"Beyond Sadness and Hostility," An Exhibition of Paintings by Mr. Yoshida from Yamatotakada, Concerning Detainment in Siberia Will be Held in Three Russian Cities
"A Siberian Detainment Painting Exhibition" is going to be held in three Russian cities including Vladivostok starting this month. The work of Mr. Isamu Yoshida (68), an amateur painter who resides in Sanwacho, Yamatotakada city, will be shown there. He has been recording on his canvas the tragedy of Siberian detainees' camps, where he lost many comrades.
Mr. Yoshida was drafted and sent to former Manchuria (now East North District of China) in 1944, and was taken to Siberia by the former Soviet Army as soon as the war ended. In a frigid environment, he had to engage in forced labor. In those terrible living conditions, his comrades fell one after another, and only 126 out of 500 survived the first winter.
After he came back to Japan in 1947, he has been drawing on his own while managing movie theaters and a parking lot for a living. However, he decided to express his real experiences in the camp on canvas in order to address the reality of war since he began to recognize, twelve or thirteen years ago, that another war may be creeping up because the budget for defense was slowly beginning to be increased.
This exhibition came a reality through the invitation of Prof. Oleg Vysochin at University of Vladivostok, whom Mr. Yoshida met when he participated in a group from Japan visiting the graves of the former detainees in Siberia last summer. This June, he received an invitational letter from the Department of Culture of both the cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
The exhibition will start in Vladivostok on the 15th of this month, in Khabarovsk in October, and then in Komsomolsk in December. He will present two hundred paintings, out of many more he has drawn. The themes are the participation of Soviet army in the war, starvation in the camp, dying friends, and waves of nostagia, and so forth. In the beginning, he was not going to show pieces depicting the Soviet Army's entry into the war, by way of consideration for the Russian side; however, when Mr. Yoshida spoke at the negotiation for the contract, saying " I lost many friends; but it all happened in the foolishness of a war," those Russians in charge of this event emphasized, "It is such a valuable statement" and hoped those pieces would be included as well.
Mr. Yoshida remarked, "I am sure it will not be enjoyable to see the pictures of the Russians at that time, but regardless, they were so cooperative about organizing this event. I really wish to fulfill a role as a delegate for peace."
