Takuichi Fujii was 51 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Before the war, Fujii was a well-recognized Issei artist in the Seattle area, and his family owned a successful florist business in Seattle's International District.

But WWII changed all that.

Fujii, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans living on the west coast, were forced to leave their homes and sent to remote incarceration camps for the duration of the war.

They could take with them only what they could carry And Fujii, in his diary really tells about packing up his house and then the family's last night and the house was cold and empty, and because they had no beds, they put on their coats and clothes and slept together like sardines in a can.

and slept together like sardines in a can.

The Fujii family, along with 7,000 other Japanese Americans from the Seattle area, were first sent to a temporary detention center at the Puyallup Fairgrounds.

The conditions were atrocious.

Each family was assigned a converted animal stall to sleep.

Even in those conditions Fujii started an art diary that begins with his family's forced removal from their home, and continues to the very end of the war.

Just a single volume, a small book, eight by five inches.

Text in one side, left page, image on the other.

Nearly 400 pages of text and image.

Fujii's art diary was composed of ink drawings usually accompanied by a brief caption in Kanji, a type of Japanese writing using symbols to represent words or ideas.

So, he is looking at what's going on around him and then he is taking notes.

He's looking at something and he is feeling something.

And then that notes there to make sure that when he starts to do the painting the feeling in the painting is going to be authentic.

Some of Fujii's first drawings are of what he calls the dirty dirty showers and the communal latrine.

Fujii also notes in his diary that they look like beggars as they wait in long lines with bowl in hand for food.

After four months at Puyallup, Fujii and his family were moved to a permanent remote incarceration camp at Minidoka, Idaho where they would live for the next 3 years.

During his incarceration, Fujii painted over 150 watercolors of what he was experiencing.

His paintings were very unique, expressionistic and chaotic in style.

And I can look at those and see that time and again he pictures the barbwire fence, the guard towers, the machine guns, the centry at the gate, you begin to get the sense of the sense of confinement and the impact of suddenly being taken from your home and business and put in a concentrated camp like this.

Near the end of the war, Fujii's diary reflected the anxiety felt the night they heard the camps were soon to close.

They had lost their homes, businesses, they had nowhere to go.

And Fujii shows that.

He shows a fight that broke out as people left that meeting that night.

He shows himself and his wife sitting with papers on their table looking in tremendous rejection.

After the war was over, Fujii did not want to talk or even think about the dark times when he was incarcerated at Minidoka.

So, he boxed up his art diary and the watercolors, and stored them away.

It was not until long after Fujii's death, that his grandson discovered what was in the mystery box he had been carrying around with him for years.

Like many Japanese-Americans, I had that box from my grandmother and then after she died, my mother had it for a while and then she gave it to me, and then I always had it but for years I never opened it.

He'd been carrying this box around and I said, Look, what is in the dirty Bekins box?

Why are we carrying this box?

Professors move right?

We're moving again with the box, okay, why are we carrying the box?

And we finally opened it, and I was stunned.

The art diary absolutely captivated Kita.

For the next 20 years, Kita worked with Shojo Honda, chief research librarian from the Library of Congress, to translate the Kanji characters.

The art diary for him is a way of rising above what's going on in that incarceration.

Art is his way out.

That's who he is, right?

So art is his way of keeping himself under these really terrible conditions.

Even with his art to escape to, being incarcerated would forever change Fujii.

Although he was a prolific artist for the rest of his life, he rarely showed his work and no longer socialized with other artists.

That for us is one of the reasons that we don't like this word resilience.

Resilience means to recover from.

Recover from means that you got damaged, your got injury.

The injury gets well, or the damage gets fixed and then it's okay.

It's gone.

But the damage in the case of Grandpa, it's not gone.

Before he was incarcerated, Grandpa was working with other artists.

He was showing in all the major shows.

He was in the public eye.

After they put him in the incarceration camp that desire to publicly show, was gone.