RAFU STAFF REPORT
With paint, cleaning supplies and elbow grease, the granite stone monument at Honda Plaza at Second Street and Central Avenue in Little Tokyo has been cleaned of graffiti.
The monument to Bunichi Kagawa, an Issei leader of the Japanese literary movement of the 1930s and 1940s, was defaced recently with black paint spelling out “FREE GAZA,” a reference to Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
Hirokazu Kosaka, master artist in residence at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, said that a member of the Honda family — the founders and operators of the plaza — mostly cleaned the monument, but also went on Monday and cleaned it further with paint thinner. However, the character part was not cleaned by thinner and Kosaka applied white enamel paint to fix it.
“It took about an hour and a half. Some parts of the characters were very thin and I had to use various brushes,” says Kosaka. “Still some parts have to be painted. I will do it next time.”
The Kagawa monument is said to be the only one dedicated to Japanese poetry in the U.S. He is believed to have written “The Sea Shines” in 1941, before he was incarcerated at Tule Lake, where he organized a literature group, Tessaku(Iron Fence), and published a literary magazine.