaka. And some people call him Robert, and some people call him Bob, and so. . . . But I think most, he responds to Horse mostly.

FRANK OKADA: His wife calls him Horse. So I figure, you know. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: That’s as intimate as any. [laughing]

FRANK OKADA: He was at a generation where nicknames were fairly prevalent, like in the thirties, the late thirties.

BARBARA JOHNS: Now this is a blood brother, not a foster brother.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, this is a blood brother. The oldest one was a foster brother.

BARBARA JOHNS: And did the foster brother adopt the name Okada?

FRANK OKADA: No, he kept his. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: His family name, which was what?

FRANK OKADA: Eiichi. . . . I forgot his last name. I used to see him a lot. . . . During the war he used to come. . . . H-i-t-a, I think was the name, but. . . . [later corrected to Eiichi Fred Haita—Ed.]

FRANK OKADA: My family’s gonna really get. . . . [chuckles]

BARBARA JOHNS: [chuckles] You can correct it later if you want to. That’s okay. You were quite young when he died.

FRANK OKADA: My brother Charlie always wanted to be a commercial artist or a—what do you call them?—graphic designer. In the forties, you’d just say commercial artist or fine artist, but now it’s like they’re graphic designers. And so that’s what he’s been doing all his life. He went to Burnley [School of Art, Seattle], and has been working agencies, and he’s been free-lancing. But he’s retired now; he’s 71 or 72.

BARBARA JOHNS: What agencies did he work for here? He’s in Seattle, I take it.

FRANK OKADA: When he first started, I guess he used to work with Harry Bonath. He was in his agency. I think at one time a lot of agencies were local, and over the years it’s just gotten bigger and are big kind of corporate kind of situations.

BARBARA JOHNS: And Burnley was really the center of a lot of that sort of graphic design and illustration.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, where people were taught. And so he worked for Harry Bonath, and then he’s worked various offices, and he’s freelanced quite a bit. So when I grew up, there was this sort of kind of working with the hands thing that was there. When I grew up, you know, funny books were really spectacular, so everybody would draw. Everybody would try to draw. I wasn’t very good at it [chuckles], but I remember prior to the Second World War, all the kids would be drawing their own funny book scripts.

BARBARA JOHNS: Oh, I remember in the forties the back page of the comic books often advertised: “Can you draw?” “Learn to draw,” “Find your talent.”

FRANK OKADA: And so they would kind of block off like the funny book section, and create stories and things, whatever. I don’t even remember any of them. But I knew that that was a real activity. As you go through grade school, you sort of doodle and sketch, sort of half listening to your teacher.

BARBARA JOHNS: Robert—Robert/Charlie—is the oldest brother, isn’t he, and then John.

FRANK OKADA: And then John is the second. He’s a writer. And then my brother Roy. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Pardon me, but John worked also as a graphic designer, did he not?

FRANK OKADA: No, when he left Seattle after he got married, he went to work—I believe it was one of the missile projects for Chrysler Corporation when they were in the missile business. And he was doing editing—copy editing. From Detroit he moved to Los Angeles where he worked for Hughes as a copyeditor _____ for whatever publications—if they were in-house or whatever.

BARBARA JOHNS: Now we’re talking about the 1940s?

FRANK OKADA: No, we’re talking after the war. In the early fifties he moved to Detroit, and then probably in the latter fifties or probably around 1960, or ‘59, he moved to Los Angeles and stayed there till he passed away.

BARBARA JOHNS: And he died in 1970?

FRANK OKADA: ‘70 or ‘71, somewhere in there. The next brother is my brother Roy, who’s been an engineer at Boeings. He just retired a couple of years ago.

BARBARA JOHNS: And how much younger is he than John?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, I don’t know.

BARBARA JOHNS: More or less.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, three or four years, somewhere in there. And then there’s me. I come in, being the youngest son. And then my sister Arlene [Yamada—FO]. She was a schoolteacher. And then when she had a family, she subbed, but now she’s working for the Forestry Service, I think, or something.

BARBARA JOHNS: In Seattle?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, out of Seattle? And then there’s Connie [Okada—FO], who’s the librarian at the University [of Washington—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: And where did the sisters fit in among your brothers?

FRANK OKADA: They’re younger than I am.

BARBARA JOHNS: Both of them are.

FRANK OKADA: Connie’s the youngest. And Arlene follows me. I do remember the first art we saw or was explained to us was the Mexican realists. Social realists were very popular in the thirties, ‘38, ‘39, and that was about the time of the WPA, so I remember seeing, or it being explained to me.

BARBARA JOHNS: You must have been seven or eight years old then?

FRANK OKADA: ‘38, ‘39, I guess, the WPA was still big. Because I think they were easy because you could tell stories. They’re so literal.

BARBARA JOHNS: You saw them in reproduction, perhaps some magazine article?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, in slides or in lantern slides or whatever.

BARBARA JOHNS: There were several artists from Seattle—Kenneth Callahan, Ambrose Patterson—who went to Mexico because of their interest in the muralists. Did that help create a more lively presence in this community?

FRANK OKADA: I was so young, but I remember going to some theater on Rainier Beach. It was one of those theater groups sponsored by WPA. In those post-Depression years, prior to the Second World War, everything was seen in its very socialized terms, and so I think it pervaded public school-teaching. I guess the orientation of what you wanted to do was fairly realistic. You know, apples, buildings. Today it’s more about—I think it’s about being more subjectively creative.

BARBARA JOHNS: Maybe, but when I think about how old you really were, it would seem only natural for someone in grade school to be interested and to understand what is realistic or naturalistic. It’d be hard to think in abstraction when you’re that age.

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think it was before the concept of being creative for creativeness’ sake.

BARBARA JOHNS: I see what you’re saying.

FRANK OKADA: Where, why you should color, express yourself. And that didn’t exist then.

BARBARA JOHNS: You must have had some good teachers if this was grade school and you were learning about Mexican muralists. Or was it your family?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, well, like my brother wanting to be a commercial artist or graphic designer, had a lot of, oh, all the paraphernalias like a drafting desk and the triangles. In those days, if you wanted some kind of title made up, it was generally done by hand. It wasn’t like you paste these up, or send this out to somebody else. And so, in those days, a kind of manual dexterity seemed. . . . Like, he’s a very good hand letterer. He can draw three blue lines, and he can script, know exactly what the right height is in relationship to the letters. And it’s something that nobody does much anymore. You know, it’s too labor intensive, when you can just paste it up and get a [finished product—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: Were there others among you who had this manual dexterity or interest in visual arts?

FRANK OKADA: Not offhand, I don’t. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: I know something about your education and a little bit about your brother John’s. Was there an emphasis on education in your family?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, because I remember the last time I went to Japan, which had to do with this show here [points to catalog: Pacific Northwest Artists and Japan, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, October 2 to November 28, 1982—Ed.]. I had a place in Osaka for three months. Took my wife down there. So they put us out in this old house. When I first went there in ‘59, it was really out in the country. So I went there, what, 22 years later, something like that. And there’s a whole suburb. It’s all been concreted. The main fire station’s built kitty-corner to this place. There was a small creek that used to run, and you could get little fishes out of it. And now it’s all concreted. Anyway, they put us in this room, and there’s this hanging [painting—Ed.], must be some Meiji kind of idea, from Meiji period, or something about education, and there’s this young boy with a queue that sort of suggests a scholar, and he’s pushing a plow and he’s reading a book. I think that’s been the emphasis. You know, my father grew up around that. My father was very good about supporting all of us while we went to college. All of us, the whole family went to college.

BARBARA JOHNS: That in itself is pretty remarkable.

FRANK OKADA: He was very supportive.

BARBARA JOHNS: And the hotel management earned him enough income for this, or did he have other means?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think some of us. . . . Well, like all my brothers went to school on the G.I. Bill, including myself, because I was a Korean veteran. When I went into Cranbrook [Academy of Art, Bloomfield, Michigan—Ed.], I used the G.I. Bill, but he helped me out anyway because the. . . . And he was very understanding about being an artist though, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, it struck me that for your brother, Robert, who wanted to be the graphic designer, to have had the desk and equipment that you described indicates a real commitment in the Depression.

FRANK OKADA: After we went to camp [internment during World War II—Ed.], and then we came back, ‘45 or ‘46, when I started high school, I started taking private lessons on Saturdays.

BARBARA JOHNS: I want to talk about this, but can we go back a couple questions about the childhood. Did you grow up in the International District?

FRANK OKADA: I grew up down there around Chinatown, and on the south of Chinatown.

BARBARA JOHNS: In the hotels, or did you move out to a house?

FRANK OKADA: No, that didn’t occur. That was gonna come when the war came up. But at that time we would room in the hotel.

BARBARA JOHNS: So you were in grade school, you were eleven, say, when the war broke out.

FRANK OKADA: Ten, eleven, something like that.

BARBARA JOHNS: What happened to your family?

FRANK OKADA: Well, first my father was. . . . My father was part of the. . . . A lot of Japanese men started an association. Of Japanese hotel owners.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you know what it was called?

FRANK OKADA: No, something Japanese Hotelmen. And then he was probably a member of the church, Buddhist Church, and then he probably had some kind of fraternal association with people from this community, because most of the Japanese that settled here initially came from Hiroshima area or further, Fukuoka area, the southern parts of Japan. They came from certain provinces of. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: You’re saying those who immigrated to Seattle or to the Northwest generally came from. . . .

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, a lot of them came from the Hiroshima or Fukuoka. All these people from Hiroshima got together. They may even have had a club. They probably did. And so, I suppose, when the FBI said, “Well, these are organized nationals, they’re Japanese, and they may be questionable, and so they picked up my father, oh, I don’t know, immediately after the declaration of war, and they sent him to Montana. And so the rest of the family went to Puyallup [Washington—Ed.] first and then to Minidoka [Idaho—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: Did you know where your father was at the time?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, he was in Montana, and I think all they did was sit up there and polish rocks, because I remember getting a box of these polished rocks.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was that an assignment, or was that what he did to pass time?

FRANK OKADA: Probably just something to pass time. I think the security was—they were considered maybe, because they were kind of active in the community. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: So the security was tighter in camp in Montana?

FRANK OKADA: . . . .in Montana, yeah. I think they were more rigidly monitored.

BARBARA JOHNS: And these were mostly men, who were taken from their families?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. They were active, community, church, it’s hometown, clubs, or whatever, I guess. And so nine months, maybe a year later, he joined us.

BARBARA JOHNS: At Minidoka.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. The camps were built like army blocks, where the barrack—it’s a rectangular affair with a large messhall in the middle, and a shower/laundry complex, and then barracks. And I think we were there a couple of years, and then Brother John’s role in the war.

BARBARA JOHNS: How many of you were there? John, for instance, was not, was he?

