TANAKA Seki
田中セキ
Born: 29 December 1895 – Died: 26 January 1944
Particulars:
Seki was born in Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. She was a single woman in Medan, Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia when the Pacific War broke out. She was taken to Australia and interned at Tatura Internment Camp in Victoria. She was in and out of hospital several times and died of a stroke at the age of 48. Her grave is in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
–Mayu Kanamori
More info:
Michiyo Miyake
Artist/s Statement:
The title of this work is ‘The Vision You Saw, That I Cannot See’. Without the administrative records in the National Archives of Australia, there would be no trace of Tanaka Seki’s life after she left her Japanese village aboard a smuggler’s boat laden with coal. Like many women from impoverished farming and fishing communities, she may well have been lured abroad with the promises of work, only to find herself in exploitative conditions that entrapped many karayuki san – Japanese women who worked as prostitutes in foreign lands. The movement of these women paralleled Japan’s imperial expansion. Medan, then part of Dutch East Indies, was home to a significant Japanese community, including Seki, though the exact duration of her stay remains uncertain. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the shifting tides of war further destabilised the lives of expatriates like Seki. She was detained there as an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to Tatura, Victoria. In January 1942, the Japanese military invaded the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, occupying until 1945.
Artist Bio:
Michiyo Miyake is a writer and translator, born in Japan and based in Australia. Since 2016, she has lived in Sydney and runs an independent press Uguisu Books. Her recent publications include a novel ‘Green Metal: Life in Tokyo during the Nuclear Catastrophe’ (2024) and ‘spiral history: TIDE’ (2023), a zine about the history of the islands where Australia’s detention centres are located, written in collaboration with the artist Haji Oh.