Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was the son of a Japanese writer and a white American woman. He became one of the greatest sculptors of his time. During the Second World War, he voluntarily chose to go to an internment camp where he could teach art workshops. He quickly learned that the camp officials didn't plan to implement any of his programs. According to wikipedia, he "also realized that, despite his heritage, he had little in common with the internees."
The Noguchi Museum website also explains that "the Second World War was wrenching for this artist of mixed Japanese and American ancestry, eliciting the powerful model for a Monument to Heroes during the war and two proposals for a memorial to those who perished in the atomic bomb blast: A tall Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950), and Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima (1952), commissioned by the city but finally rejected because Noguchi was an American."
On being biracial and bicultural Noguchi said in an interview:
"First of all, my mother was American. And going to Japan with an American mother and being half-Japanese puts on in a very anomalous position. On the one hand, she is of Japan, she wanted to be in Japan. But the fact of the matter is that the Japanese do not accept foreigners as another person equal to themselves because Japanese are Japanese and everybody else is foreign, you understand. It’s a very traditional country in that sense; and very unusually so, perhaps. I mean very exclusive in a sense. And, on top of that, my mother was separated from my father when I was very, very young so that I didn’t have that contact that I might have had to one-half parent anyway. So I was an appendage on a stranger; that is to say….And yet, as I say, she loved Japan, let’s say, had friends and pupils there. She taught English. But I was more or less a kind of waif because she was always working a great deal of the time and I was sort of thrown onto the neighboring children and so forth who, of course, were Japanese. So my playmates and so forth were Japanese but I was not Japanese, you see. And, you know, people talk about the discrimination that exists against half-breeds. And, it is probably so. Although I mean, personally, I can’t say that I experienced discrimination as such, a third person looking at it more objectively would probably say that it’s a classical case. I, for instance, have never felt discriminated against in this country either, for that matter, but somebody else looking at it might say: “Well, but you don’t realize that this is evidence of discrimination.” And my own attitude, of course, is another question. Am I really free? Or am I really inherently self-protective against incipient discrimination. Do you understand?"