FRANK OKADA: No, my brother John went to Nebraska—Lincoln, Nebraska. He started going to school. And after the first year, he volunteered, when they were taking volunteers, and he became an interpreter. He went to Camp Savage in Minnesota, I think it was. And my brother Charlie volunteered. And so he went with 442nd, went to Europe. And then my oldest, the one that was killed, he stayed in the army, and he was transferred to the 442nd.

BARBARA JOHNS: Pardon me, but he had been in the army when the war broke out?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, he was in the army when the war broke out, and so he was transferred to this Japanese American unit. And so he was in the same outfit as my brother Charlie. But Charlie knows more about what happened.

BARBARA JOHNS: Were there Japanese American units before the war?

FRANK OKADA: No. There was one from Hawaii, which was called the Hundredth Battalion, and it became incorporated. See it was a Battalion, something called the Hundredth Battalion, in the army hierarchy, you know, like a battalion has four companies, and the four. . . . Let’s see, how’d it work? Something like there was four companies in a battalion, and there was four battalions make up a regiment. So the Hundredth was smaller. It was a battalion, and it became part of the 442nd, which was a regiment.

BARBARA JOHNS: John was in school when the war broke out.

FRANK OKADA: Well, after one year at. . . . He went to Scottsbluff [meant Lincoln—FO], Nebraska. I think it was a junior college at that time. After the first year, he volunteered, because they wanted, you know, they were starting to take volunteers, so he volunteered, and ended up in the air force in the South Pacific.

BARBARA JOHNS: Now, he was an interpreter, so he spoke Japanese. You said that you don’t. Did the older children in your family speak more Japanese?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. Prior to the Second World War, all the Japanese American kids had to go to school for one hour, Japanese school—hour or hour and a half.

BARBARA JOHNS: “Had to.” Did the family pressure?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, everybody went. And so people like John—if they were conscientious about the study—John could write and he could speak. People of my generation, who were like nine or ten years old. . . .

[Tape 1, side B]

FRANK OKADA: So people of my generation, I think I only went to the equivalent of the first grade.

BARBARA JOHNS: In the Japanese school.

FRANK OKADA: In the Japanese school. And then the camp thing, the war started. . . . And the Japanese that was spoken around the home were addressed to kids, and the kids responded like kids. It wasn’t like the adult, mature, polite language.

BARBARA JOHNS: I see.

FRANK OKADA: And so the camp thing is really. . . . So because the living situation was like an army thing, you wouldn’t eat with your family; you would eat with your friends.

BARBARA JOHNS: Were you not allowed to eat with your family?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, we did. . . . But generally, at least I recall eating by myself or with my friends in camp. Some families insisted that they all eat together at all times. And so the Japanese wasn’t practiced. I guess if you’ve learned a language at home, it’s generally around a dinner table. And so we got out of speaking in Japanese, so I can speak a little Japanese, but because of my being away from the community, going to New York or going to Europe or going to Japan, or being isolated in Seattle with the artists’ community rather than the Japanese American community. I’ve never really practiced it, or been able to hear it enough to learn new words or just by hearing learn how to speak.

BARBARA JOHNS: Aside from this child level of Japanese that you heard as a young child, was Japanese the primary language at home? Or were both Japanese and English spoken freely?

FRANK OKADA: In my family, a lot of responsibility about my being raised was put on my brothers. And so that was generally done in English; it wasn’t done in Japanese. I recall when I went to Japan in ‘59, on a Fulbright, my cousin met me. He met me in Tokyo, when we were going down to Kyoto, where I was going to stay. And he asked what I wanted to do, and I think I said something about “Katsudo,” which really means silent movies, this is 1959. And “eiga” is the Japanese for spoken sound movies, and he just cracked up. And so it occurred to me, years later, that my family had left Japan shortly after the First World War, or something, and they did see silent movies. As I recall, when I was very young, going to Nippon-Kan and seeing silent movies. You know, like ‘38 or ‘39.

BARBARA JOHNS: This is the theater in the International District.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. That used to be where Japanese would have their festivals. And they would show movies there. And I remember looking at the silent movies. I guess with war and being in camp, the Japanese language didn’t change, and so when I started going to high school, I always thought this “katsudo” just meant movies, but it means silent movies. [chuckles] So you realized that maybe it’s better not to say anything because if I did start a conversation in Japanese, I couldn’t go into depth.

BARBARA JOHNS: And your relatives in Japan spoke enough English that you could communicate?

FRANK OKADA: When I visited my uncle, first day I don’t quite understand everything, but it has to do with recognizing the voice, you know, you get used to the voice and you start picking up more. But in my situation, where I’d been out of the community so long, where I didn’t hear it or have to use it, it’s for all intents and purposes, really nonexistent.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was Japanese forbidden at camp? Or discouraged?

FRANK OKADA: I think the older people spoke it among themselves. And I spoke some, too, but. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Some of the older people didn’t speak English, I would think.

FRANK OKADA: They did to some extent, but most of them were more comfortable speaking Japanese.

BARBARA JOHNS: What do you remember about camp and the conditions in which you lived?

FRANK OKADA: Like I told Regina [Hackett, art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer], when she called me about this article [“Pride Amid Prejudice,” August 9, 1990—Ed.], I said, “I wasn’t really indignant, because it seemed like a lot of fun [to me].” You know, it was like an extended summer camp, in a sense.

BARBARA JOHNS: When you’re eleven and twelve.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. The indignities certainly, oh, come, or some conscious sort of thoughts, after you’re matured, and you look back.

BARBARA JOHNS: When did you get angry?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I didn’t get angry. But it was an indignity, and I think the older people really suffered, you know, there were great sacrifices. I think a lot of people never made it, really. Killed their will. I mean, they come back and they’re. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Of your parents’ generation?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. Come back, they’re almost sixty and had to start all over again. Some people just could never make it. Which is the sad part. It’s more about a sadness. To have, you know, and to say that I’m indignant is like, indignant at who? In a sense, except the system. My indignity or my consciousness about that came, oh, much later.

BARBARA JOHNS: In about what time do you place that?

FRANK OKADA: I suppose, probably in the late sixties, when the idea of the importance of your cultural heritage and a cultural identity was important, with the Chicanos, and with the Blacks, and with Asian American movements. And I suppose my interest came because of the. . . . The Asian American thing, I think artistically was a literary movement initially. People like Frank Chin or Lawson Inada. They’re the people who had my brother’s book republished [combined Asian American Resources Project, Inc., Seattle and San Francisco, 1976]. And being an abstract. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: You’re talking about an ethnic consciousness in the sixties.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, Asian American thing.

BARBARA JOHNS: That you identify as a literary movement.

FRANK OKADA: And so I became aware of it. . . . And the written word is so much more precise, in terms of describing things. And the way I paint [chuckles] is hard to align with that kind of thing. But you think about it a lot. . . . But I think to a great degree the kind of ambience of my painting has. . . . You know, when I think about painting, I always think about—at least in my stage, you know, because I’m going to be 59 in November, I’ve lived three-quarters of my life at least—my painting as a more dedicatory object than something that’s says something.

BARBARA JOHNS: You say “dedicatory.” Do you mean meditative or reflective?

FRANK OKADA: Dedicatory in terms of, mmm, maybe like a kind of a monument dedicated to the dead, or something like the Chinese stele with a sutra sort of carved in the back. I’d see it like that, because I sort of sensed that sort of remembrance of the past.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you liken it to any Japanese traditions?

FRANK OKADA: No, I mean, it’s just an offering.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, one thing that comes to mind is the wrapping of trees. I’ve not been to Japan, but. . . .

FRANK OKADA: Well, the wrapping of trees is to protect them from freezing.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’ve seen pictures of ties around auspicious places that I believe goes back to Shinto.

FRANK OKADA: There’s places where you can write something on a piece of paper, and then tie it onto a branch of a tree. Or something like that, as I recall.

BARBARA JOHNS: It always strikes me as such a direct, simple nondescriptive action.

FRANK OKADA: Gestures, I guess you could say. Nondescriptive gesture.

BARBARA JOHNS: Does that relate to what you’re saying about your painting?

FRANK OKADA: It’s sort of like it. It’s the best I can do. [chuckles]

BARBARA JOHNS: Did your awareness of your painting take a new context, then, in the sixties? You went to Japan first in the late fifties, so I’m wondering when you somewhat formalized this in your own mind.

FRANK OKADA: Well, painting in Eugene [Oregon—Ed.] where there is really, when I first went down there, a no-gallery situation. You know, there’s the kind of critics in a small. . . . You know, Eugene, at least to me, is a small town that’s sort of skipped becoming a big city. Eugene is a small town that became a suburb.

BARBARA JOHNS: A suburb of the university [of Oregon—Ed.]?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I mean, Seattle was a small town, small port. It became a big city, and then the suburbs sort of grew out of that. And Eugene, to me, is like a small city that skipped becoming a big city and became a suburb.

BARBARA JOHNS: So it has a very residential character?

FRANK OKADA: It has a much more suburban quality. There’s nothing old. There’s no old buildings of any merit. They tore ‘em all down, for what they had old. So somehow it’s not really like Seattle. You know, Seattle has a lot of old buildings. I grew up here, and I spent most of my time in big cities up to the time I moved to Eugene. The rhythm of the place is a lot slower than Seattle. So you can’t help being affected by that. . . . Studio discipline, it just becomes a very workaday thing for me, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s interesting that you moved to Eugene in the late sixties, roughly the same time that ethnic identity became a political issue.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I went down there in ‘69.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’m wondering from the way that you describe your paintings as dedicatory, if perhaps the move changed your painting? Did it make it more reflective? Did it make your practice of it more reflective, perhaps?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I guess it’s more reflective painting, compared to what I’m doing now, if you compare it to the painting that was hanging in this show here this summer, you know, this current exhibition [an untitled painting dated 1966, in Views and Visions in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle Art Museum—Ed.]. It’s not as physical. The way I paint—every day, good, bad, or indifferent—just go in the studio in the mornings, you start to feel older. Because the way I paint is very physical, you know, and it takes. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Will you describe it?

FRANK OKADA: I do this underpainting, and I got this small stroke. . . . Last two year, the last two years, I did about five paintings that were like 80 by 156 inches.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’ve seen some of the big ones.

FRANK OKADA: Nordstrom, I did one for Jean and Bruce Nordstrom as a commission, and I said, “Well, I don’t want to do sketches, and so I’ll just do five big ones and you guys take your choice.”

BARBARA JOHNS: Typically, do you work on several at once, or do you work on one at a time?

FRANK OKADA: I work about two or three at a time. Two at a time.

BARBARA JOHNS: And these five would be related? I know often your work has a closely related geometric matrix.

FRANK OKADA: Well, I’ll bring the slides. There’s one slide that’s missing, but I did three with one idea, and then two with another. But that was a mistake. Next time I want to do the sketches. “Is this what you want? Okay, I’ll give you that.”

BARBARA JOHNS: How long does it take you to complete a painting of that size?

