by Tara Neilson
Li was passionately opposed to violence and war. He wasn’t surprised that the world at large, with its prejudices and segregation based on arbitrary privilege, couldn’t find its way to a lasting peace, but despite the upheaval in his native country, he believed that a people of one race and one nation should find common ground and peace.
As his summer outside of time progressed, his favorite moments were the solitary hours spent late in the evenings going fishing. His boots crunched on shells and the musky scent of pop weed filled the air as the golden creek tumbled over rounded rocks glinting in the brilliant and extreme light just before the sun set.
He had time, as he fished amongst the teeming fins in the shade of rustling alder trees, to absorb this eternal moment. Behind him, the red-painted, white-trim buildings resting on concrete blocks and pilings, glowed in the trenchant sunshine. He cast his line and wondered about his future, the future of China, and where humanity was headed.
Li Gongpu became a high-profile anti-war protestor and university professor after his return to China. He was beaten up by government agents for his objections to the Chinese Civil War, but he was not intimidated. In 1946, one year before the Union Bay cannery burned, secret agents of the Kuomintang assassinated Li Gongpu in Kunming as he left a theater with his wife.
The famous scholar, poet, and popular literature professor Wen Yiduo, who was a close friend, gave Li’s funeral oration despite being warned by friends that it was too dangerous. After standing up to give an inspiring oration on behalf of Li and the beliefs they both shared, Wen Yiduo was gunned down.
US President Harry Truman sent a personal letter protesting the assassinations to Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek on August 10, 1946. He wrote that the assassination of such distinguished Chinese liberals would not be ignored and that resorting to force and military or secret police rather than democratic processes to settle major social issues revealed a lack of understanding about the liberal trend of the times. “The people of the United States view with violent repugnance this state of affairs,” Truman concluded.
Fei Xiantong, one of China’s leading social scientists, wrote that “Li Gongpu’s blood marks a new turning point in the history of the Chinese people’s struggle for democracy.”
Today there exists a beautifully cared for Li Gongpu Tomb on the grounds of Kunming Normal University in China.
Historians believe that Li Gongpu’s written experiences at the Union Bay cannery are the only firsthand Chinese accounts of Alaskan cannery work before World War II.
• • •
GEORGE TSUTAKAWA
Summers 1930–1935
George Tsutakawa, born in Seattle, Washington, in 1910, was an artist whose belief that man is a part of nature allowed him to conceptualize and create sublime fountain sculptures that earned him worldwide recognition.
Tsutakawa, a second-generation Japanese American, was named for the first president of the United States, George Washington. His father, Shozo Tsutakawa, was a successful businessman whose export-import business forged connections between Seattle and the Japanese ports of Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo. The Tsutakawas lived in a fashionable part of Seattle in a spacious house complete with servants, including a governess.
However, in 1924, the Alien Land Law (intended to limit the ability of Asian and other so-called “non-desirable” immigrants to own land and property and thus discourage them from settling permanently in the US) forced Shozo to give up his home, but his business continued to prosper.
Due to worsening attitudes and legalities, Tsutakawa and his siblings were sent to Japan to live with their grandmother, Mutsu Naito, in Fukuyama. She took Tsutakawa and his brother to the theater and sent them to study with a Zen master, who taught them philosophy, pottery making, and the tea ceremony. She had a samurai warrior’s suit of armor that had been in their family for four hundred years and Tsutakawa was, on special occasions, allowed to wear it. They continued to live with her when their mother died of the Spanish Influenza and Shozo remarried.
Tsutakawa recalled that Fukuyama was “a very, very old town with a castle in the middle, a beautiful picturesque old city… there was a small group of painters, who had studied in Tokyo, and they were telling us about Picasso, Matisse, and showing reproductions of their works.” There and then, he decided to become an artist.
This resulted in his being sent back to Seattle when he was sixteen and no longer retained any of his English. While he worked at the family business, he also attended high school and college, determined to become an American art student. His focus narrowed onto printmaking and sculpture. Like any modern teenager or college student, he bought a radio and record player, and as many albums of music (he preferred the classics) as he could afford.
