MINAMI Kiyomi
Born: 12 December 1921 – Died: 2 August 1943
Particulars:
Maemizo Kiyomi was born in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, in 1921. In February 1941, she married Minami Seichiro, a clerk who had lived in Tonga for seven years working for Banno Bros. She moved to Tonga to start her life with him but had only lived there for a few months when the Pacific War broke out. When Kiyomi was interned, she had just turned 20, and only married for a year. Though both were taken to Aotearoa / New Zealand, Seichiro was confined on Matiu / Somes Island in Wellington Harbour while Kiyomi lived with other Nikkei women and children in a town south of Auckland. She only found out she was pregnant once they were separated. She had a boy Hiroshi in the winter of 1942. Seichiro probably would have seen his son for the first time when his family was reunited to be sent to Australia on a flight in August 1943, around Hiroshi’s first birthday. Tragically, the plane crashed soon after take-off. All three of the Minami family died in the crash. Kiyomi died when she was 21 years old.
–Sophie Constable
More info:
Sophie Constable
Artist/s Statement:
Kiyomi’s story reminded me of when I found out I was pregnant with my first child. I desperately wanted to nest, create a safe place to have my baby and nurture my family, but my partner had moved overseas. I didn’t know where I would be having the baby, or even if my partner would be able to be there. I wondered whether Kiyomi also struggled to create a nest so far from her husband, away from her new home in Tonga, and isolated from her family in Japan.
Reading that the women interned at Pokeno had fashion books, I cut one strip of paper for every year of Kiyomi’s life from Japanese print media from the 1930s, and New Zealand print media from the 1940s to assemble a fragile nest, and placed in it a single delicate egg.
Artist Bio:
Sophie Constable is an artist, scientist, researcher, and educator at The Australian National University in Canberra.