This 18.5-by-32-inch horizontal panorama portrays Hank Tanaka in Cleveland—a Japanese American who experienced incarceration during World War II and who became part of Cleveland’s post-war Japanese American community. The horizontal format places Tanaka within environmental context that documents his contemporary life.

Created in 2004, the work represents Hayashi’s documentation of Cleveland’s Japanese American community, connecting local survivors to the broader national experience of incarceration. Tanaka’s presence in Cleveland reflects the resettlement patterns that dispersed Japanese Americans from the West Coast to communities throughout the country.

The environmental portrait format shows Tanaka within the Cleveland landscape he has inhabited for decades, the ordinary residential and commercial context contrasting with the extraordinary history of wartime incarceration. The juxtaposition documents the normalcy that survivors rebuilt after the abnormality of imprisonment.

The photo collage technique fragments and reassembles this portrait, the assembled composition capturing Tanaka from multiple perspectives while maintaining coherent presence. The process creates portraiture that documentary photography’s single exposure cannot achieve.

Cleveland’s Japanese American community, though smaller than West Coast populations, developed significant institutions including the Cleveland Buddhist Temple and cultural organizations that maintained Japanese American identity in Ohio. Tanaka’s portrait documents one member of this community that formed partly through forced wartime dispersal.