One of the perks of being a Valley Life columnist is getting to know people through interviews, either in person or occasionally by phone. So far, all my profiles have been about people still alive, but, after watching the movie “Our Mr. Matsura,” produced and directed by Beth Harrington, I was so impressed by the story of this remarkable Japanese immigrant that I decided to write about someone who died over a hundred years ago.
This was the second time the Omak Theater had offered free showings of Harrington’s film, with the help of the Okanogan County Historical Society. Harrington is an Emmy award-winning independent filmmaker whose work focuses on American culture, history, art, and music, based in Vancouver, Washington. Five years in the making, “Our Mr. Matsura” tells the tale of Frank Matsura, an “issei,” a first-generation Japanese immigrant,” through the thoughts and family memories of a wide array of people from the Colville Confederated Tribes, and the small Washington communities of Okanogan, Omak, Conconully and Brewster, as well as extended family members in Japan and experts from around the world, according to a press release.
Matsura has been variously described as “a handsome, impish extrovert,” “an eccentric, educated, Japanese immigrant,” and as “coyote” by Michael Holloman, artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Colville Tribes. The reasons for a well-educated aristocratic Japanese man ending up in a frontier town like Okanogan in 1903 still remain an enigma.
The movie begins by chronicling some of Matsura’s early history through interviews with extended relatives. He was orphaned at an early age and lived with his aunt and uncle, who ran a school where he learned English and was briefly a teacher. In 1901, when he was in his early20s, he left Japan for Seattle, but a few years after arriving in the U.S., he answered an ad in the paper for a cook’s helper in the Elliot Hotel in Conconully.
Around 1907, Matsura opened a two-room photography studio in the town of Okanogan. There, he became a popular and beloved member of the community to both the white, settler population, Native Americans, and the women in the community, judging from his photographs, where he is shown in intimate portraits with them. In an article about Matsura by Glen Mimura, he writes, “What do we make of this cross-racial chumminess between the sexes in 1910 Okanogan, on the settler side of the river? In photographs taken outside the studio, we see no such casual sociability, and certainly not flirtiness, across race and sex and perhaps class, as well.” Wendall George, Colville engineer and writer, said Matsura’s work “made you realize that things were not always the way they seemed to be.”
Indeed, Matsura’s work documented the people and landscape of the Okanogan Valley in a rich and varied manner rarely seen in his time, enabling all his subjects “to present themselves to themselves and others, on their own terms,” according to Mimura. He photographed individuals and groups with whimsical costumes and characters, often inserting himself into the photos. His series of 12 images taken with a stamp camera is reminiscent of the photo booths of my generation that we piled into to clown it up. Matsura’s portrayal of his Indian friends was particularly gifted. As Michael Hollowman put it, “He made conceptually sophisticated and collaborative portraits of individuals and families (of various tribes) with whom he maintained trusting relationships.”
Matsura died of tuberculosis in 1913 at the age of 32. More than 300 people attended his funeral, the largest in the Okanogan to that point. His photographic prints and negatives went to his friend, Judge William Brown, and were stored away for 40 years. When rediscovered, some of his photos were published in a book by JoAnne Roe, “Frank Matsura, Frontier Photographer.” Others made their way into the Washington State University archives, and several boxes of Matsura’s glass plate negatives found in Brown’s garage were turned over to the Okanogan County Historical Society. The Matsura collection at WSU has been uploaded and can be viewed online in the WSU Library’s digital collections. The Okanogan Chamber of Commerce has a Frank Matsura Photo Mural Tour, a map of which can be found at Ok.chamber.com. Read more about the film, “Our Mr. Matsura,” at https://ourmrmatsura.com/.