FRANK OKADA: About four months. And I would be doing some smaller things on the side, but. . . . So, like when I’m sort of covering the underpainting, put color over all the underpainting, when you start at six in the morning and [maybe, you] work till ten at night to get it finished]. Takes a while, and I have to figure out another way to do that, you know. [chuckles] But that just happens to be where I’m at at the moment. When I finish a painting, that’s a kind of resolution, that I can say, “Well, it’s done, and I’ll go on to the next one.” But I question the working that way.

BARBARA JOHNS: Is the small motion, the small stroke on the surface. . . .

FRANK OKADA: Well, it’s just sort of brushing. But it’s just a medium, too. You know, I think oil paint has that kind of physical volume, it keeps that stroke, but if you do it in acrylics, it just doesn’t retain the nice kind of brush marks and things. But I like oil paintings, because you can bail out. You can scrape oil painting down, you can bring the color back up, where acrylics is closer to Russian roulette. If you keep covering it, the colors get deader and flatter. And I’ve always been comfortable with oils. I’ve always painted with them.

BARBARA JOHNS: There’s one painting at the Seattle Art Museum that’s in casein. Did you try that for a while?

FRANK OKADA: I don’t remember that painting.

BARBARA JOHNS: A small black and white.

FRANK OKADA: I said, “This is a hell of a dumb way to paint,” but it’s the way it is. I just work into more _____, you know, so. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: A dumb way to paint is?

FRANK OKADA: This real labor -intensive way I figured out. Where the strokes had to be fairly even and consistent. When you start doing a canvas that’s 80 by 156 inches, that’s a big shape when you trying to keep a fairly even texture. I think of it all the time, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’ll bet! [laughs]

FRANK OKADA: So it’s just my luck, if that’s the only way at this time that I can resolve a painting, and I guess that’s the price.

BARBARA JOHNS: We were talking about the post-war years and the consciousness of the sixties and moving to Eugene. Did you ever made an equation between these experiences and the direction of your work?

FRANK OKADA: No. No, I never said, “Here’s my painting, and this is my statement.”

BARBARA JOHNS: I didn’t mean that. I think we were talking about the term “dedicatory,” a certain consciousness of the sixties, and you moved to Eugene to a more isolated place. I was trying to see if there was any kind of relationship in your own mind.

FRANK OKADA: No, I felt the way I painted it would be a far stretch of the imagination to relate what I was doing to what was essentially happening in the literary discipline, in terms of being able to describe that experience. There was no way to make it fit, and, if I did, I knew it would make me real uncomfortable, because it wouldn’t hold, I couldn’t stand by it.

BARBARA JOHNS: I want to go way back to either the war years or right after. The ages that you were during the war—a young teenager and then a teenager right after—that’s a time in which an individual really forms a lot of self-image.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, well, when I came back from camp. . . . No, one year before, my father moved us to a place called Ione, Washington, which is a hundred miles north of Spokane, and we lived there a year. This friend had a laundry, and so my dad worked there.

BARBARA JOHNS: Now this is at the end of the war?

FRANK OKADA: This is before the end of the war. You could move out of camp, but it had to be east of the Rockies [FO means Cascades—Ed.], if you had some support. My father had this friend who ran this laundry, and so my father took me and my two sisters and my mother up there for a year. We worked the laundry and I finished the seventh grade there, skipped the eighth. I had this teacher; it was very nice, because she had taught at Tule Lake [California—Ed.]. And so she knew about where we came from, and she was very nice. She was very encouraging and she had us write a lot and things, and so she was very good. You know, she’d be creative and imaginative and things. So it was very good experience for going back into exclusively white society, because we were the only Japanese family in that town.

BARBARA JOHNS: It was good experience because of the quality of education?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, and I think it helped because she had taught a year or two years at Tule Lake. And her name was Mrs. Locke, and she at least seemed to have encouraged creative writing and drawing and things like that. And so when he came back here, I started high school—Broadway (when this was still a high school). And so I went to Broadway one year and I went to Garfield for three, because they closed it [Broadway—Ed.] up after my freshman year. And so when I started high school, they started paying private lessons for me on Saturdays, so all through high school, every Saturday I’d go up and learn drawing and painting. It’s sort of like, “If you don’t go, you’re going to have to get a job or do something.”

BARBARA JOHNS: This is your father.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. So I said, “Okay, I’ll go to school.” It was Leon Derbyshire. He had a. . . . You know where the I.O.O.F. Temple [10th and Pine, Seattle—Ed.] is? He had a studio on the top floor, taught for years. A lot of commercial artists would go there and study. And so I went to him every Saturday or, all through high school.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did he teach, himself, or with other teachers?

FRANK OKADA: He taught himself. He was sort of a portrait/landscape painter, but he was very good. You know, he didn’t say you had to be an artist or anything like that. . . . So he started off with cubed objects with charcoal, fine charcoal. Made you draw for a year, and then introduced you to an eight-color palette, and to still lives. And his background was. . . . Prior to the First World War, I think he was in the Seattle Art Club, for when there were no schools, they would go to house to house and teach each other something.

BARBARA JOHNS: Wasn’t he British?

FRANK OKADA: No. He may have been British, but I think he was maybe born here. He was a very nice, gentle man, and so after the. . . . I think he may have got drafted or something, the First World War, but maybe the war ended or something. I know that he had gone to Paris and studied with André Lhote. And so he was orientated [sic], at least up to Cezanne. I think a lot of Americans—Canadians—had studied with him, and even as late—I met this Canadian lady, who said that she had studied with André Lhote in 1955 or ‘54.

BARBARA JOHNS: A number of artists from Seattle were there in the thirties.

FRANK OKADA: And so, then after that Derbyshire went to Pennsylvania Academy of Art. He liked people like Robert Brachman, at the New York Art Students League. He liked Henri and Sloan and. . . . It was sort of the way to paint before the advent of Abstract Expressionism. And so I liked that orientation, and that was sort of nice, when you think about it, because there aren’t too many people who teach privately anymore.

BARBARA JOHNS: So these were really private classes?

FRANK OKADA: Well, Saturday there were like, oh, six or seven kids there.

BARBARA JOHNS: But they were, like you, in high school?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. And he had other classes during the weekdays and the evenings for older people. Portrait painting, _____. So a studio became very comfortable. To be in the studio atmosphere. One of the people that I went to school with was Robert Bonavie. You know, Robert? He’s a French horn [player—Ed.]. I think he used to play French horn for Seattle Symphony. And there were a couple other people. And so I went there for four years. And he [Derbyshsire—Ed.] really loved nineteenth-century academic painting. But that’s all right because, you know, it was an honest kind of affection for it. He liked Bouguereau and he would talk about—you look at it, it’s very sappy, sentimental—the technical thing about the underpainting. And he’d talk about Gerome and things, and when I travel and go to museums, I could look at a French academic painting and see some very admirable qualities about it. I was in Boston, and when I go to Boston I always looked at. . . . There’s something—I think it’s by Gerome—it’s called The Prince. Have you seen that painting? It’s a beautiful painting. It’s a very ascetic kind of monk’s robe coming down the steps. . . . He’s surrounded by all these well-dressed courtiers. And it’s beautifully orchestrated, because, you know, you just, “Gee, this guy did everything.”

[Tape 2, side A]
[The recording level on most of this tape side was very low, making some of the connecting words unintelligible, so my certainty is considerably lessened—Trans.]

BARBARA JOHNS: This is an interview with Frank Okada, tape 2, side one, August 16th.

FRANK OKADA: So, I enjoy looking at it.

BARBARA JOHNS: There are a few of those kinds of paintings in Seattle—I think of the Henry [Art Gallery, University of Washington] collection and maybe some things at the Frye [Art Museum, Seattle]. Did you see any of that?

FRANK OKADA: Not at the quality of that particular painting we’re talking about now.

BARBARA JOHNS: Not of Gerome. I’m thinking of Bouguereau.

FRANK OKADA: I look at anything. The guy who paints those ducks. What’s his name? You know, those feathery ducks, really popular? You ever see them in the Frye?

BARBARA JOHNS: I can’t think who it is, Frank.

FRANK OKADA: I think it’s a German painter. I enjoy looking at them.

BARBARA JOHNS: Let me ask you about your father. It sounds as if he really encouraged you, in giving you an option.

FRANK OKADA: He supported us, yeah. My brother Charlie recommended my father to send me, because I’m always drawing. And, you know, I wasn’t the greatest high school scholar.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, your high school years were awfully disrupted.

FRANK OKADA: Well, it was very continuous, because I started as a freshman in high school here.

BARBARA JOHNS: But you don’t describe a sense of dislocation, at fifteen or sixteen. I think back to post-war years, and that can’t have been comfortable.

FRANK OKADA: Jackson Street, lower Jackson, when you came out, was all Black. I really like jazz. I used to hear a lot of jazz, and I still like it. I came back and I used to hang out at a Black record shop, called Lynn’s Record Shop, and a really nice lady—we became very good friends—ran it, a woman named Betty Stiles. She was from New York, and so I started to listen to jazz records at a very young age, and started collecting it. And through the years I just keep collecting. I just got rid of a whole bunch of my old LP’s.

BARBARA JOHNS: David [Ishii—Ed.] [laughing] told me. He was horrified that you had given them away.

FRANK OKADA: I started buying CD’s and I think I made about $300 or something like that.

BARBARA JOHNS: You developed your interest in jazz then, as a teenager, I take it?

FRANK OKADA: I would read Downbeat and Metronome, and I would read books at the library, history of jazz, go out and buy the record and listen to it. Then I used to go to another record shop, where I got involved and started listening to classical music. _____ _____ says, “Well, listen to this.” And this is in the, late ‘48, ‘49, and there was a woman named Twila Hayes, and said, “Well, listen to this one.” So I’d buy John Cage or some of the French modern composers, like Martineau, and whoever. I’d take them home and listen to them, listen to Bartok. Then I’d go read about it in the library.
Derbyshire said, “You have to travel and you have to look at paintings, you have to go back east.” I always sort of knew that I had to, sooner or later, travel to look at other people, and he was very good. But I really appreciate his sort of affection for academic painting. Every time I see that painting [Gerome’s The Prince—Ed.], it knocks me up. Because it’s beautiful. . . . It’s so complex: the lighting and the reflections on the wall, and costuming and the postures of the figures, and the space between the figure, choreography. This is a very wonderful pregnant movement. People think I’m off my rockers, but I appreciate the fact that you look at it, and I think it’s good.

BARBARA JOHNS: Is it too extravagant to say that in your very large paintings, you’re dealing with space and light with a related kind of mastery of scale?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, could be. He certainly emphasized placement, this apple and this bowl were how far, what level.

BARBARA JOHNS: This is Derbyshire?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. So there was a lot of designing involved. When you do a still life, and the more complex it gets, you have textural differences, the texture of the apples, the texture of the drape, and stuff. And it’s a fairly complex kind of program, I guess you could say. The more stuff you put in the more you have to program, you have to consider, in terms of entire events of painting. I think it’s somewhere, some kind of tutorial logic that developed there, and especially his orientation in Cubism, you know, as up to Cezanne, a kind of even tension and a sort of a grid system, you could say, of Cezanne, no dead spaces kind of thing. So that little kinds of concerns were very important. But I did like the fact that he restricted us to and eight-color palette, and that’s it.

