By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
“silence fell one evening
after talk of war
around fireside”
“jeep patrolling slowly
stove is glowing
at night”
“winter night
pale faced man
taps my shoulder”
–haiku written in Japanese by Hyakuissei Okamoto at the Tule Lake concentration camp, in response to martial law declared at the camp, November 1943. Translated by Violet Kazue de Cristoforo.
We don’t know when Hyakuissei Okamoto was born, or when he died, only that he was imprisoned at Tule Lake War Relocation Center, and that he worked with a haiku collective at the camp.
But Okamoto’s stark poetic impressions of Tule Lake qualified him as one of 65 authors included in “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration,” a new anthology out now from Penguin Classics. The book’s co-editor, longtime Seattle resident and activist Frank Abe, explained that the volume grew out of his own activism and that of his co-editor, Floyd Cheung at Smith College in Massachusetts.
The book assembles commentary on the Japanese American internment during World War II in the form of poetries, memoirs, essays, fiction, political appeals, petitions, government documents, and one of the first graphic novels produced on American soil. Broader coverage includes before and after the war.
What emerged from their research, said Abe, was “this collective voice, from people of wildly different backgrounds, educations. They all shared the same voice, which was that of contesting the actions of the government in treating them all the same for one reason and one reason only, their race. And that was what surprised me in how the anthology came together.
“My personal tendency was to include selections that are more pointed, than poignant. We avoid the tendency to include selections that were merely flowery, or ‘oh-woe-is-me.’ Instead the pieces are by-and-large from people pushing back against injustice.”
The 68 pieces came from many primary sources, but Abe cited a collection of such literature Professor Cheung assembled, years ago, for teaching purposes.
The other substantial collection: Abe’s own.
“In the late ‘70s, I began talking to every Nisei I met about camp and collecting every scrap of first-hand information I could find about the camps. I was 28 with no money and yet here I was buying expensive hardcover books like ‘The Kikuchi Diaries’ and ‘The Derelicts of Company K,’ because they each had a voice I had not seen before in print.
“Charles Kikuchi captured the excited voice of a Nisei at the moment he and others were kicked out of Berkeley [University]. Tamotsu Shibutani captured the raucous and profane conversations of Hawaiian recruits at the Military Intelligence Service Language School, that utterly shattered the stereotype of the nobility of the Nisei soldier. These were [in] the boxes of books and files I would drag with me from city to city over the past 45 years, without any idea of what I wanted to do with this material until this project came along.”
Of the anthology’s 65 authors, 14 hailed from Seattle—several reference Seattle’s Chinatown and/or nearby neighborhoods.
“Kamekichi Tokita was a sign painter, his shop was up on the hill on Sixth Avenue, just past Main. John Okada, [author of the famous “No-No Boy” novel], wrote the poem ‘I Must Be Strong’ as a UW freshman living at the Yakima Hotel at Maynard and Dearborn. Gordon Hirabayashi was at the UW. Monica Sone, she describes the bus ride down Beacon Hill to Eighth and Lane [where Greyhound buses picked up prisoners for the camps].
“Mitsue Yamada was from Beacon Hill as well. Nao Akutsu, [and her husband], their shoe repair shop was at Sixth and King, where the Hing Hay Park’s big red arches are located now. Fuyo Tanagi [and her husband], their grocery shop was where the Tai Tung [restaurant] is now.”
One crucial post-war document also came from the Emerald City. Shosuke Saki’s “An Appeal for Action to Obtain Redress for the World War II Evacuation and Imprisonment of Japanese Americans,” issued in 1975, from the Japanese American Citizens League’s Seattle headquarters in downtown’s Rainier Tower.
Frank Abe (Photo by Kayla Isomura)
“For decades,” said Abe, “Japanese America was unable to talk about the camps, because they didn’t have the language. In the ‘50s and ‘60s and early ‘70s, the public square thought was ‘You were the guys who bombed Pearl Harbor,’ ‘Don’t forget Pearl Harbor.’
“Shosuke’s appeal for action stated clearly that Japanese Americans were distinct from Japanese in Japan, and that the camps violated the Constitution and Bill of Rights. America needed to apologize and award compensation, not for property losses, but for violations of due process, equal protection of the law, as guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Asked about a second volume of incarceration material, Abe responded with a chuckle that the current book was originally twice as long.
“The manuscript we submitted to Penguin, they said, ‘Thank you, now cut it in half please.’”
He has no plans to take part in a second volume for Penguin, but did put out a challenge to other archivists, to follow this book’s lead.
“This anthology is our view, our slice, of the writings. But there are 120,000 ways to slice this material.
“The volume is designed to give teachers and students an easily accessible overview of the arc of camp experience, to see how all the many conflicts and contradictions fit together. Teachers can supplement it with their own favorite books and films and local stories.”