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ABSTRACT
This essay reflects upon the continuing significance of the freestyle Kaiko haiku movement documented by poet, editor, and translator Violet Kazue de Cristoforo in the anthology May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow (1997). A vivid, rule-breaking, highly social form that thrived in specialized clubs, Kaiko haiku began in Tokyo in the early 1900s and was brought by young emigrant writers to California, where it was transformed and almost erased by Japanese American incarceration. The essay revisits the poetic form and de Cristoforo’s literary work and activism in light of settler-colonialism, ecological change, and the essayist’s experience living in California’s Central Valley.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to more colleagues than I can name here for feedback and helpful conversations on this project over the years. I wish to especially acknowledge Josephine Lee, Frank Abe, Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, Josephine Park, and D. Scott. The American Association of University Women provided research funding.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Biographical information throughout this essay is compiled from several sources: John Howard, Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bucknell/detail.action?docID=432241; Jane E. Dusselier, Remaking Inside Places: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Elaine Woo, “Violet de Cristoforo, 90; California Haiku Poet Sent to WWII Internment Camps (Obituary),” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2007; Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997); Frank Abe, “Former Renunciant Charges WW2 Scientist with Defamation,” Pacific Citizen, July 22, 1988; Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, “A Victim of a Tule Lake Anthropologist” (Pullman, WA: Association for Asian American Studies National Conference, 1988); Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, “A Victim of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS),” June 30, 1987; and John Tateishi, And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York: Random House, 1984).
2. Michael R. Jin, Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022), 102–3, 107; and Eric Muller, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 14. See also Eliko Kosaka, “Caught in Between Okinawa and Hawai‘i: ‘Kibei’ Diaspora in Masao Yamashiro’s The Kibei Nisei,” Amerasia Journal 41, no. 1 (2015): 23–35.
3. De Cristoforo, “Victim of the JERS Study,” 10–11.
4. This paper follows many Asian American scholars and the Japanese American Citizens League in using the term “incarceration camps” instead of “internment camps” to reflect the reality of the imprisonment of American citizens and the conditions in which they were held, See National JACL Power of Words II Committee, Power of Words Handbook: A Guide to Language about Japanese Americans in World War II (San Francisco: Japanese American Citizens League, 2013), 10.
5. Violet Kazue Matsuda de Cristoforo, “There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Wartime Haiku,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 1 (1993): 93–115.
6. De Cristoforo, “Victim of a Tule Lake Anthropologist”; de Cristoforo, “Victim of the JERS Study”; and Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, “J’Accuse,” Rikka, 1974.
7. I contacted Violet de Cristoforo’s youngest daughter, who declined to be interviewed for this essay. ShiPu Wang’s account of researching Japanese American painter Miki Hayakawa (1899–1953) provides a model of scholarly caution, as Wang sifts through biographical inaccuracies already in print. ShiPu Wang, The Other American Moderns: Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017), 97–100, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271080727.
8. It is difficult to know how many clubs existed. While May Sky focuses on the work of incarcerated poets within de Cristoforo’s personal network, she hints that they were not the only Kaiko kai: “The passing of the once energetic free-style Kaiko groups, especially the Delta Ginsha Haiku Kai and the Valley Ginsha Haiku Kai (which had been known for their international flavor and capable women poets), was a tragedy to the ethnic Japanese communities.” See de Cristoforo, May Sky, 25.
9. We Came to Grow: Japanese Americans in the Central Valley (KVIE Documentaries, 1999), https://www.pbs.org/video/we-came-to-grow-japanese-americans-in-the-central-valley-zgmlje/; Kelli Y. Nakamura, “Kenjinkai,” in Densho Encyclopedia (2015), https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Kenjinkai.
10. Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
11. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 55; de Cristoforo, “J’Accuse”; and de Cristoforo, “Victim of the JERS Study,” 10.
12. Dusselier, Remaking Inside Places, 16; “WWII Japanese American Assembly Center Newsletters,” Calisphere, University of California Library, https://calisphere.org/item/d9f4035f-f27b-4567-b0e8-3002d01324dc/ (accessed October 11, 2023).
13. The Stop AAPI Hate coalition documented over 11,000 anti-Asian hate incidents during the pandemic’s first two years, and a fall 2022 survey revealed that 51% of Asian Americans felt unsafe in public. “Two Years and Thousands of Voices: What Community-Generated Data Tells Us About Anti-AAPI Hate” (Stop AAPI Hate, July 20, 2022), https://stopaapihate.org/year-2-report/.
14. Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 2, 6.
