I'd like to meet:
The angler in this photograph has no smile and no first name known to us. He's remembered only as Ishikawa, Fisherman — a sweet and haunting mystery from a dark chapter in U.S. history.
Toyo Miyatake made this portrait during World War II at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.
No one knows exactly how Ishikawa slipped away to go fishing. He holds the only evidence of his travels, freedom in a string of trout.
Ishikawa had the face of those who "suddenly and deliberately" attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Within three months, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans. Two-thirds were American citizens. Manzanar, 220 miles north of Los Angeles, was the first of 10 camps constructed of wood and tar paper. FDR called them concentration camps.The curtain of time obscures Ishikawa's full identity. Archie Miyatake, the photographer's son, recalls Ishikawa. "He lived in our block, but I never knew his first name. He fished a lot. He was gone for two weeks at a time."Ishikawa found himself between a rock (Mt. Whitney, highest point in the Lower 48) and a hard place (Badwater in Death Valley, the lowest). He must have looked at the six-strand barbed-wire fence and dreamed and schemed, finally obsessing. And he left.
"He must have gone at night," says the younger Miyatake. "That's what we did. But we only went up the stream, Shepherd Creek. We didn't go where he went." Native American guide Richard Stewart says, "No one knows exactly where he went."
Perhaps a guard dozed when Ishikawa snaked past the machine guns and rifles in the towers, climbed the alluvial fans through scrub brush, then followed an ancient Paiute trail in Shepherd Canyon that eased the nearly vertical pitch of the Sierran escarpment.The fine brace he displays are the state fish, the riotously hued golden trout that exist at high elevations. Ishikawa may have fished the lakes at 11,000 feet, where there is but sky and rock, water and ice, where every granitic ledge is as sharp as a 1950s Cadillac fin.
It is a supremely spare landscape, mind-bending, almost psychedelic in the scarce air. It has the stark beauty of a Zen garden, the perfect retreat for a prisoner of his ancestry. He went a ways to find it: He left the wire behind at 3,900 feet.These are trophy-size goldens. They're a species known for overpopulating and having stunted growth. He must be holding lake fish, fish that have wintered over a few years but bear snaky bodies and oversized heads. There isn't much for a fish to eat where Ishikawa explored.So he caught a bunch, probably with grasshoppers — that irresistible trout bait — then lugged the catch down the mountain and back through the wire. Miyatake then took the photo inside the camp. He also took the memory of Ishikawa's first name with him when he died in 1979.Others tell fish tales earned by slipping away from camps like Heart Mountain, hard by the side of the Shoshone River in Wyoming. But no man seems to have gone so far, so high and so alone as Ishikawa, Fisherman.