Morning Light is a work I had never seen in person until it resurfaced a few years ago. It looks both like and unlike his other tin pieces; it lacks the thousands of perforations of nails as its borders are a neat trim, and the tin itself is from preexisting vessels that were not painted by him. It is conceivably more of a painting than a sculpture, but it retains a stillness poised for an entrance that a lot of his other works have. This looked like a tableau from the old Hawaii with the dirt roads, the Dole cannery as the largest employer, and a time before direct flights from the mainland. I didn’t know where the morning was dawning inside the work, but I assumed it was rooted somewhere familiar in Honolulu. The shock was learning it was the view from his childhood dentist’s office—a fabled boogeyman whose atrocities were part of dad’s morbid repertoire.

I always heard it told as a Japanese man in a white coat who had a pedal-operated drill and didn’t use anesthetic, and, in my dad’s recollection, was gleeful at signs of distress in kids. My dad said he got his teeth yanked, left screaming and bloody, with his mother indifferent to his agony. It scarred him emotionally, as did the bout of diphtheria, wherein nobody came to visit him in the hospital, and he was left with just a view of the door and window to the hallway, encountering the same abandonment.

Dad’s fear of losing his teeth overtook his dread of doctors and dentists, and so he went four times a year to his adulthood dentist, Dr. Yoshitomi, who wore three-piece suits with a pocket watch and would always shake my hand formally, bending down to meet me. He and my father were both part of a small diaspora of Japanese Americans who had come to New York City from all across the country.

Dr. Yoshitomi was also part of the Japanese population that had been interned during World War II, a tragedy I knew nothing about until recently, when writing about him for this piece. My father enlisted so his sisters and mother would not be rounded up and forced into camps to suffer the same fate.

In retrospect, Dr. Yoshitomi’s impeccable bearing and dignity make sense in the context of having been imprisoned. There is something immense and defiant about rising above the dirt tracks of a barbed wire perimeter enforced by the government to a success story with a sweeping view of Central Park, complete with gargoyles on the trim of the building.

Because I wasn’t introduced to Morning Light until well after dad died, I’m still cowed by how he could wrest something so beautiful from a particularly cruel memory. It changed the way I looked at the work from every angle: whether each square inch of the painting had taken inspiration from something else that seemed far-flung. I imagine the dentist would feel the same way: to look at his 5th Avenue suit and shoes and never imagine the sacrifices it took to get there. Both of their fates were of a Japanese American of that era—men at the mercy of a hostile government, trying to build back what they could of themselves that had been taken away.

- Misa Kobayashi