BARBARA JOHNS: The primary, secondaries, black, and white?

FRANK OKADA: No, it was ivory black, and zinc white, and cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre light, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, viridian green, and probably an umber, and that’s it.

BARBARA JOHNS: And are those basics that you work with today?

FRANK OKADA: I painted with just those colors till I was thirty years old. Then in the mid-thirties I got involved in transparencies. I’d started a kind of minimalist thing, you start throwing everything out. And so at this point, I’m wondering what should I put back in?

BARBARA JOHNS: “At this point” meaning today?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, yeah, so. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Thinking about Seattle in the late 1940s and your interest in art, what about the Seattle Art Museum? If you weren’t a good high school student—or an avid high school student—you were really an avid student of other things.

FRANK OKADA: I used to go up there and look. I used to go on my own. I was encouraged to go to the place on my own, and I was encouraged to read, so I’d go to the library. So I’d go after my classes. I’d just go down to the library and take a book. If I read something about Picasso or something, you read about his participation with [Sergei—Ed.] Diaghilev in Parade, and so you’d read that, and so you read about [Erik—Ed.] Satie. So I sort of read like that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Sherman Lee was at the museum from about ‘48 to ‘52. He bought some stunning pieces for the museum during that time. Now was there _____ a lot of publicity in the community?

FRANK OKADA: No, I just went up there and looked around, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: You would have seen first-class Asian art.

FRANK OKADA: I didn’t know too much about it till I went to Japan and _____ to do some homework.

BARBARA JOHNS: You deflected my questions about coming back to Seattle in the post-war years. You said that the International District around Jackson was Black. But you described it only in terms of your comfort, because of the jazz. Surely it must have been difficult, as a teenager.

FRANK OKADA: [hesitant, thinking] No, I wasn’t, it wasn’t, I didn’t think it was.

BARBARA JOHNS: You had told Regina [Hackett, in her article—Ed.], I noticed, that you and your brother passed yourself off as Chinese.
[The quality of the recording from here to the end is quite poor—Trans.]

FRANK OKADA: It wasn’t my brother. It was a friend of mine. But the incident was my friend and I took a bus out to West Seattle, and went swimming. And so we were waiting for a bus to come take us back into Seattle. This little old lady with white hair asked us if we were Japs, and we said certainly no, and she didn’t know the difference. So, you know, so as I have told Regina, probably beating up on a Chinese and Filipino, in the old “B” war movies.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’m thinking of your brother’s book, in which people did pass themselves off to avoid abuse.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, they didn’t know the difference.

BARBARA JOHNS: Were there a lot of Japanese Americans in your high school?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, Garfield had most of the. . . . Garfield and Franklin, I guess, some to Cleveland. Because most of them had returned to the central part of the city. Over the years, as they become more affluent, moved out to the suburbs.

BARBARA JOHNS: Where did you live when you came back?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, down in the south end.

BARBARA JOHNS: In a house at that point, or apartment building?

FRANK OKADA: No, it was a hotel.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did your father get back into management?

FRANK OKADA: He did everything. Make the beds, did the [janitor], and all that stuff. My mother helped. And then she got sick. She passed away in 1950. She died fairly early. So my father sort of raised, at least my sisters. By that time I was in high school.

BARBARA JOHNS: How much younger are your sisters than you?

FRANK OKADA: I think Arlene is maybe four years younger than I am. Connie was born in camp. She was born in ‘43 or ‘42. ‘43, I think. You’d have to ask her.

BARBARA JOHNS: So there must be about a twenty-year span then between the oldest and youngest?

FRANK OKADA: From my oldest brother, yeah.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was returning after the war harder on your older brothers?

FRANK OKADA: I didn’t get that feeling.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did the family feel the terrible irony in one of your brothers having been killed in the war and the rest of you having been at camp?

FRANK OKADA: My family, at least in terms of brothers, we never discussed things where we would feel compelled to sit down and talk about things, in an extended searching way. You just never did that.

BARBARA JOHNS: It is a reticence of style, or is it the pain of events?

FRANK OKADA: I think it was just like everybody had their own thing to do, and. . . . They had their own circle of friends.

BARBARA JOHNS: So you don’t remember any discussions among your parents, while two of your brothers were in the service, the rest of you were in camp?

FRANK OKADA: My parents probably talked about it, concerned with their safety _____ I would think, but. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: So they’re not ones to express outrage or the sorrow that you described earlier.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I think there’s in hindsight—at least for me personally—it’s in hindsight of other fairly well _____.

BARBARA JOHNS: In this context, let me ask you about your brother’s book then [John Okada, No-No Boy—Ed.], that was published in 1957. In the recent edition of it, at the University of Washington Press, there are essays by Frank Chin and I’ve forgotten whom else.

FRANK OKADA: Was it Lawson Inada?

BARBARA JOHNS: I think so. They talk about trying to locate your family, and they allude to questions initially whether your family approved of John’s book because of the view that it presented for the first time of an Asian American psyche.

FRANK OKADA: I think when the book came out that his generation, you know, were just starting to establish themselves. And I guess we couldn’t picture someone who went to jail as being heroic in nature. Even though it was a matter of going to jail because of a matter of principle. I guess it was real hard to see to them, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: But the book doesn’t present his decision to go to jail so much as a matter of principle, because the character is very much in doubt about his decision.

FRANK OKADA: Because of the parents. But there was that doubt. I think it was good to do that. He must have had great respect for those people who refused to be drafted.

BARBARA JOHNS: Your brother John?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. Though he himself wanted to go.

BARBARA JOHNS: And I would think a book like that—because it’s written with such clarity and passion—would come out of one’s own convictions and confusions.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, so a protagonist essentially is a person who has great doubts about decisions he makes.

BARBARA JOHNS: Can we assume that John shared some of his doubts?

FRANK OKADA: I think, especially in Japanese American communities, that the real people you want to present are the people who actually went in the military. And got wounded, or got killed. . . . I don’t know, I don’t think we knew how to handle that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you remember how your family handled it or felt about it?

FRANK OKADA: When I read it, I knew that many in the community that served in the military in the U.S. forces would not be very sympathetic to it. But I think my family’s very proud that he could publish a book. At least for me personally, it’s a hell of a role model. I’m grateful for that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Are you more grateful in retrospect?

FRANK OKADA: Well, in retrospect too, I’ve been more grateful. But he went to school and did his graduate work, and he worked his way through school, and he wrote this book. He loved living in this town. He loved his friends. And, but he knew that if he spent, living in Seattle, because he enjoyed the companies of his friends. . . . He liked to go fishing and picnics and things. He enjoyed that. But he would never write that book. [FO means: John knew that if he stayed in Seattle among his friends, he would never write that book—Trans.]

BARBARA JOHNS: So he moved to Detroit, then somewhat as a matter of discipline?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I think so. So he could isolate himself. Because when I was in Detroit, he did mention a couple of times, like how he enjoyed going fishing with his friends on the weekends and things and talked, about such a great guy, or _____ _____. So I think he felt that if he’s going to write the book to isolate himself, simply on a social level, because I think he enjoyed that camaraderie. See, I learned something from that. If you going to do something, you have to be able to isolate yourself. And see the situation objectively even in geographic terms.

BARBARA JOHNS: When did he move to Detroit?

FRANK OKADA: Gosh, ‘53 or ‘54.

BARBARA JOHNS: So the book was underway or in mind?

FRANK OKADA: He wrote probably most of it in Detroit.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did you know about the writing of the second book?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I knew he was starting to gather information, and he was going to write about the first generation, my father’s generation. And then I realized that he took eighteen years off to enjoy his family. That was his choice.

BARBARA JOHNS: His children were very young then when the first book was published.

FRANK OKADA: They were probably four and five, or five and six. So even in Los Angeles, you know, he just wanted to enjoy his family. I’ve heard a lot of people say that. So I don’t blame him. But then I realized maybe he should have wrote that book.

BARBARA JOHNS: It sounds as if he did write it, but maybe it wasn’t finished yet.

FRANK OKADA: No, I think he was gathering material. Because about three years or two years before he [John—Ed.] passed away, he went to my father and asked him questions about the life, what was going on, and after the First World War, in the twenties, their experiences, but he was gathering material for the book.

BARBARA JOHNS: Hmm, it had sounded to me from accounts I read that. . . .

FRANK OKADA: No, it wasn’t written.

BARBARA JOHNS: . . . .Dorothy [Okada—Ed.] had done a good deal of the manuscript.

FRANK OKADA: Frank Chin wrote something about how Dorothy tried to give this [material to the Japanese American Research Project, UCLA—Ed.]. Well, this outfit was designed just to take things written in Japanese. Frank doesn’t say that.

BARBARA JOHNS: No, he doesn’t. That’s interesting, because I’ve heard that story repeated a couple of times.

FRANK OKADA: At that point, it wasn’t this Asian. . . . I think that’s what I heard, but I don’t know how true that is, either.

BARBARA JOHNS: I want to go back to the publishing of the first book, but let me follow a question. You spoke of your brother’s taking these eighteen years off to be with his family. And that you wished he had written the book, or said he should have written the book. You told me when we were talking informally before, that you don’t have children, and it was a choice that you had made so that you could work. Did your brother’s decision have any bearing on your decision?

FRANK OKADA: No, because somewhere along the line, I knew I would not make a living off my painting. And I just figured, when you’re forty, and you have an opportunity to get a job that would pay more than selling, you know. . . . So I just made it, figuring that I’d always work fulltime and paint. But I know that the emphasis about how important art is that you couldn’t be a weekend painter. It’s a fulltime commitment. So you just can’t wait for your sabbatical. You can’t wait for the weekend. You just have to paint every day. I think it’s that the level of expectations are more.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do others in your family have the respect for discipline that you’ve described?

FRANK OKADA: Well, in their own way, if they’re engineering or whatever you do.

BARBARA JOHNS: That’s impressive, because it forms a thread that goes out throughout your conversation.

FRANK OKADA: I sweat blood for every square inch of those canvases. Sometimes I work on a painting three months and I scrap it. But I think it’s in part because maybe I. . . . I may be mistaken and. . . . Because it’s not very spontaneous painting. You know, it’s fairly rigid, and not like it used to be. [small chuckle]

BARBARA JOHNS: You mean that it used to be spontaneous?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, a little more spontaneous.

BARBARA JOHNS: May I go back to John’s family and your family? You’ve described your family as proud of his accomplishment, but nevertheless there’s a sense that what he published in ‘57 would be very uncomfortable to the Japanese American community in general.

FRANK OKADA: Well, I can’t see them really accepting the protagonist as being representative of the community at that time.