In order to pay for his own tuition, Tsutakawa headed north to work in the Alaskan canneries. He ended up in the small, isolated cannery located in Union Bay, thirty-five miles north of Ketchikan, accessible only by water or air. One summer’s pay amounted to $150, which, during the Depression, was enough to pay for his tuition, his books, streetcar fare, and hot lunches. “It paid for just about everything,” he later said.
Cannery conditions had improved considerably from the time he was born, when the hell ships bore unwilling Japanese workers to labor unceasingly for little pay and almost no food at the “slime line,” but it was a far cry from the civility of his grandmother’s home, or his early home in Seattle. Tsutakawa didn’t let that get in the way of his desire to be an artist, regardless of the work he had to do in order to achieve his dreams.
He soon discovered that the work was strenuous, monotonous, and unending. Fishing boats, or cannery barges (scows), would arrive at high tide at the cannery pier and the salmon—sockeye, coho, and pinks—were pitched into an elevator that lifted them and slid them into the cannery.
Tsutakawa’s day typically started at 6 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m., but when the salmon were running he and the others would work well into the night, when the high-latitude sun barely set, to get the fish processed and canned before it spoiled.
Japanese workers stood for endless hours with their hands immersed in cold running water, scooping the viscera out of innumerable fish cavities. This was the job of “slimers.” In earlier times, down the line, other nationalities (cannery work was arranged by nationality) would have cubed the fish which were tapped into cans with a pinch of salt by the “table men.” The cans, weighed and topped at the “patching table,” were subject to the “crimpers” who used pliers to close the cans and then soldered the lids. But all of that work was now done by a machine, the “Iron Chink.” In fact, most of the work was now done by machines and conveyor belts, but they had to be manned, directed, inspected, and guided by men.
George Tsutakawa painting on the beach. He worked at the Union Bay cannery and painted scenes of it in the 1930s. (Courtesy of Kizamu Tsutakawa)
The sealed cans, stacked in towering squares, were wheeled into the retorts (immense, barrel-like pressure cookers) to steam for an hour. Then the hot cans were vented, checked for leaks (resealed, if necessary), and returned for a second cooking. Afterward, they were sent to the cooling shed where an unmusical cacophony of lids pinging and popping as they cooled would ring out all day, every day.
The finished cans were slapped with the company label, stacked in boxes—they and the cans were made by cannery workers—and stored in the warehouse until the end of the season.
Despite the long hours and hard work, Tsutakawa’s interest in art remained at the forefront of his mind. In his downtime he took the opportunity to visit the nearby native village and study the carvings on ceremonial buildings. He was interested in the totem poles, not only as intriguing pieces of art, but also as marvels of engineering: they were able to withstand many years of hurricane force winds. He made a point of talking to the Tlingit carvers about their art.
And he pursued his own art. Whenever he had the time he used watercolors to paint the cannery buildings with their white-trimm
ed, twelve-paned windows as they lined the pier, creating a lonely wooden alley that was littered with wood-stave barrels, a spool of line, fishing dories, stacks of canned salmon, and a long-handled flatbed cart to move them.
His artist’s eye was caught by the colors and contrasts. He set up his canvas and paints on the bridge that spanned the creek to capture the frontier feel of the cannery with its red-with-whitetrim buildings surrounded by the evergreen forest and embraced by berry bushes. Boardwalks wound between the buildings as they jutted out on pilings into the bay. In the distance Lemesurier Point was visible at the tip of Cleveland Peninsula. On the other side of that point was the fishing community of Meyers Chuck with a post office, barbershop, bakery, and bar.
His paintings are curiously absent of people and when he painted the huge fuel drum on the rock bluffs, with its attached shack and a boardwalk leading to it, and a pier out in front for boats to moor at when they took on fuel, it looks abandoned. Perhaps he subconsciously wished to have the cannery to himself without the distraction of bustling, shouting humans cluttering up the scenery.
