Art and Agency in Sugamo Prison: Japanese War Criminal Drawings

Built in the 1920s to house political prisoners, Sugamo Prison was one of the few buildings in Tokyo to survive Allied bombing. The irony of Sugamo surviving to be used by SCAP during the occupation to house Japanese war criminals was not lost on its new inhabitants and operators. Prisoner Tokio Tobita, convicted of slapping an American P.O.W. during the war, visualized in a cartoon drawing the poetic justice of Sugamo’s original designer, incarcerated in the prison he built, having strange nightmares when an American jailor on suicide watch rattled his cell bars. The drawing encapsulates a number of tensions. MacArthur feared retribution. The Allies were prosecuting Japanese soldiers like Tobita for mistreating prisoners. They had to set a positive example. So MacArthur chose green recruits—the cream of the crop of young American soldiers who never saw battle—to demonstrate to the Japanese (especially the inmates) how things should have been done when they were in charge. MacArthur prohibited the jailors from exploiting and harming their celebrity prisoners with photography and the kinds of mocking drawings circulated during the war. But it was all right if the Japanese caricatured themselves, and the jailors were desperate for souvenirs, after all. Tobita and six other war criminal artists rose to notoriety by producing hundreds of drawings of the people and events of the prison in exchange for cigarettes, magazines, blank paper, and lighter work duty from their American jailors. The unpublished drawings, collected from American veterans over the past decade by our team led by New York artist and writer Bill Barrette, are a window into the Sugamo Prison experience. Following Alfred Gell, we conclude that the Japanese war criminals used the drawings as “technologies of enchantment” to transform themselves and their histories in their own and their captors’ minds’ eyes.