BARBARA JOHNS: You can see them accepting? Or rejecting? [had trouble hearing FO—BJ]

FRANK OKADA: Not.

BARBARA JOHNS: Not accepting.

FRANK OKADA: Being a sterotype person.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was there any ambivalence on the part of the family, or awkwardness, perhaps, wondering what the reception would be?

FRANK OKADA: No. I don’t think they even thought about it.

BARBARA JOHNS: The reason I ask is there’s some hint in the introduction to the book that that might have been the case.

FRANK OKADA: I think everybody was proud. To the community he did publish a book.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s hard to realize that he was the first Japanese American writer?

FRANK OKADA: Novelist. But then, when he was studying, I would read the books that he brought in and was studying, so there’s was always a lot of books around the house.

BARBARA JOHNS: This was when he was at the University of Washington or Columbia.

FRANK OKADA: At the University of Washington. So you become familiar with some of the books he was reading. Reading was a fairly . . . around a lot, maybe.

BARBARA JOHNS: There’s also a reference in Frank Chin’s article that Dorothy did not come to the funeral? Now was there a break in the family, or is that again not accurate information?

FRANK OKADA: No, we went down there, and we had a service. We went down to Los Angeles, and we had a service in Los Angeles in the mortuary. Okay? There was a service. We’re Buddhists, and Buddhists by preference, though I don’t practice it, is cremation. And so it was a matter of interring his urn in our family plot in Washelli. So anyhow it’s not. . . . Well, Frank can be a little dramatic.

BARBARA JOHNS: There are innuendoes in there.

FRANK OKADA: I love Frank, and. . . . Because I think Frank was very important for the Asian American literary movement. I think he was a real catalyst, and he pisses off a lot of people, but he did it. I give him a lot of credit for this whole redress thing. I think he’s very responsible. He reached the third- and fourth-generation college level, and he really addressed their intellectuality. You know, I think he’s very important. And I think he was abrasive and probably upset a lot of people, but I know, I believe he did a lot.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, maybe that explains the tenor of this essay. That is, clearly your brother’s book is a real banner.

FRANK OKADA: Frank did a lot. You know, really I recognize his contribution. I like Frank.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did you know Frank and a number of the others who were coming back to Seattle in the seventies?

FRANK OKADA: I met him probably after my brother’s book was published, but I’m in Eugene. There’s this kind of community thing, so a lot of it is, when I come up and talk to David [Ishii—Ed.], I don’t see everybody, except Shawn Wong or Alan Lau, maybe. You know, I get some articles written, so I see it fairly far removed. I grasp the situation from a distance. But I am aware of what’s been going on.

BARBARA JOHNS: I wasn’t questioning that. You had talked earlier about the leadership that the literary people had provided. And I wondered, I guess, how direct your connection was with it.

[Tape 2, side B]

BARBARA JOHNS: This is Frank Okada, August 16, tape two, side two. Frank, I’d like to go back to your memories of Seattle in the late forties and fifties and your connection with jazz.

FRANK OKADA: I grew up on Jackson Street. Lower Jackson, from about Fifth Avenue up to Fourteenth, it was really a lot of Black establishments: cleaners, restaurants. And so you heard a lot of it. In the jukeboxes they would have the blues and the—the popular blues. And they would have jazz records on the. . . . There were a lot of Japanese restaurants at that time, you know, that. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: This was the late forties?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, immediately after the war. So jukeboxes would have current jazz things, Western pop, Lester Young. So there was quite a bit of it.

BARBARA JOHNS: When we were taking a break, you talked about the number of musicians and who came through Seattle. [FO had talked about this subject during a recess in the interview—BJ]

FRANK OKADA: They would all be around there. I saw Sammy Davis when he was with the Will Mastin Trio. They all stayed at the Atlas Hotel, because there was a segregated, de facto, situation in terms of accommodations.

BARBARA JOHNS: And the Atlas Hotel is in the International District. . . .

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. I would see Sammy Davis. He was really a spectacular musician, because I remember I walked in the—it must have been about ‘48 when some of the first big Dizzy Gillespie big band recordings were coming out in 78 [rpm—Ed.]. He had one of these sweet potatoes [ocarina?—Ed.], and he was playing along with Gillespie’s soloist, big band, really amazing kind of performance. And this record shop was called Lynn’s Record Shop, which was. . . . I think there’s a Vietnamese grocery right now, right off from Seventh and Jackson. They would get all the records. You wouldn’t get them at Sherman and Clay [music store—Ed.], uptown. They would have all these Savoy and Dial recordings. . . . So it was a different. . . . I mean this was stuff maybe they played once a week at midnight on a jazz program on the radio, but I got in the habit of dropping by every day and hanging out there, and I learned a lot.

BARBARA JOHNS: And what kind of clubs did the performers play?

FRANK OKADA: Well, there a couple. Down around there they would have local musicians play. The Tuxedo [Club—Ed.] was a bottle club. Because this was before cocktail lounges and things came in. So you’d go in and you’d pay a cover, and then you’d bring your own bottle, and they’d give you a setup or whatever.

BARBARA JOHNS: You talked earlier about a number of people you saw come through the club.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, well, that’s when I would see Ray Charles. Quincy had said he was a genius, and I went down and, you know, it. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: You have to back up a bit. So you were in high school with Quincy Jones?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, he told me that, “There’s this great genius,” but I don’t really read music or anything; I just listen. But he [Quincy Jones—Ed.] was talking about his ear [Ray Charles’—Ed.] and how to compose and not necessarily his singing style.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was Quincy a good enough friend in high school that you and he went to a lot of these performances together?

FRANK OKADA: No, no, because Quincy was working all the time. He was working every weekend. Weeknights he was playing with a group, Bumps Blackwell, and he was like fourteen, fifteen, and he’d work till four o’clock in the morning and go to school. Another good role model for discipline. That sort of suggests that good jazz musicians are very disciplined musicians in a way.

BARBARA JOHNS: When we talked a few minutes, you described going to the clubs, where the Black audience’s response to the performance showed you a different way of responding.

FRANK OKADA: Because I don’t read music, I only listen to it, you know, but just years of listening, I sort of roughly know who’s better [than—Ed.] someone just playing a whole bunch of old licks and running cliches, that’s about it.

BARBARA JOHNS: Seattle was on a national circuit then for a lot of these musicians.

FRANK OKADA: Well, they had the vaudeville at the Palomar Theater, and so they’d come up with a big band, and you’d see maybe Count Basie, and then you’d have a dance act and a comedian and a juggler, or something, like an hour program, hour and a half program. Those are the last of the vaudeville circuits.

BARBARA JOHNS: The vaudeville’s different from the Tuxedo Club and others you’ve described?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, that was after hours. But they were in the town.

BARBARA JOHNS: And there were no restrictions on you as a young teenager, I gather.

FRANK OKADA: No, no. It was fairly loose down there. Black musicians used to be down there off of Maynard and Jackson. This is the Rainier Power Building. It’s a white two-story terra-cotta-faced building. The Black Elks used to be on the second floor. And that was also the Black musicians’ local union. So it seemed to be quite a bit of activity going on there.

BARBARA JOHNS: I like the way you described how you learned a lot from Black musicians and the Black community. It sounds like you spent a lot of time—and serious time.

FRANK OKADA: Listening and they’d say, “Well, this is really great,” and listen. But I was very fortunate because. . . . And then around ‘48 and ‘49, I became very close to John Erling, became very good friends over the years.

BARBARA JOHNS: John Erling?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, he used to run the Fifth Avenue Record Shop [for a long time the biggest and most comprehensive in Seattle—Ed.]. I’d go in there and I’d buy records, and I did till he sold the business. But I still see him occasionally. He’s very knowledgeable and he says, “Well, you gotta hear this,” so I’d listen.

BARBARA JOHNS: You went to New York and a lot of other places because of art, but certainly the music must have been a motive also?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. When I lived in New York—for about a year and a half there—I lived Fifth Street, between Second and the Bowery. I was only a half block from the old Five Spot [Cafe—Ed.], so I would just go in. On the weekdays, it was very empty. You just walked in to have a drink. At that time, [Thelonius—Ed.] Monk was playing a lot at the old Five Spot, so I’d see him a lot there. And I’d see other people. Mostly, since I’ve been in Eugene, it’s mostly recordings; no large clubs that bring in [musicians—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: What connection do you make between your love of jazz and your painting?

FRANK OKADA: Not much. One of the first albums that I bought was something called Jazz at the Philharmonic, which was still on 78. They had this wonderful David Stone Martin cover. Have you ever seen it? Of a trumpet player, and it’s done in beautiful line drawing. David Stone Martin, you know, has this real mastery of line drawing. It was one of the original. . . . It was the first Jazz at the Philharmonic. It was probably released on a twelve-inch 78s, and it was originally released on an Asch label. And Asch label was the one that started recording people like Leadbelly and, oh, Cafe Society groups, jazz groups, like John Kirby, not mainstream kind of thing.

BARBARA JOHNS: Okay, you’re way beyond me. Go ahead. [laughs]

FRANK OKADA: I was starting to listen to that. . . . And so the cover, I said, “Well, but maybe it’s. . . .” But it was a wonderful cover.

BARBARA JOHNS: What about the cover? The freedom of line?

FRANK OKADA: The linear quality. David Stone Martin did a lot of covers for Norman Granz, the record producer and concert promoter. And so over the years I’ve always sort of liked the kind of wonderful line drawing, and kind of line qualities that Ben Shahn gets. But very much more complicated on some of the covers I’ve seen.

BARBARA JOHNS: And does the line have analogies to jazz?

FRANK OKADA: No, no. It had nothing to do with that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, you described a more fluid line. I began to wonder if it did.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, well, this has got a wonderful variety, with the speed and the weight, and the different rhythms of line, the way it breaks, and that sort of thing.

BARBARA JOHNS: Now you say break and talk about form and variation. If I look at your paintings in series and I look at a kind of—this goes back to looking at the slides that Greg Kucera [Gallery, Seattle] has right now—I see six, eight slides of paintings that are a basic geometric shape that you’ve varied with color. Now, do you equate that theme and variation—if I can put it so simplistically—to jazz in any way?

FRANK OKADA: No. Not really.

BARBARA JOHNS: I realize it’s pretty elementary, but I just wondered if there’s anything in that.

FRANK OKADA: No, I just enjoy listening to it, I guess. I look at the painting, and I can’t see where any of that is manifested.

BARBARA JOHNS: Okay, fair enough. Just had to try that, Frank.

FRANK OKADA: I like listening to it, and that’s about it. Again, it’d be a stretch of the imagination to read that interest into the painting. I’d hate to even try. I think I could make a convincing rationale for that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Okay. I’m not well-enough versed in jazz either to take on further questions.

FRANK OKADA: When I’m in my studio, it’s very isolated, really isolated. And I think a good jazz or good classical music is some way of bringing in real life into your isolation. It sort of keeps you honest, I think. I would look at it that way.

