2025 Theses Master's

a sky of carved birds: cartographic portraits of Japanese American life & loss in Seattle

Yoshimura Small, Timothy John

While there are archives that chronicle the wartime internment of Japanese Americans across the West Coast of the United States, less has been done to meso-spatially represent the magnitude of their dispossession in the cities they called home. This study first digitizes and transforms various pre- and post-war documentation detailing the Japanese American trajectory in Seattle's Nihonmachi enclave. These data include archival Sanborn maps, census microfilm scans at the enumeration district level, and community-derived mappings.

The displacive impacts of wartime incarceration on Nihonmachi's homes and businesses are then explored through qualitative cartographic techniques, geospatial analyses, and novel counter-maps. A dasymetric re-aggregation of Nihonmachi's residential fabric harnesses Sanborn map building footprints to paint a block-level picture of life before and after internment. Data overlays and collages of historical photographs are used to highlight the variegated semiotics and spatial contentions between this study's authoritative and community-drawn maps. By colliding, annotating, and reimagining Seattle's urban past according to a melange of imperfect representational forms, competing claims on knowledge are challenged.

This research celebrates and holds sacred practices of mapping and storytelling, while fully acknowledging that reality is unknowable. Here, Japanese American life and loss are emblematic of a larger interrogation; one that questions the production and portrayal of geographic information in organized space. If data is to have a role in equitable sociopolitical processes, it must in its own creation account for the plurality of our lived experiences. Thus, an invitation to spatial practitioners and beyond: the conventional epistemologies of geography and urban planning are movable; how might we critique and reshape them together?