Sugamo Prison was the main prison for Japanese war criminal suspects and convicts after World War II. It held about 2,000 prisoners for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). Throughout the Allied Occupation (1945-1952), a total of 2,500 American GIs of the Eighth US Army patrolled and guarded the prison. Many of the young American GI guards formed unexpected relationships with the incarcerated people under their care. The guards often commissioned sketches from prisoners in exchange for cigarettes, Western magazines, or lighter work assignments. One prisoner, Tokio Tobita, sketched the scenes from daily life in the prison. Many of the drawings were scenes that he found to be particularly funny or poignant, especially if they showed how far the mighty had fallen, or depicted some of the other type of tensions between the American guards and Japanese prisoners. The drawings serve as a visual diary depicting daily life in Sugamo and were given as gifts to the guards. As Tobita’s reputation grew, several other prison artists emerged that began to imnitate his style and strike out on their own to create cartoons with new themes. One inmate,Fujiki Fumio went on to publish his cartoons after his release.

Some of guards held onto the prisoners’ handmade gifts and sketches for the rest of their lives, and even corresponded with the inmates for decades. Many shared these cherished mementos with other American veterans at reunions into the early 2000s.

Bill Barrette, an artist from New York, was younger cousin of one of the former Sugamo guard, George Picard. At a family reunion in the late 1990s, Barrette learned about Picard’s various keepsakes from inmates, which he had saved from the prison for a half a century. Among these objects, Barrette discovered, were several delicate pencil drawings, including portraits and a sketch of a prison cell. Barrette along with Midori Sato and Toyota Naurmi began working on the "Sugamo Project." They set oout to collecting surviving mementos and drawings, mainly at the reunions of military veterans in the US, and from the artists Tokio Tobita and Fumio Fujiki in Japan.

Eventually, enough Sugamo-related materials and research accumulated to result in several exhibitions. The third and final exhibition, “Encounters: Sugamo Prison 1945-52; The American Occupation of Japan and Memories of the Asia Pacific War,” was held in April 2003 at the East Asian Library at Princeton University. The exhibit was followed by a 3-day symposium, convened by Martin Collcutt, then Director of East Asian Studies, where scholars and former inhabitants of the prison, including Tobita, appeared and presented papers.

Many of the collected keepsakes, which had been on extended loan from Army veterans, later had to be returned. However, other important materials as well as interviews and research papers came together as a result of the project. Barette’s team recorded extensive videotape footage of the exhibitions and conversations with Tobita, Fujiki, and many of the American soldier collectors of the Sugamo drawings (Powell and Du, 2015). Following Fujiki’s passing in 2004, his widow donated all of her late husband’s materials to the OSU Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. A former Sugamo prison guard, B. A. “Buck” Langdon, gifted additional Tobita drawings to the Billy Ireland. This established the Fumio Fujiki and Tokio Tobita Collection, archiving the works of the two most important Sugamo visual artists for research and teaching. Since their donation, high resolution images of these materials have been reformatted and are now accessible online via The Ohio State University Libraries’ Digital Collections.

Further Reading: “ Escaping Sugamo Prison with a no. 2 pencil: the drawings of Japanese war criminal Tobita Tokio.” Visual Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1. (Powell and Du, 2015)

Sugamo life : prison arts under American occupation, 1945-52. (Bill Barrette, 2013)

Blog post, The Fumio Fujiki and Tokio Tobita Collection of Manga, Part I (Davis and Joseph, 2023)