BARBARA JOHNS: A friend of mine who is a musician once described music as the most abstract of the arts.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, it is, because program music can create a visual picture.

BARBARA JOHNS: Right, but not that you see, and one that passes in time.

FRANK OKADA: It’s really abstract in that sense. The Gates of Kiev or Night on Bald Mountain, those are very visual. I think Kandinsky wrote much of his thoughts in terms of wanting his paintings to have. . . . You know, he talks about his paintings often in terms of music, because music is the most abstract form there is. I’m not trying to find that equivalent in painting.

BARBARA JOHNS: I understand that. Okay. Are you game to go on for a while?

FRANK OKADA: I’ve got time.

BARBARA JOHNS: And energy? [chuckles]

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. I’m not doing anything.

BARBARA JOHNS: Okay, then I think at this point what I would do is go back to about 1950 when you started Cornish [School of Art, Seattle].

FRANK OKADA: Cornish . . . in ‘49, ‘50, I went a couple years. I went first in. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: My notes say you went to Cornish in ‘51, ‘52.

FRANK OKADA: I went to Edison [Technical School, Seattle—Ed.], the commercial art school, but. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Broadway High School was converted to Edison, am I right that that’s the same place?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, it was a vocational school at that time. So I went there maybe a couple quarters or something in commercial art, because Paul Immel used to teach there, watercolor. But, you know, commercial art I don’t have. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: The manual dexterity you were talking about?

FRANK OKADA: . . . dexterity, I guess. And, but it wasn’t too challenging. So the second year I went to Cornish three days a week, and then I went to Derby two days a week.

BARBARA JOHNS: Derby is Derbyshire?

FRANK OKADA: Derbyshire, yeah. And I think I did that for about a year. And at Cornish I met James Peck. James Edward Peck made his living as a commercial designer. He was the art director. And then he would teach up there. You know, I think he really loved to teach, and I think he had a Guggenheim in the forties, or something like that. Before the Second World War, and he talked about traveling around the country and on all the trains, and on the caboose, and if you wanted to watercolor, you’d get off and do watercolors. And I think he maybe had a renewal on it. But he was telling about how wonderful an experience it was. And he was a very wonderful watercolorer, and he introduced me to people like Arthur Dove and things. And he urged people to go to the concerts, go to the theater, go to the ballet, and he—again—he urged people to travel. And Derby, I think was very good too, because he says, “You have to paint on your own.” He kept saying, “You set up your own studio and paint on your own.” So it was. . . . I was encouraged to do things. I didn’t know where the money was going to come to finance it but I was encouraged just the same.

BARBARA JOHNS: It sounds as if all these people encouraged you somewhat in the same direction. Or is it just the way you’re describing it?

FRANK OKADA: They told me to get out, go to concerts, and go to ballet. So I did.

BARBARA JOHNS: Some of what you were doing already.

FRANK OKADA: You can’t do everything. You couldn’t afford to do everything. And so I had that. And unlike a public institution, people like Jim or like Derbyshire, they’re really individuals. They don’t have some myth that that was being imposed on them. And I’m glad I had that. There was this individual who didn’t have to stick to some program, being forced by some administration. They would talk about other things. And Derbyshire would always talk about Mozart and how wonderful Mozart was. You get older, so you go out and buy Mozart and listen to Mozart, you know. Things like that. So it was like you didn’t have to, but you became acquainted, you know. It wasn’t something that I was supposed to be taught. And so it came as very personal.

BARBARA JOHNS: Your lessons with Derbyshire at that point were private lessons?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I sat up there and painted, you know, and he’d say, “Well, the ellipse is wrong,” or, “Placement’s wrong,” or, you know. It was repeated over and over. You’d make the same mistakes, he tells you you made the same error, and it was very interesting.
The only gallery at that time, in the late forties, was in the Frederick & Nelson [department store—Ed.], was a little gift shop before you went in the restaurant. Then Zoe opened up.

BARBARA JOHNS: I was going to ask when you became aware of Zoe Dusanne, and her collection.

FRANK OKADA: She started in ‘50, or ‘49 or ‘50, somewhere around.

BARBARA JOHNS: I don’t remember when the gallery opened. I would have said maybe ‘52.

FRANK OKADA: Down on Eastlake. So I used to go down when she had it at home, and she was showing, oh, a lot of younger Abstract Expressionists. In the fifties, early fifties, she showed people like Paul Jenkins, I think Sam Francis, Mike Kanimitsu. And I know [she showed—Ed.] Yayoi Kusama. You know Yayoi Kusama?

BARBARA JOHNS: No, I don’t.

FRANK OKADA: She’s the one that choreographed all the frolicking nudes on Wall Street at noon in the late sixties. Anyway. And so I know Yayoi had her first show there. She came in the late fifties. And I met her later in New York. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: She was a painter at that time?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, she’s recently had a big show in New York. It’s the one. . . . What’s her name? It’s not one of the major museums; it’s just an art space type.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, there’s P.S. 1.

FRANK OKADA: No, not P.S. 1; it’s the other one. It’s the one in lower Manhattan, up around Tribeca. Is that the Museum of Contemporary Art?

BARBARA JOHNS: The New Museum.

FRANK OKADA: I think that’s where she was showing her work. It may be at P.S. 1, but a sort of a retrospective. I met her through Paul.

BARBARA JOHNS: Through Paul . . . Horiuchi?

FRANK OKADA: Horiuchi, yeah. All the Japanese artists would come [to Seattle—Ed.], and they’d all say, “Well, go see Paul,” or, “Go see George” [Tsutakawa—Ed.]. And so after that, I went in the army. At least in the early fifties, there were three important shows, because there were no galleries. The Puyallup Fair [Western Washington Fair—Ed.] was considered very important, because they brought an out-of-town juror.

BARBARA JOHNS: And where did those jurors usually come from?

FRANK OKADA: Well, there was one when I got first prize one year, came from Chicago Museum. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: So, from beyond the West Coast, too.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. And that’s when Gervais Reed was doing it every fall. They would have this exhibition. The other one was the Annual Watercolor Show. And then the Northwest Annual. So the situation, certainly in Seattle, and a lot of other cities outside of New York, had to do with gaining visibility in these sort of one-painting [one painting per artist exhibitions—Ed.]. Now it’s turned around—where you gain your visibility in a commercial gallery, and then you get anointed by the museum. It works different. It’s a different system now. It was different. So there was only the three, three important shows. Then the gallery scene kind of started in ‘55, ‘56.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did you know Zoe Dusanne’s collection of European paintings?

FRANK OKADA: I used to go down there and look it. I wasn’t familiar with everything, but she would always talk to you and let you see things.

BARBARA JOHNS: Some of the older Japanese American artists, like George or Paul, will refer frequently to Zoe’s support of them as a group.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, she showed them. She showed them and showed John Matsudaira. I was a lot younger.

BARBARA JOHNS: I know that you were younger. Did you ever feel discrimination? In other words, would that kind of special recognition have been of any meaning to you?

FRANK OKADA: Hmm. . . . Not really. Like the fact that they did show there?

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, for instance—and this goes back say twenty years earlier to the Northwest Printmaker shows—George’s prints were shown and won some prizes, as did Fay Chong. That kind of recognition was a very important validation, not only for them as young men but as Asian Americans. And I’m just wondering if the kind of recognition that someone like Zoe Dusanne shows was an important signal to you. I guess the question is, did you feel any discrimination?

FRANK OKADA: No, I always felt that. . . . At that time, the jury was made not on you but on your work, so the matter of ethnicity was not the issue. The work was either good or bad. I felt that that was fair.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s for the older generation people who would be much more aware of having to enter mainstream or be accepted.

FRANK OKADA: I thought it was very natural that George and Kenjiro [Nomura—Ed.] and Paul were very active in exhibiting in the early fifties, a lot of it. I think it would suggest that it was a normal course of events for an artist.

BARBARA JOHNS: Rather than a special validation.

FRANK OKADA: In terms of ethnicity, I felt that the system, where they looked at the work first, and then at you afterwards, seemed like if the painting’s good, it’s. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Fair enough.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, it’s fair enough, you know. If the painting’s not good enough, that’s fair enough, but so I never felt. . . . As long as it was looked at that way.

BARBARA JOHNS: So you never felt exclusion in that way, and it’s not an issue.

FRANK OKADA: Certainly today, where it’s so high-powered and there’s a lot of network going on, that maybe it isn’t fair. But I also feel, if you go to a gallery, and they say, “Well, we don’t want to look at the paintings. We want to look at your color slides.” I get the feeling with public art and all that, I think there’s a whole new profession since the sixties, late sixties. We have a bureaucracy of art administrators. [chuckles] Which is something that really didn’t exist in the fifties or late forties. And it’s a big industry. I think it’s a new profession, this bureaucracy. You know, it’s art administration. And I get a feeling that quite a few of them will not look at work, but they will look at your slides. So maybe you have to figure, “Well, the painting may be very good. The slide looks better. I think I’ll send in the slide,” you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: And it’s a little hard for them to extrapolate from the slide to your 150-inch paintings.

FRANK OKADA: Whether the painting is good, bad, or indifferent, they’re saying, “Well, the slide looks good. I’ll send them the good-looking slide.” It may be not the best painting. In my case, you know, where they’re very large and the detail is very minute, it’s a waste of money for me to take slides.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you attribute the willingness to look at the art first, in the 1950s, to Abstract Expressionism, to the ethos of painting at that time or the formalist aesthetic?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think prior to the late fifties, the dominance of the kind of energy in the American art. . . . It’s a big industry now.

BARBARA JOHNS: I ask in part because from everything else I read, Seattle art in the late forties and fifties was quite political, in that there were a circle of artists, centered around the museum and identified by the preeminence of Tobey and Graves and artists who worked with them.

FRANK OKADA: And their friendship with Dr. [Richard—Ed.] Fuller [founder and director of the Seattle Art Museum—Ed.].

BARBARA JOHNS: And other artists will say that they were excluded. Now this doesn’t have anything to do with ethnicity.

FRANK OKADA: Well, there weren’t that many artists.

BARBARA JOHNS: But it’s certainly very political in that one is in the inside or outside.

[Tape 3, side A]

BARBARA JOHNS: Okada, August 16, tape three, side one.

FRANK OKADA: So, we have to look at someone like Tobey, who was in Venice Biennale, was _____ _____. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, it’s not till ‘58.

FRANK OKADA: . . . you know, and I think maybe that’s about the time he started taking French lessons. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: With [Otto—Ed.] Seligman.

FRANK OKADA: No, I think he was going to the university or something. This guy’s almost sixty years old. And so you go to Europe because you might find a more responsive audience. That’s how I saw it already. I mean, you know, this guy is damn near sixty years old, and taking French because he might feel there’s a more responsive audience in Europe.

BARBARA JOHNS: I see? Well, his work received a good reception [in Europe].

FRANK OKADA: I may have construed this here, because he. . . . I remember him appearing on the front of the magazine, what’s. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, there was a Life magazine article, in ‘53.

