Kamekichi Tokita

Kamekichi Tokita (1897–1948) was a Japanese American painter and diarist. He immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1919, and lived in Seattle, Washington's Japantown/Nihonmachi district (now the International District). He was a prominent figure in the Pacific Northwest art world of the 1930s, with paintings regularly included in major exhibitions.

During World War II, Tokita and his family were forced to move to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. His detailed, deeply expressive diary and sketches he made there were later published and recognized as important records of the Japanese American wartime experience.

Tokita died in Seattle in 1948.

Tokita was born July 16, 1897, in the coastal city of Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, to Juhei Tokita and Shin Kato Tokita. He had an older brother, Wahei, and three younger sisters. His father, Juhei, owned a soy sauce manufacturing business and ran a family-owned dry tea shop. As in many middle-class families of the Meiji Era, great importance was placed on both traditional Japanese values and modern, Western-style education.

Tokita showed an interest in art from an early age, but was expected to work in the family business. After graduating from high school in 1915 his father sent him to China (the exact location is unrecorded) to work as a tea salesman, but he instead spent much of his two years there studying calligraphy and traditional ink painting under a Chinese teacher.

Exasperated by his son's growing rebelliousness, Tokita's father planned to send him to work with business associates in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Tokita sailed the Yokohama-Seattle line aboard the Suwa Maru, arriving in Seattle, Washington on December 2, 1919. He was greeted by his brother Wahei, who had been living and working in Seattle for several years. Enamored of the city and its thriving Japantown district, Tokita did not continue on to Chicago.

Little detail is known of Tokita's early years in Seattle. His brother returned to Japan about a year after Tokita's arrival. Around the same time, he met Kenjiro Nomura, a fellow Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) painter who became his close friend and business partner, and who introduced him to oil painting. Tokita began working as a sign painter, a trade in which his skill at calligraphy proved useful.

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