Kenji Kawano: 40 Years with the Navajo

Kenji Kawano is perhaps best known for his photographs of the Navajo code talkers recruited by the Marines to communicate military orders in their own language in World War II, baffling the Japanese. Around 400 young men, who had never been away from the reservation, served in some of the bloodiest battles in the South Pacific and are credited with helping win the battle of Iwo Jima. As a Japanese native, and thus a “former enemy,” Mr. Kawano might have seemed an unlikely candidate to tell the code talkers’ story. But his background is what helped him bond with the Navajo veterans who had remained silent for so many years. Soon after he had settled into the Navajo Nation in 1974 to work on a project, he was struggling to learn the language. While he was hitchhiking in 1975, a big camera bag on his shoulder, he was given a ride by Carl N. Gorman, one of the original 29 code talkers. Mr. Gorman invited him to a Navajo Code Talkers Association meeting, and Mr. Kawano began to photograph them at functions and parades. He quickly realized they were the same age as his father, who served in the Japanese Navy during the war and trained as a human torpedo for a potential suicide mission. “My father said the war ended early so he could come home,” Mr. Kawano recalled. “That’s why I was born and I came to America, taking pictures of the former enemy. He came to see me back in the ’90s; he met Mr. Gorman, and I have a picture of the two of them. So life is very interesting.” Those images are among four decades of work included in a two-part retrospective, “40 Years With the Navajo,” which will be exhibited through Jan. 30, 2016, at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Ariz. The second part of the exhibit opens today.