Meet Hashime Murayama, U.S. citizen, gifted artist — and so-called security threat during WWII

His 20-year tenure at National Geographic was cut short by xenophobia

Published in

Timeline

3 min readDec 15, 2017

Two Portuguese man of war (Physalia arethusa) drifting half-submerged in the sea, 1919. Color line block after a painting by Hashime Murayama. (Hashime Murayama/Wikimedia)

Why did one of the 20th century’s most successful scientific illustrators get fired from a decades-long career at National Geographic, thrown in jail, and relegated to laboring behind the scenes as an invisible—yet crucial—cog in the work of university cancer researchers?

He was an immigrant in America, of course.

Hashime Murayama (1879–1954) had been in the U.S. for most of his life when the Second World War kicked off. But citizenship and status wouldn’t save his career as an illustrator for the National Geographic Society, and it wouldn’t spare him and his family imprisonment in the internment camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were sent after Pearl Harbor. A gifted technical artist born and educated in Japan, Murayama’s career veered into a dynamic intersection of magazine illustration, science journalism, and fine art when he was hired by National Geographic as the magazine’s first staff artist in 1921. After he was dismissed in 1941 (replaced, ironically, by an illustrator of German descent), Murayama found work at Cornell University making detailed color sketches of uterine cancer cells for fellow immigrant and pioneering cytopathologist Georgios Papanikolaou (of “Pap” smear fame). It was this crucial role that spared Murayama from further internment when he was repeatedly arrested under suspicion as an alien enemy in 1942 and 1943. According to an investigator from the Attorney General, who overruled his order of internment by the Alien Enemy Hearing Board, “it is said that he is the only person in the United States who can do that kind of work.”

Hashime Murayama working on a watercolor with the use of a microscope in 1932. (Clifton R. Adams)

Murayama worked with Papanikolaou for the remainder of the war, and up until his death, in 1954. Despite the gravity of his medical sketches, it is his finely detailed depictions of nature for which Murayama is best remembered. Produced using live subjects observed during aquarium visits, or, in the case of insects, specimens kept in a jar at this desk, Murayama’s watercolors are sumptuous interrogations of the space between art and science—unobserved nature imagined as only a true artist could.