When he returned to Washington, Tsutakawa created linocuts of fish, fishermen, fishing boats, the cannery, and Alaska. He created a self-portrait in one of the linocuts that captures a sense of lonesome tranquility. It shows him in a surprisingly civilized cannery bunkhouse seated in front of a writing table reading a book below an eight-paned window, adorned with drapes. On the wall behind him is a framed picture and beside the desk a bookcase bulging with weighty tomes.
Out the open door he recreated one of the most identifiable landmarks in the Clarence Strait–Union Bay area, Castle Mountain on Prince of Wales Island, with its three distinct turrets, the middle one larger than the two flanking peaks.
A linocut titled “Inspiration” shows a man standing on a smooth mound overlooking a wide expanse of what could be water, reminiscent of the large, smooth rock at the entrance to the superintendent’s inlet on the other side of the peninsula from the noisy cannery. The man is standing with arms akimbo amidst rays of sunshine or rain, or a combination of the two—what Southeast Alaskans call liquid sunshine—soaking up the rawness and expansiveness of Alaska’s dramatic landscape. It’s easy to imagine a man with an artistic imagination exulting in the mind-expanding breadth of the scene.
Other linocuts reveal Union Bay cannery at its busiest, a hive of industry, an outpost of busy civilization in the wild hinterlands. In “Longshore, Union Bay” he depicts a scene inside the cannery warehouse with its barn-like doors open onto the pier. On the right a ship dwarfs the cannery pier and its buildings as it winches aboard crates of canned salmon while in the foreground men haul boxes to large flatbed trolleys, maneuvered by a long handle. The ship is so out of proportion to the tiny workers and even the cannery that it gives a sense of the vast outside world suddenly intruding on the isolated post.
Another linocut, “‘Iron Chink’ or ‘Slimer’ (Union Bay Cannery, Alaska),” shows two men dressed in slickers and rubber boots and hats working by the light of a bare lightbulb in front of a giant machine complete with belts and wheels. They stand on planks stretched across two wooden boxes at a table heaped with salmon, eviscerating them and feeding them to the machine. There is a sense that the men, though standing side by side, are immersed in their own thoughts, isolated inside their own minds by the racket around them. Beyond the machine neat rows of cans are conveyed upward out of sight. It’s an unsettling Brave New World scene, encapsulating the strangeness of how efficiently and matter-of-factly man can turn what was once a wild and free, living creature into a product.
Most remarkably, Tsutakawa made his most detailed linocut of the cannery itself, imagining it from a birds-eye point of view far above the creek. The tall pier on its multitude of pilings stretches far out into the bay, with a building on the end that must have been coated in sea spray and in danger of being blown away in the powerful northerlies that strike that unprotected shore. More buildings (the cannery, warehouse, commissary, and so on) crowd between the pier, the forest, and the creek. The radio shack sits next to what is most likely the power plant (where one day a fire would start and burn down the cannery), the antenna post towering above the trees.
It is a compact, tight-knit community, surrounded by the unlimited reach of bay, sweeping sky, and distant, faded mountains, iconoclastic and quaint in its 1930s enterprise.
With his cannery summers behind him, Tsutakawa found his art student days giving way to World War II. Japanese Americans, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, had their property confiscated and were incarcerated by the tens of thousands in internment camps. The Tsutakawa family business was no exception, and neither were Tsutakawa’s uncles who operated it while his father was in Japan. Tsutakawa volunteered for the US Army, where he was commissioned by officers to paint their portraits.
After the war Tsutakawa married Ayame Kyotani, a woman who had been forced to live in one of the internment camps, whose brother was killed at Hiroshima. They began a family, eventually having four children (who would later establish themselves in the fields of art and music). Tsutakawa was recruited to a faculty position at the University of Washington after receiving his MFA. A popular and generous teacher, he taught design courses in the School of Architecture, and later taught in the School of Art.
