A Look Back in Time by Brad Shirakawa
“Baby is Taking a Bath” is a fine example of Ella Honderich’s skills, with details so fine that the Hirano family can be identified from it. Baby Daniel is being bathed by his father, James Shigeo Hirano. Pencil and watercolor wash on standard paper, about 9×12” – Topaz, Utah, April 1944.
Topaz 1944: Ella Honderich sat quietly, pencil in hand, making a sketch of the family that she had come to know. She felt accepted by the Hiranos (sketch above), for they were also immigrants, some of whom spoke with an accent. She did too, having come from Sweden in 1937.
Ella’s husband, Walter, was in charge of the Topaz camp stores and co-op. So while Walter was working, Ella was teaching a night class in German. She got to know the Japanese American families and their students. It’s likely that’s why those families felt comfortable when Ella’s penchant for drawing brought her to their barracks. Honderich made 80 sketches over about a two year period while she lived with the incarcerated Isseis and Niseis in the Utah desert.
60 of the 80 sketches are missing. Ella’s granddaughter, Cynthia Wright needs your help to find them. So the question remains…
Have you, has anyone seen Ella’s art?
About 80 people we’re recently on hand to see Cynthia Wright’s presentation of Ella’s work at J-Sei1 in Emeryville on October 13. The event was organized by Ruth Sasaki of the Topaz Stories website.
“My grandmother had lost track of 60 or so of the sketches,” Wright said. “So I went on a mission to find images and copies of as many sketches that I could find. I ended up with about 25.” Those copies were found at the National Archives, the Japanese American National Museum and the Topaz Museum.
How the Sketches were Lost
“She was very proud of them, she wanted to share them,” Wright said in August 2023 “She tried to get them published. No one was really interested in publishing them at the time. She had given a group to Daisy Satoda and Dave Tatsuno for a reunion.”
“Prior to that she had a portfolio of about 60 sketches that she gave to one of her art professors, Sueo Serisawa to hold onto while she was traveling,” Wright said at J-Sei on October 13. “But she came back from traveling and he said ‘Oh, I understood you were donating these and I gave them to my friend, Tomoo Ogita,’ who was president of the Hollywood JACL at the time. By the time she got in touch with Mr. Ogita’s family, Mr. Ogita had passed away. And the family said, ‘We don’t know what happened to the sketches.’”
Ella Hallgren arrived at the University of Washington from Stockholm, Sweden in 1937, to study home economics, weaving and most importantly, art.
Living in Seattle, WA, she met and in 1940 married Walter Honderich. He was hired to be the Superintendent of Business Enterprises in Topaz, overseeing the camp co-op, and was highly respected by the Japanese he met there. “She came to the U.S. to study art,” said Wright. “She was an artist her whole life. She very intentionally, with my grandfather’s (Walter) direction, wanted to record history. She knew at the time it was important to capture what was happening. She was told by the government not to publish any or she would get
into trouble.”
After the war, Ella studied at the Emil Bisttram School of Arts in Taos, New Mexico. She would continue to paint and become a school teacher. Ella died in 1999, Walter in 1985.
2024: All of Ella’s Topaz pencil work is quite fine. “I feel there is something in Ella’s work… there is a tenderness in the way she is moving the pencil around. It’s the detail that Ella as an artist goes into,” said Kimi Hill, who was commenting on the work during the J-Sei presentation. So fine that it’s often possible to identify Ella’s subjects.
Also speaking at J-Sei was Daniel Hirano. “Indeed I’m the one in the pail and the floor getting a bath (above). My dad is shown bathing me, James Shigeo. My mom is seen here at the kitchen table, she is knitting, she is 35 years old. She is seven months pregnant with my younger sister, Carol. In front of her is my older sister, Janet Inako, at that time she was 6 years old. I have no idea how she got a tricycle.”
Response to the J-Sei presentation was very positive, with one person commenting that “It gives us an idea of what everyday life was like. I’ve never seen these type of images of inside the barracks, so its very informative.”
There is no doubt that if Ella Honderich were alive today, she would be very pleased to know that her work has not only survived her, but brings joy to those who see it. So the question remains…
Have you, has anyone seen Ella’s art?
If you know anything about the lost sketches, contact the Topaz Stories website
- J-Sei is a Japanese American community center in the San Francisco Bay Area www.j-sei.org ↩︎
