Jimmy's 'Cats': From World War II to Sept. 11 ... and Beyond
Filmmaker's film on homeless man becomes journey into past U.S. injustices.
May 3, 2007 — -- "I hereby formally renounce my United States nationality and all of its rights and privileges…" -- Jimmy Mirikitani
Sacramento-born artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani was 22 at the outbreak of World War II when he was separated from his sister and placed in an internment camp. He was one of the 120,000 people imprisoned by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds of them, Mirikitani included, were American citizens.
Mirikitani spent nearly four years in Tule Lake, Calif., a high-security camp where those considered "disloyal" to America were placed. This betrayal by the U.S. government led him to renounce his citizenship; he was one of 5,500 Japanese-Americans to take that extreme step. And like many internees, Mirikitani used his art as a way to document his life while coping with incarceration.
Mirikitani painted the harsh environment of Tule Lake -- the desert, the mountains, reptiles and the camp itself, its rough barracks, watchtowers and gates. He often included himself in his pictures, trapped behind the barbed wire fences. As an art instructor in the camp, he taught calligraphy and painting, and exhibited his work in shows at the recreation hall. But the recurring theme in his art since he was a child is cats, often in pairs, all sizes, leaping over mountains or lounging about.
"I like cats," Mirikitani explained this week in a conversation in his small assisted-living apartment in New York. "I'm an artist, and all over people know my cats."
He's right, thanks to a new film by director Linda Hattendorf, "The Cats of Mirikitani". The film begins with Mirikitani homeless on the streets of lower Manhattan in early 2001. Mirikitani is an artist who refused handouts but would sell his drawings -- not just of cats but dragons and flowers native to his ancestral home of Hiroshima -- in Washington Square Park.
Hattendorf hoped to raise awareness of the problem of homelessness through the story of this 80-year-old man living on the streets. But on the morning of Sept. 11, after months of filming, Hattendorf found Mirikitani choking on the toxic smoke billowing from the World Trade Center site. She impulsively invited him to live with her. In their months together, she began to unravel the details of his past to help him receive government assistance and she learned about Mirikitani's wartime imprisonment and how it shaped his life.
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