Kenjiro Nomura (artist)

Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956) was a Japanese American painter. Immigrating to the United States from Japan as a boy, he became a well-known artist in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and 30s.

In 1942, during the Second World War, Nomura and his family were incarcerated in the Minidoka Relocation Center. Sketches and paintings he made there over the next three years continue to be exhibited as an important record of the Japanese-American wartime experience.

Nomura eventually moved into abstract painting. He died in Seattle, Washington, in 1956.

Kenjiro Nomura was born in 1896 in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. In 1907 his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Tacoma, Washington. When he was sixteen his parents returned to Japan; Kenjiro opted to stay in the U.S.

In 1916 Nomura moved to Seattle, working for a shopkeeper in the city's bustling Japantown / Nihonmachi neighborhood (later known as the International District). Within a year he began working as an apprentice sign painter (most likely with Burgira Hirayama, the only known professional sign painter in Japantown at that time), and began taking lessons in the studio of Fokko Tadama, a prominent art teacher who instructed Nomura in the basic techniques of Western Art. A Dutch-Indonesian immigrant himself, Tadama often worked with Japanese-American students.

In 1922, after five years of study with Tadama, Nomura had some of his paintings selected by the Seattle Fine Art Society for inclusion in its Annual Exhibition of the Artists of the Pacific Northwest. The same year he and a friend, Show Toda, opened a sign painting business in Japantown. The following year they moved it to Sixth Ave. and Main St., in the heart of Nihonmachi, where it would remain for the next thirteen years. Combining their names, they called it Noto Sign Co. It soon became a successful business and a studio and hang-out for artists, as well as Nomura and Toda's home. Notable Nikkei artists who worked and socialized there at various times included Takuichi Fujii, George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.

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