Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent over a year in internment camps. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.
Obata was born in 1885 in Okayama prefecture in Japan. He was the youngest of a very large family. At the age of five, he showed a natural inclination for drawing. He was then adopted by his older brother, Rokuichi, who was himself an artist. At the age of seven he began his formal training by a master painter in the art of sumi-e, Japanese ink and brush painting.
At the age of 14, Obata ran away from home to avoid being put into military school. In Tokyo, he became apprenticed to the painter Tanryo Murata for three years. He also studied with Kogyo Terasaki and Goho Hasimoto. He was trained in Western as well as Japanese art, painting throughout his life in the Western manner. Shortly after he finished his apprenticeship, he received a prestigious art award in Tokyo.
In 1903, Obata left for the United States. He arrived in Seattle, where he planned to study American art before continuing to Paris to study European art. When he got to San Francisco, he found work as a domestic servant in a household, with the pay of $1.50 per week plus room and board. He was one of the founders of the Fuji Club, the first Japanese-American baseball team on the American mainland. In 1906, Obata made on-site sketches of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake. In 1909 he worked in the hops fields in the Sacramento Valley.
Eventually, Obata was able to earn his living in California as an illustrator for different newspapers, including San Francisco's two Japanese newspapers, The New World and the Japanese American, and as a commercial designer. As a designer he decorated the famous Oriental rooms for Gump's department store and did similar work for the Emporium and City of Paris department stores. He designed "Jewel Rooms" for the G. T. Mars Company and one in the Hotel Ambassador. He made five large murals for the Toyo Kisen Kaisha Steamship Company and for the Iwata Dry Goods Company
From 1915 to 1917 Obata was an illustrator and cover page designer for the magazine Japan, published for the Toyo Kisen Kaisha Steamship Co., during which time he turned out about 3000 illustrations and numerous cover designs.
During the 1920s, Obata spent much time painting landscapes throughout California. In 1921, he co-founded the East West Art Society in San Francisco. On the invitation of Worth Ryder, a professor of art at UC Berkeley who had become a friend, Obata spent the summer of 1927 on a sketching tour of Yosemite and the Sierra high country, producing over 100 new sketches and ink paintings in six weeks. The first exhibition Obata had for American audiences was in the following year, 1928.
In 1928, after his father's death, Obata returned to Japan. There he supervised the production of 35 colored woodblock prints of California landscapes for his "World Landscape Series", the majority of which are views of Yosemite National Park in California. Published in limited editions of 100 by the Takamizawa Print Works in Japan, the prints were exhibited at the Eighty-Seventh Annual Exhibition at Ueno Park in Tokyo in 1930 and his painting of Lake Basin in the High Sierra won first prize. He left Tokyo shortly thereafter.
Beginning in 1930, Obata had many very successful exhibitions in California. One, in 1931 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, was a large exhibit of both his work and the work of his brother, Rokuichi.
In 1932 Obata was appointed as an instructor in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 1930 and 1941, one-man exhibitions were held in numerous locations.
Obata and his wife Haruko ran an art supply store at 2525 Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, from which his wife offered lessons in ikebana. The shop was shut at after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, and eventually the Obatas were forced to close it and cancel all classes.
Executive Order 9066 led to Obata organizing a large sale of his many paintings and woodblock prints. He donated the profits from the sale to establish a scholarship for a student "regardless of race or creed, who ... has suffered the most from this war." University President Robert Gordon Sproul, a friend of the Obatas, offered to store many of the remaining works.
In April 1942, Obata was interned at the Tanforan detention center. By May, he and fellow artists, were able to create an art school that had 900 students, entirely with their own money and with donations from the outside from friends from U.C. Berkeley, including Dorothea Lange. Their curriculum was comprehensive, offering 95 classes each week in 25 subjects. Camp administrators were supportive, seeing art as a constructive way to occupy detainees' time, and Obata and his colleagues were eventually allowed to order supplies from Sears Roebuck catalogs or purchase them in town. The school became so successful that they were able to exhibit the artwork outside the camp in July.

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