The Cats of Mirikitani

Directed by Linda Hattendorf

Produced by Masa Yoshikawa and Linda Hattendorf

By Dana F. Toukan

The Cats of Mirikitani is a film about humanity; both the good and the downright ugly. Based in New York City, it was intended to depict a vérité portrait of an eighty-five year old homeless Japanese artist living on the streets; his art, brimming with animated cats, daunting camps and dazzling flames hints at an interesting character ready to decanter a wealth of tales, however due to the circumstances and characters involved, namely the film’s director Linda Hattendorf and her subject Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, the film becomes a revealing and poignant account of an unlikely friendship bound by the marvels of the human spirit.

We are introduced to Mirikitani in the opening shot, a homeless man lugging a cardboard box and black portfolio art case on the streets of Manhattan on a cold winter day. Clad in a large blue anorak and red cap, with a leopard print scarf around his neck, his face is not visible; he nonetheless draws, his chin pressed firmly on his chest while his hand moves feverishly up and down the page, the world passing him by. He seems unaware of it. The grime encrusted on his hands and beneath the surface of a few long nails indicates he has no concern for grooming and yet his intense focus on the artwork beneath these hands reflect the importance of this matter in his life. “He gave me a drawing of a cat,” Hattendorf narrates about their first meeting, “and asked for one thing in return. That I take a picture of it for him.”

Hattendorf met Mirikitani on January 1st 2001, and proceeded to visit him frequently in the following months. “He would scold me when I didn’t show up with the camera,” she later mentions at the DC Film Festival where the film was shown in April 2007. Yet it was on the streets of New York in 2001 that Mirikitani first discussed his work, and it was through his art that Hattendorf realized the historical significance behind it: the austere scene of a camp with a large mountain and fence was none other than Tule Lake, an internment camp where he had spent time; the cats were a constant request of a young boy that always followed Mirikitani in the camp, where the boy then died and was buried; and the raging red flames illustrated none other than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, where Mirikitani was raised. “I learnt a great deal about the history of this country.” Hattendorf affirms in regards to his work.

On 9/11, Hattendorf would use her camera. She filmed the World Trade Center blanketed by thick billowing clouds of black smoke as well as the chaos running amok on the streets below. She also managed to capture the composed Mirikitani standing several feet away from the horrendous scene, drawing; his posture in its familiar bent form while his Bic biro pen – the only medium he’d use as it didn’t bleed in snow or rain – rapidly filling in the stark white gaps of the page. It was also on that day and amid the brouhaha, that she would invite him into her Soho apartment and thus her life. “I had to. I couldn’t just stand there and watch him inhale the toxic smoke.”

Hence it was on the floor of Hattendorf’s quarters, among her books and sofa, a curious cat, his artwork and the flood of the 9/11 media coverage on the television screen, that Mirikitani continued to disclose snippets of an extraordinary life. In an accent thick enough to warrant a transcript and in no chronological order he revealed that he was born in Sacramento and raised in Hiroshima where he had been trained in classical art. “I’m not soldier boy. I’m artist. I want to go to America. I want to see.” As a result, he returned to the United States at the age of eighteen to pursue his passion for art, moving in with his sister Kazuko, and her family in Seattle before a series of tragic events subsequently ensued. The Americans bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941 forced them to separate. He was sent to an internment camp in Tule Lake, California, while his sister was sent to one in Idaho; consequently, they would lose touch with one another for the next sixty years. Furthermore, along with the other internees at that camp, he was compelled to renunciate his citizenship and thus without any legal documents many professional doors, with all the lucrative and personal possibilities they presented, were immediately closed. After Tule Lake, and a second internment camp in Texas, Mirikitani took whatever jobs he could, whether sorting vegetables on an assembly line in New Jersey or cooking tempura and sushi for Jackson Pollock, (“He’s crazy!” Mirikitani refers to the deceased artist), before ultimately landing in New York City in 1952 where he cooked and drove for a gentleman on Park Avenue. It was after this employer passed away that Mirikitani moved to the streets. He was probably in the seventh decade of his life.

Indeed, it was in the confined space of Hattendorf’s small Soho apartment that Mirikitani’s world would also open up to glimpses of a new future, albeit and again, in such uncertain times. And so his healing process started as well; the aftermath of 9/11 allowing him to draw parallels to painful times in history, “Same old story,” he noted at one point, remarkably nonplussed. “Goddamn World War II. Huh?” He later added, and on another occasion wistfully, “Everything ashes. Just like the moon.” Mirikitani eased into the world of domesticity seamlessly; watering plants, cooking, singing to the cat, complaining when the phone rang six times while Hattendorf was out, and even rebuking his hostess when she returned home after ten thirty one night. “So worried,” he gasped, genuinely alarmed. “So worried! Single woman.” All the while he would still resort to his calling, his art; only now his hands were clean and his posture straightening.

On that life altering day in September 2001, Hattendorf’s role shifted from observer to participant. She admits, “I woke up a few days later and wondered what I had done.” Nonetheless, she vigilantly strived to unearth the missing pieces of his past, no doubt in the hopes of securing him a better future; and miraculously, she did. For other than coming across an article about, and therefore contacting, Janice Mirikitani, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, his second cousin and new found family member, she discovers that Mirikitani’s citizenship had been eventually returned to him years later – a letter he had never received – and reconnects him with his sister, Kazuko. “Hello sister. It’s Tsutomu. What happened to your husband?” Mirikitani asks in the first phone call to his only surviving sibling after sixty years. Hattendorf’s relentless efforts in researching and contacting ensured he received the Social Security benefits he was entitled to, and had begrudged the mention of until then; introduced him to the Village Adult Day Care in New York where he demonstrated karate moves to the residents, and more importantly started teaching art. “Sensei means my teacher. Call me Jimmy-san,” he later quips to Hattendorf, thrilled by this new outcome but nonetheless and in true Japanese form, reserved in emotional outpour. Finally, he moves into an apartment in an assisted living retirement center, adopts a cast away cat (as he refers to it) and for the first time in decades undoubtedly, has a birthday party where invitees such as the doorman of his former workplace on Park Avenue attend. It isn’t until Mirikitani travels to California to connect with a community of former internees at a healing pilgrimage at the site of Tule Lake that we start to truly feel that his wounds will in fact heal. “Good feeling,” He says on the bus ride back. “Not mad anymore. Passing through. Memories. Ghost people very kind to me.”

One of the most touching elements of this story is perhaps illuminated by the importance and power of trust, particularly in such times when the human spirit feels it has been submerged in unpitying waters. “It was such a moving journey,” Hattendorf reflects after clearly learning to trust. She then adds, “Everyone could do something positive. We don’t have to succumb to fear.” Of course, Mirikitani had trusted all along; at first purely in art and its healing powers to survive the treachery of a homeless life, even going so far as referring to himself as Grand Master Artist and claiming he made it while living on the streets, and then finally in his ability to restore his faith, both in life and another human being. Hattendorf mentions that a yoga instructor attributes Mirikitani’s improved posture to this matter of trust explaining that on the street, “He was protecting his heart and as he started to trust more, he opened up.” States Hattendorf, “Plus he was a real role model.”

As for Mirikitani’s art, it has unsurprisingly flourished with his spirits. The once bare white walls of his new apartment now don much larger and brighter pieces of persimmons, lanterns, and of course, cats. He has in addition, switched mediums to paint. And the camps, he still draws them despite his recent visit to Tule Lake. “He draws the same picture; the mountain, camp, fence,” Hattendorf notes, “only after visiting the site, the fence is now broken, and he’s never put himself in the picture again.”

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