The Hope of Another Spring

"While this book will be of particular interest to institutions in the Northwest (and Chicago), where Fujii was professionally active, it is broadly relevant and widely recommended as American History. Fujii’s diary is approachable and intimate documentation of an under-emphasized chapter and perspective, and Barbara Johns brings welcome attention and analysis to this artist and his work."

"The book and exhibition, together, shed a powerful new light on a troubling chapter in U.S. history. . . . Compelling as both artwork and history."

"This altogether beautiful book by noted Seattle-based art historian and curator Barbara Johns strikingly testifies to the oft-stated judgment that a picture is worth a thousand words."

"Like her subject Takuichi Fujii’s diary in drawings and words, Barbara Johns’s book records and interprets the events and, especially, the places of the forced incarceration and 'relocation' of the artist and his family during World War II as seen keenly by the Issei artist. But whereas Fujii’s art implicitly evokes its current, historical, and cultural contexts, Johns’s book, deeply researched, explicitly considers those contexts and the work of her predecessors in the scholarship of Asian American art history as well as archival details she herself has recovered. Including the translated text and drawings presented by the art historian Sandy Kita and his collaborator Honda Shōjō, The Hope of Another Spring is itself a remarkable work combining visual, verbal, and scholarly art and the profound social criticism they make—for us, today."

"The visual camp diary left by Fujii offers a powerful and detailed portrait of life at the Puyallup and Minidoka camps. It is a gift to get such a close-up view."

"Although Fujii created an impressive body of paintings and drawings, he rarely displayed them publicly, so his work is virtually unknown. Barbara Johns makes an important contribution that expands our knowledge of Issei artists who were active in the mid-twentieth century."