The book takes its title from a question Sandy Sugawara’s mother once asked, and that question opens onto a history the photographs refuse to let settle. Show Me the Way to Go to Home addresses the incarceration camps that held roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Sugawara and Catiana Garcia Kilroy photographed the sites, and the book sets their contemporary views against archival photographs, personal stories, and government documents, so that the present-day ground and the official paper record are made to answer each other. Radius Books published the volume in hardcover: 332 pages, 144 images.
It is not a single-author monograph. Karen Korematsu, daughter of the civil rights plaintiff Fred Korematsu, contributes the foreword. Donna K. Nagata, a psychologist at the University of Michigan whose research concerns the multigenerational consequences of the race-based incarceration, writes an essay. Brandon Shimoda and Christine Kitano contribute poetry, and Sugawara and Garcia Kilroy write as well. Testimony, document, verse, and photograph are given equal standing here; none is asked to illustrate the others. In a field where the photographer’s voice usually governs, the decision to distribute authority this way is the book’s governing idea.
That idea is carried into the object itself. The publisher describes each camp’s story as printed on rice paper and interwoven with landscape photographs, so that historical material and present-day terrain meet in the turning of pages. The alternation is structural, not decorative: a reader moves between what a place looks like now and what was written about it then, and the book’s design holds both in view. The result registers the layered feelings of people who lived in the camps, and it does so through the physical sequence of the volume rather than through any single image.
For a collector, the significance lies in this construction and in the range of contributors, not in any claim about scarcity. A serious independent publisher has taken a difficult history and treated it as a problem of bookmaking, with archive and landscape in counterpoint and multiple voices held in balance. The subject has not lost its urgency; the book’s method is what gives it lasting weight.
