ISHIBASHI Kijo
Born: 28 July 1892 – Died: 27 February 1942
Particulars:
Kijo / Kiyo was born in Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. She was married, and working as a domestic worker in Balikpapan, Kalimantan in Indonesia, then called Dutch East Indies, when the war broke out and she was arrested as an ‘enemy alien’. She was taken to Australia to be interned but died of tuberculosis in South Australia on her way to the internment camp in Victoria. Her grave is in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
–Mayu Kanamori
More info:
Mayu Kanamori
Artist/s Statement:
Sometimes the authorities mistyped someone’s name, but in Kiyo’s case, I think she wrote her name as Kijo because ‘j’ in Dutch is pronounced like a ‘y’. Kiyo was a popular Japanese woman’s name at the time. From my research of the records held at the National Archives of Australia, I learned that her husband was from the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture and was a proprietor of a hotel in Balikpapan. Shimabara Peninsula is also where many of the women known as karayuki-san left Japan to work overseas, often in brothels. I cannot be sure if she was a karayuki-san, but it is very likely that she was at some point.
When she died, her husband was allowed to travel to South Australia from Victoria to attend her funeral. Her husband married another internee in at the Tatura Internment Camp a couple of years later.
I chose to honour Kijo / Kiyo because she died on 27 February, which is my birthday. I wrote her name as Kijo in English, and Kiyo in Japanese hiragana on a photograph I took just outside the Shimabara Castle on Shimabara Peninsula, where she was most likely from.
Artist Bio:
Mayu Kanamori is a Japanese Australian artist working across mediums of photography, video, performance, and poetry.