TT Takemoto
Looking for Jiro, 2011
Single-channel digital video with sound, 5:45 min.

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

In 2009, the artist E.G. Crichton paired other artists with the archives of queer ancestors for a project titled Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive. That was how TT Takemoto encountered Jiro Onuma. Onuma migrated from Japan to the United States when he was nineteen. In 1942, at the age of thirty-eight, he became one of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated after America declared war on Japan. “Seeing Onuma’s photographs … startled me,” writes Takemoto. “They opened my eyes to the presence of LGBT individuals in the American concentration camps and connected me to this history of wartime imprisonment in a whole new manner.” The artist’s research resulted initially in a group of handmade objects titled Gentleman's Gaman: A Gay Bachelor's Japanese American Incarceration Camp Survival Kit, and then in Looking for Jiro. Takemoto describes Jiro as a “a queer experimental video featuring an ABBA/Madonna mash-up, drag-king performance, US war propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making” that “conjures up an alternative campy world in which Onuma can dream of musclemen as a way to keep his queer imaginary alive amid the loneliness and despair of incarceration.“

Takemoto’s research into Onuma revolved around a number of questions. “What internal and external factors have contributed to the invisibility of same-sex intimacy and queer sexuality within the collective memory of Japanese American wartime history? How does the Onuma collection complicate and expand existing incarceration camp histories, memories, and representations? Is it possible to form personal and affective attachments to queer individuals and absent memories through the objects and materials they leave behind? These questions challenge me to consider what is at stake in the process of looking for Jiro Onuma in the mute photographs and ephemera that constitute his material remains.” Looking for Jiro won the Best Experimental Film Jury Award at the Austin LGBT International Film Festival in 2012. It has been screened in dozens of festivals and exhibitions.