FRANK OKADA: Well, there’s a French magazine that. . . . What was the name of that. . . . Trompe L’Oiel or Eye or. . . . He was on the front page of a French art magazine immediately after. So, I figured, this guy has gone to San Francisco and participated in that discussion of Duchamp and Frank Lloyd Wright [round table discussion of modern art, led by Douglas MacAgy, 1949—Ed.] and that possibilities thing. And he still survived and disciplined himself to survive. It’s like a very realistic thing—someone like Tobey and he has to make these moves. It shouldn’t be like that.

BARBARA JOHNS: So it was an example to you, then. When did you meet Tobey?

FRANK OKADA: I met him once in ‘54. I met him about three times. I met him in ‘55 or something, [at] Rose’s Bookstore, and I introduced myself. At the Puyallup Fair, like Graves and [Paul—Ed.] Horiuchi and Kenneth [Callahan—Ed.], they all showed down there. And I think that year I took a first prize and he said he liked my painting. I look at the painting, and I don’t know, I’m so distanced when I look at it now. My sister has it.

BARBARA JOHNS: Had you introduced yourself because of your admiration for his work and his personal example?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. I guess we went and had coffee—and this was in ‘55 when he was still living on the Ave [University Way in University District—Ed.] up there. He asked what I was doing, and I said, “I’m going to school after my degree,” and he said, “That’s very good. That’s great.” And so then I saw him at a couple openings. And the last time I saw him, I had gone to Europe in summer of ‘70, to look at the Matisse centennial there. I went back to Paris. And so, by that time, 1970, he had become quite affluent. So I met him in—that’s the last time I met him—I met him in a bookstore off the Palais Royale right across the street from the Louvre. Very fancy. And so I introduced myself. We talked, and we went out and had lunch, and he said, “What are you doing?” So I told him, “Teaching at University of Oregon, School of Fine Arts,” and he laughed. [laughs] But his financial position was different at that time. It was very funny.

BARBARA JOHNS: Although I understand he was very anxious always about his financial security.

FRANK OKADA: So you don’t blame him, at sixty years old, and not a pot to piss in so it was who’s gonna take care of him? [Note: The age I surmised him to be during our first meeting at Rose’s Bookstore—FO]. So it was funny. I met him in the bookstore the last time I saw him.

BARBARA JOHNS: People occasionally liken your work to his in the small strokes, and his work sometimes has a kind of tablet formation, with an irregular border. Do you liken your work to his at all? In any of those or other respects?

FRANK OKADA: I think maybe my work is a little more opaque. But because of medium. But it’s larger. I suppose the dimension of scale when I work maybe becomes a factor. . . . In the paintings, it’s a factor of the image, I suppose you can say. It’s the physical scale that one has to consider. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: And color, I’d have to add, with your work.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, and color.

BARBARA JOHNS: I can see a lot of differences, but I wonder if you ever make any parallels?

FRANK OKADA: Well, I think a lot of that color. . . . You know, for years, in the early thirties, Tobey had mixed paint, like some earth colors—like yellow ochre, Indian red, black. . . . He had about three boxes, and they were old piano roll boxes

BARBARA JOHNS: Um hmm.

FRANK OKADA: And he must have hand mixed and tubed in the thirties. He gave them to Paul [Horiuchi—Ed.], and then Paul gave them to me. And I wasn’t into Indian red at that time, because Indian red is a very pervasive color. It gets into everything.

BARBARA JOHNS: Is that that somewhat mauve, dark muddy red?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, it’s an oxide. I didn’t use it, because at that time I was still dealing with these eight-color palettes. I used the ochre and some things, and then I gave them to Willard Parker, for a painting. And I don’t know, maybe he used them or something. But I think a lot of the choice of a palette was, like cadmiums were expensive, the cobalts expensive, earth colors. When you start mixing your own paint, and you don’t use up—they certainly didn’t use a lot of it. I think Morris [Graves—Ed.] may have, but. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Now, this is a choice of palette on Tobey’s part that you’re referring to, or your own?

FRANK OKADA: In choice of their part, because I remember a story of a painter friend of mine named Felix Pasilis, was very prominent on Tenth Street. He said, in the late forties and early fifties, he’d see these paintings from South America, and they’re all earthy browns and umbers and ochres. And so as transportation got easier, they would go to South America, or he’d maybe to Brazil, and the place was just exploding with brilliant color. And he realized that the South American artists couldn’t afford the expense of brilliant paints like your cadmium yellows. For years they thought, “Well, South were these earthy browns and these grays and these umbers, that really reflects them,” but when they actually went down there and saw this explosion of color, you know, I think they realized that it was a matter of economics. These guys couldn’t afford. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: So all this that’s written about the Northwest, and about an aesthetic of muted color. . . .

FRANK OKADA: Well, it could be. I mean, it could maybe. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Here’s a retort.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, it’s just a reality of the expense of the color. I think. I mean, you hear about these guys, you know, Graves and Tobey, living off the [land], eating off oysters or mussels, and things that.

BARBARA JOHNS: Well, surely, and a lot of Graves and Guy Anderson’s paintings of the thirties are on seed bags, during the Depression.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, and things on cigar box covers and things like that, so, [it—Ed.] may be, I don’t know.

BARBARA JOHNS: There’s a painting in the Seattle Art Museum collection of yours, dated 1955.

FRANK OKADA: Oh. [Terrible], yeah.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you remember? I think it’s called Flux. It’s not a large painting, but it to me is. . . .

FRANK OKADA: It’s built up very heavily.

BARBARA JOHNS: It is, but it also to me is very Tobey-like, in that it’s got a lot of white, it has those small, almost semi-circular little strokes. Were you aware of a real affinity or affiliation with Tobey? This is 1955, at the time that you describe meeting him. And I should say that the museum collection in the fifties is full of work with that kind of palette. I think that the pre-eminence Tobey must have had—did have—during that time a wide influence.

FRANK OKADA: It’s very subtle color relationships, you know, grays and browns and manipulation of warms, cool, and very low-keyed hues, in a [sense], low-keyed color temperature. I guess you see a lot of it, but I, but at least for me. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: In this particular painting—excuse me—it’s both the palette, but also the stroke and the shape and the gesture.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I haven’t seen that in years.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’ll bring a slide tomorrow. Okay.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, well, I’m not sure I want to see it. [said with a smile—Ed.]

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s a very nice painting.

FRANK OKADA: He was the modern artist. I’m in this real dichotomy, that like Tobey, who’s sort of into a kind of pictorial space which is very ambiguous—like [Jackson—Ed.] Pollock, which is in a space, is it microscopic or macroscopic? And I have this background with Derby exulting about Bouguereau and Robert Henri with us, and afterwards it’s great, but I wasn’t making a judgment anyway. I was just saying, “Well, I’ll just take it all in, and I suppose might add up someplace down the line.” So, you know, I wasn’t making judgments.

BARBARA JOHNS: No, but it seemed as if it was probably one of the directions as a young man you would try.

FRANK OKADA: Tobey was actually the first abstract painter, because by that time his work was fairly accessible in the museums and the galleries—as the gallery systems became more established. I never questioned that before. The polarity of that source, because I figured if I do that—it’s like I just said, “Well, I’ll just absorb it and let it sit.”

BARBARA JOHNS: Gaylen Hansen told me recently that at one point he and Ian Baxter spent a lot of time looking at the space between the paintings in an exhibition. I guess what he meant was that in concentrating on that space between gave the possibility to open something new.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. So, you know, in his own way he broke the Cubist infrastructure, which Pollock did. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Was his philosophical direction of interest to you?

FRANK OKADA: In the early fifties, with Suzuki going to—D.T. Suzuki—going to Columbia and publishing, it became very popular reading among us. And the artists and intelligentsia it was very influential. Because of that they misread Franz Kline. At that time, you know, color reproductions were not as prevalent, and so if you saw a Kline black and white reproduction like this [pointing to a catalog—Ed.], that it would be easy to construe it as a calligraphic gesture till you saw it built up and saw it in its actual scale. It’s sort of like the guy who wrote about San Francisco. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: [Thomas—Ed.] Albright?

FRANK OKADA: Albright, about how Joan Brown and a lot of those people sort of misinterpreted [Willem—Ed.] deKooning. You know, deKooning really was about color.

BARBARA JOHNS: Through a reproduction?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. And surely in the early fifties, like you open up an art magazine and there’d only be one color reproduction, or two, if you’re lucky.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s during the fifties that, well, George Tsutakawa made his first return visit to Japan, 1955, ‘56. At that time he and Paul [Horiuchi—Ed.] talk about extended conversations with Tobey, with James Takazaki, about Buddhism, about Zen. Were you aware of those conversations?

FRANK OKADA: No, I wasn’t of their age. I wasn’t of their generation. Matsudaira—John—probably. Him and Paul always were close and used to go places together. And I went up to see Takazaki, oh, maybe a couple of times, and they would look at scrolls and they seemed really sort of knowledgeable about them. So I’d just go and listen and look. And then, I was out of town a lot, and working. John and Paul could read Japanese. They could read the current art periodicals from Japan and they had a fairly sophisticated insight. You know, it wasn’t all visual.

BARBARA JOHNS: Their heritage then was really earlier than the sixties political movement that you described.

FRANK OKADA: I think that the sensibility, their interest in Japanese art, was an insight that I didn’t have.

BARBARA JOHNS: Um hmm.

FRANK OKADA: But I did, after I went to Japan, mainly to view Japanese art. I went to look at the Zen paintings and became familiar with people like Mu Ch’i and people like Hsia Kuei. Well, I always really sort of appreciated that kind of art, what became a spiritual exercise.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s something I would like to talk with you at greater length, maybe tomorrow when we’re fresher. Because your statement in this Pacific Northwest Artists and Japan [National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1982—Ed.] is so specific about your study of Muromachi period and references that I take it that you really underwent a very intense study.

FRANK OKADA: Well, I liked the idea of the Zen painting as a kind of spiritual exercise. Above politics and above commercialism, I suppose. It always seemed like a very pure way of making art. . . . It’s very admirable.

BARBARA JOHNS: I feel as if I would really like to start that tomorrow under less pressure. I would like to address to your experience in Japan. Could we go back and just retrace some of the school experiences, perhaps, up to that trip?

FRANK OKADA: Okay, so I after I got out of. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: You were in Cornish, then you were in the Army for a couple years?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, and when I was in. . . . I sent a couple paintings back to my brother, when I was painting in Korea. I was watercoloring there. And one of the watercolors—it must have been ‘53 or something—Northwest Watercolor, I think, Paul took first prize, I took second prize, and John had taken third prize. But I hadn’t known Paul, so when I got discharged, well, “Paul said he would like to meet you,” so I went up to a place called Turks on Fourteenth and James, or someplace, where he was still body and fender man [Horiuchi worked in an automotive repair shop at the time—Ed.]. And so he hauled himself out and introduced himself, and so over the years—like when he ran the antique shop on Pine and then later on off Boren—I would go out and visit him, and we’d talk. But he was a very good role model, too, especially when he started doing the direct-welded steel sculpture. And when you think about body and fender work—he’s still doing body and fender work when he started doing this—it’s very physical. And then he would do that body-fender work and do this very physical sculpture, direct welding thing.