In his lifetime, he managed to try his hand at an astonishing diversity of art forms, media, and styles. In 1960 he “developed the fountain sculpture of fabricated bronze and completed seventy-five major commissions in the United State, Canada and Japan” (Mayumi Tsutakawa, They Painted from Their Hearts: Pioneer Asian American Artists, University of Washington: 1994). These fountains would bring him worldwide fame.
They were not typical jetting, or squirting fountains, but instead were created so that water would fall naturally over his sculpted shapes. “My fountain sculptures are an attempt to unify water—the life force of the universe that flows in an elusive cyclical course throughout eternity—with an immutable metal sculpture,” he wrote in 1982.
In recognition of his contributions to art and culture, George Tsutakawa received two honorary doctorate degrees, as well as achievement awards from the Emperor of Japan and the National Japanese American Citizen’s League. He died in 1997 at the age of eighty-seven.
Tsutakawa appears to be the only Southeast Alaskan cannery worker, while a resident, to have captured in paint a pre-WWII Alaskan cannery.
• • •
INGEBRIGT (EDWARD) SINNES
1930s–1940s
The Southeast Alaskan city of Petersburg, not too far north of the Union Bay cannery, was founded by a Norwegian by the name of Peter Buschmann at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, this fishing town is known as Little Norway and has the tidy, colorful appearance reminiscent of the land of Buschmann’s birth.
Peter’s son, Eigil Buschmann, started the Nakat Packing Corporation with a partner named Haakon Friele, and together they eventually owned and operated six canneries in Southeast Alaska with 800 employees, producing an average 250,000–300,000 cases of salmon annually, 650,000 cases in peak years.
One of the six canneries was in Union Bay where a Norwegian by the name of Ingebrigt Sinnes worked.
Norway was well represented in the Alaskan fishing and cannery scene for good reason. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, Norway lost as many citizens to American immigration as had comprised her total population in 1800. Many of them settled in the Midwest but were drawn toward the West Coast, feeling a familiarity with the land and lifestyle that was in many ways similar to their homeland.
Simple chain migration followed, as the immigrants sent letters and prepaid tickets home urging family to follow them. In addition, there were the snake oil promotional efforts by steamship and railroad agents who traveled around the country, telling fairytales about America in order to sell more tickets. Many of these Norwegian immigrants (but not all) just missed being on the Titanic.
Sinnes was exposed
to all this talk, letters others sent home, and the stories his father told of being in America a few years earlier, so it’s not surprising that he became infected by “American fever,” as so many of his countrymen had been before him.
In photos he appears to be of average height with lean good looks (complete with a cleft chin) that bring to mind such film legends as Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, and Cary Grant. He gazes directly into the camera with a slight smile and an air of easy, good nature. While the others with him look of their time, he looks like he could step through the camera into the present and fit right in.
Ingebrigt Johansen Sinnes was born in 1898 in Hemne, Norway, about twenty-five miles from the town where Peter Buschmann, the founder of Petersburg (and, as noted, father to one of the future owners of the Union Bay cannery), came from.
Sinnes was fourth out of six siblings in a working-class family. He found, as he came of age, that times were hard with no work to be found. The stories about America called to him, though by the time he was twenty-five and ready to make the journey there was now a quota system, restricting the number of immigrants that the US government permitted annually from any one country. He and a friend managed to make it into the quota for 1923.
Sinnes traveled with his friend Torger Stolsmo aboard the ship MS Stavangerfjord to Ellis Island, just outside of a modern New York City lit by electricity and kept up to date by telephone, at a time when “bootleggers and prohibition agents were killing each other in pitched battles on city streets and country roads, and occasionally killing an innocent bystander” (Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States 1900–1925, VI The Twenties, Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1935). At the same time, young people were dropping dead of overexertion from the popular stunt of “Marathon dancing.” Exposure to the mad pace of NYC life must have been a shock to their Old World sensibilities, and apparently they reacted differently to it.