BARBARA JOHNS: I’ve seen one. It’s fairly small, maybe two feet wide.

FRANK OKADA: But it’s still very physical kind of thing, and I was amazed.

BARBARA JOHNS: Do you connect that physicality with his use of collage, which is a tearing and piecing together?

FRANK OKADA: They’re direct welded. But the idea that he would do it, after pounding bodies out. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: And what were your discussions with Paul? You said you had extended discussions with him.

FRANK OKADA: Not extended; we’d just talk about other people or, you know, we talked. . . . One time, when he was on Pine, there was something called The Magician by Jack Levine. Do you remember that painting?

BARBARA JOHNS: I do know it.

FRANK OKADA: Is it in the museum collection?

BARBARA JOHNS: It is.

FRANK OKADA: And he was fixing it up. Someone put a whole through it or something. But I did like Jack Levine at that time, a lot earlier I liked Jack. Over the [years] since I’ve seen more current things. But you have to understand that before the advent of Abstract Expressionism, Jack Levine was a highly visible painter in all the periodicals, and as soon as Abstract Expressionism started to occur and reach its peak, Levine’s. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Somewhat like Ben Shahn, I would guess. Shahn’s retained much more recognition.

FRANK OKADA: Well, Shahn. . . . I met Shahn in Japan once in the. . . . When I lived in Kyoto, I met Stanton McDonald Wright. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s a good place to go to meet all the American painters. [chuckles]

FRANK OKADA: . . . and I met him, oh, in about spring of ‘60, or something. He was very elegant. Very tall and this beautiful silver beard, black suit, black cape, one of those black Italian ones. He ended up talking about the merits of French pastry. But he was a lot of fun. The way he paints with very radiated, smooth surfaces, you know? He was thinking about it in woodblock, and something about it was going to take him 168 plates or something. I don’t know what. I don’t know if he ever did one. [chuckles] But he was trying to do a woodblock print or something and was bitching about that. But I was very sort of dumbstruck when I first met him, because I thought he was dead by then. Because I’d read about him in history books and who would think. . . . And so I’m sitting in Kyoto, and he’s talking about the merits of French pastry. I saw him a couple times after that and he was sort of interesting.
And I also met Ben Shahn. My image of Ben Shahn was. . . . The photo that Bruce Nauman had taken of him, sitting in a studio, and it’s shot from a high angle?

BARBARA JOHNS: I can’t think of it offhand.

FRANK OKADA: And he’s sort of sitting in his studio, sort of like this, or something. [demonstrating posture—Trans.] I always liked Ben Shahn’s line drawings. And so my impression was of a very small man, as a sweet man. But he’s about six-three. He’s a big man.

BARBARA JOHNS: Oh really!

FRANK OKADA: He’s built like a football fullback. And he’s sort of bossy. His wife was very nice. And so I saw him a couple times, and we went to see this woodblock printmaker and. . . . Ben wanted to see him, so we went out. And then Ben was going to go to Russia from there, but he decided that he didn’t want to go because he wanted to get back to his studio, so he never did go to Russia.

BARBARA JOHNS: Hmm. This was all ‘59?

FRANK OKADA: ‘60. I think his wife’s name’s Helmi, or something. And she used to do a lot of illustrating for fashion magazines and things. So I sort of respected that too. But there was something not right that he couldn’t screw around Russia get back to the studio. This photo. . . . You should look at it, I think it’s a Bruce Nauman photo. Not Bruce Nauman, but Newman?

BARBARA JOHNS: Arnold Newman. Maybe?

FRANK OKADA: Could be Arnold Newman. But he’s fairly famous for his cluttered studio, you know, and the angle! And that was interesting. I met a lot of artists, met a lot of poets and Gary Snyder.

BARBARA JOHNS: In Kyoto?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, yeah. Gary Snyder was a. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: We haven’t even talked about your going off to New York. I don’t. . . .

FRANK OKADA: I just went to New York, it was about fifteen months, and then, and got to know a few people, like Ed Clark, the Black painter, and Pasilis and Resnick, Milton, and Sam Goodman, who died maybe fifteen years ago. He was from Canada and was an Abstract Expressionist from Montreal. There was Paul Resika. It was a group that used to hang out with ‘em.

BARBARA JOHNS: Why don’t we take a short break and talk about whether to start again tomorrow.

FRANK OKADA: Okay.

AUGUST 17, 1990
[Tape 3, side B]

BARBARA JOHNS: This is an interview with Frank Okada, August 17, Friday, at the interviewer’s home. This is the second of two sessions. Frank, before we begin with your story, I’m wanted to ask you, thinking about yesterday, whether you knew Kenjiro Nomura very well.

FRANK OKADA: I knew him very slightly, because he died in ‘56. I was in the army and I was going to school, so I wasn’t really in town. I knew his work, but I knew him, remembering him from camp, because he lived in the same block in the relocation center. But I knew his son, George. And I did know he painted, and I was familiar with that sort of kind of painting he was doing at that time.

BARBARA JOHNS: “At the time” meaning in the fifties when he was doing abstract work?

FRANK OKADA: In the early fifties. I became familiar with his technique and his imagery.

BARBARA JOHNS: It’s quite a shift from the realist work that he was doing in the thirties and mid-forties.

FRANK OKADA: I guess. I suppose, for people like George [Tsutakawa—Ed.] and Kenjiro and Paul [Horiuchi—Ed.], there was like some kind of a five- or six-year void where there were other kind of things they had to deal with rather than to, say, read art magazines or. . . . And most of the art really sort of stopped for the Second World War anyway. There were more immediate kind of personal concerns to deal with, so I suppose when they came back and had a little time to make themselves cognizant of what had occurred, or what was occurring, that it probably was a dramatic change, the normal sort of change in the way art was going.

BARBARA JOHNS: George and Paul have talked about some of the changes in their work, but since Nomura’s been dead for so many years, there’s really, I think, very little information or familiarity with the work.

FRANK OKADA: I’m not really familiar. I knew they were fairly realistic, in a maybe kind of expressive manner.

BARBARA JOHNS: And his abstraction I think more than the others’ has references to Tobey’s in the use of a white line and kind of calligraphic notation, even though it is individual as well, so that I wondered if there were an interchange of some kind.

FRANK OKADA: Yeah, I think that all occurred when they came back.

BARBARA JOHNS: Maybe we can get to you more directly and ask briefly about your service in the Korean War. You were in the Army?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. I went over there I guess in December of ‘52, and then they signed the Armistice about seven months later, and then I just bided my time till I was ready to be discharged. I was in the Army for 22 months and 25 days, and then I came back.

BARBARA JOHNS: You were not in the front or in any action then?

FRANK OKADA: No, no. I was in an evac [evacuation—Ed.] hospital. First mostly around Pusan area, southern area, it was an evac hospital, so. . . . I worked in a dental clinic. I remember, the reason I got in. They had two cycles where you would take basic training for like ten weeks, which was like the infantry training, then they had a heavy infantry training, which took another six more weeks or something. So at the end of the first phase of the cycle, they picked up their medics and the clerks and things, and so they looked at your M.O.S.—I forget what it stands for—and they said, “Well, you had art school training, so you go to the medics.” I said, “Okay.” So I never realized what that was about. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: Thinking you had the manual dexterity, was that the rationale? [laughs]

FRANK OKADA: I have no idea, I have no idea. But anyway, a company commander, a personnel person, said, “Well, you’re going to medics ‘cause your background says you’ll be suitable to serve in the Medics,” which was fine with me. [chuckles]

BARBARA JOHNS: And you were discharged then after nearly two years?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah.

BARBARA JOHNS: And went to Cranbrook [Academy of Art—Ed.]?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah. It was dramatically different from most art schools, in terms of its beautiful grounds and the [George—Ed.] Booth estate. Most art schools look fairly dirty and like second-hand space, and this was very well manicured and in the dorms you had your individual rooms and you had maid service.

BARBARA JOHNS: How much of the campus is designed by [Eliel—Ed.] Saarinen or other prominent architects?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, most of it was designed by Saarinen and [Carl—Ed.] Milles, and, you know, there’s the Kingswood girls’ school on this estate, and there’s the Cranbrook boy’s school, and there’s a science institute. It was just a large estate with all these kind of educational appendages.

BARBARA JOHNS: Were the science institute and the art institute and the other schools founded approximately the same time, as a part of the same concept?

FRANK OKADA: I would think.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was there a progressive philosophy, or a concept of integration of these various arts and kinds of knowledge, that was a ruling idea of the school?

FRANK OKADA: No, I think, like most art schools, the dialogue among the students is what’s currently being discussed. Like in the mid-fifties it was all Abstract Expressionism, at least in painting and certainly in sculpture in the early fifties—[Jacques—Ed.] Lipchitz and [Henry—Ed.] Moore and people like Ibram Lassaw, and direct welding. A lot of people were working in direct welding sculpture.

BARBARA JOHNS: Did you take any sculpture classes or any classes outside painting?

FRANK OKADA: All the painters had to take one sculpture introduction, so you’re familiar with the medium, and it was mostly knowing what armature was and working with a model and doing it with plasticene and making casts so you understand the process, so, yeah, but it was something you had to take.

BARBARA JOHNS: But you went there to be a painter?

FRANK OKADA: Yeah.

BARBARA JOHNS: And Fred Mitchell was the person perhaps most important to you?

FRANK OKADA: At that point, yeah, because he was very active [with] the veterans coming back from Europe. Like he’s probably the same generation as Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns and that group. His studio was in the same building off of Coenti Slip, where Rauschenberg and Johns first had their studios, so he took me into Johns’ studio.

BARBARA JOHNS: So this is when you would go back and forth to New York with Mitchell?

FRANK OKADA: This is in ‘55. And later [Ovind—Ed.] Fahlström moved into that space after Johns. . . . I’ve never really met him. But Fred was there, and so it was very interesting, you know.

BARBARA JOHNS: So Fred was a real direct connection then to New York.

FRANK OKADA: He’d direct you to painters, and so I thought it was. . . .

BARBARA JOHNS: How frequently were you able to go to New York then?

FRANK OKADA: Oh, we went about every other month or something.

BARBARA JOHNS: As a class, or a number of students, or any way possible?

FRANK OKADA: Well, just three or four people’d get together and then go to New York City.

BARBARA JOHNS: Was Mitchell then very much part of the Abstract Expressionist style and that attitude?

FRANK OKADA: He was part of that group. He talked in length about the Tenth Street activities, deKooning, and, oh, [Philip—Ed.] Guston, and other people.

BARBARA JOHNS: He had been second generation but part of that circle?

FRANK OKADA: I gue