15. Soichi Furuta, translator’s introduction to Cape Jasmine and Pomegranates: The Free-Meter Haiku of Ippekiro, by Ippekirō, trans. Soichi Furuta (New York, NY: Grossman, 1974), xvi.
16. For poets who published under both given and family names, I have written their names with the family name second, following English convention. In Japanese the family name would come first. However, some poets published under one name and I will reference them that way; for example, Ippekirō Nakatsuka published as Ippekirō. Thanks to Ryu Yotsuya for this clarification.
17. Shiki Masaoka et al., Thistle Brilliant Morning: Shiki, Hekigodō, Santōka, Hōsai, trans. William Higginson (Paterson, NJ: From Here Press, 1975); William Higginson, trans., The Big Waves: Meisetsu, Shiki, Hekigotō, Kyoshi, Hakyō (privately published, 1989), 12.
18. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 15; and Ippekirō, Cape Jasmine, xix.
19. Ippekirō, Cape Jasmine, xix.
20. Kenneth Yasude, Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature and History (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), 31–32, 39.
21. Translation by Ryu Yotsuya.
22. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 10.
23. W.G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 7; and Wendy Ng, Japanese-American Internment during World War II: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 2.
24. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 24.
25. Ibid., 29.
26. Audrey Wu Clark, The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 61, 67, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucm/detail.action?docID=4312043.
27. Chrissy Yee Lau, “‘Ashamed of Certain Japanese’: The Politics of Affect in Japanese Women’s Immigration Exclusion, 1919–1924,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Boston: Brill, 2017), 202, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucm/detail.action?docID=4825524.
28. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 30.
29. Chrissy Yee Lau, New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022), 4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv360nr2q; and Howard, Concentration Camps, 199.
30. Lau, New Women, 16.
31. Howard, Concentration Camps, 40–42. In 1924, de Cristoforo’s parents, the Yamanes, moved the family from Hawai‘i back to Japan to escape anti-Japanese racism. A few years later, de Cristoforo was invited to live with the Stuarts, a white couple they had known in Hawai‘i who had since moved to Fresno. Mrs. Stuart had given Kazue Yamane the name “Violet” because it was easier for English speakers to pronounce. Reluctantly, the Yamanes sent their daughter to Fresno, where she attended high school.
32. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 24.
33. For more on contemporary literary workshops and organizations that support marginalized writers, see Joseph Wei, “Postmemory Workshops: Vietnamese American Poets, Refugee Memory Work, and Creative Writing,” MELUS 47, no. 3 (2022), mlac043, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac043; Viniyanka Prasad, “The Imagination of Literary Spaces: On Contemporary Literary and Artistic Outreach,” Literary Hub (blog), September 8, 2023, https://lithub.com/the-imagination-of-literary-spaces-on-contemporary-literary-and-artistic-outreach/.
34. Clark, The Asian American Avant-Garde, 5.
35. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 29.
36. Ibid., 35.
37. Ibid., 30.
38. Ibid., 37.
39. Ibid., 17, 79, 83–89, 209.
40. Kazue Matsuda (Violet Matsuda de Cristoforo), Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp 1944 (privately published, 1993 [1988]), E ix.
41. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, “The Poetics of Consolation: Japanese Aesthetics and American Incarceration,” New Literary History 50, no. 4 (2019): 576–7.
42. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 89.
43. Ibid., 227, 233.
44. Ibid., 263.
45. De Cristoforo, “Victim of the JERS Study,” 13.
46. American Civil Liberties Union, Interview with Mrs. Violet Matsuda at Tule Lake Center, July 10, 1944, JERS Collection, Bancroft Library; Frank Abe et al., We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Seattle: Wing Luke Museum and Chin Music Press, 2021), 77–84.
47. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 231, 233, 251.
48. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95, 297–8.
49. Jin, Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless, 137.
50. Mira Shimabukuro, “‘Me Inwardly, Before I Dared’: Japanese Americans Writing-to-Gaman,” College English 73, no. 6 (2011): 648–71.
51. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 17.
52. Timothy Yu, et al., “Against Witness: Anti-Commemorative Asian/American Poetics,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 2 (2019): 77, https://doi.org/10.5749/vergstudglobasia.5.2.0076.
53. OAR US EPA, “Climate Change Indicators: Wildfires,” Reports and Assessments, July 1, 2016, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires; and Deniss J. Martinez et al., “Indigenous Fire Futures: Anticolonial Approaches to Shifting Fire Relations in California,” Environment and Society 14, no. 1 (2023): 142–61, https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2023.140109.
54. Bonnie Berkowitz, et al., “How Many Years Do We Lose to the Air We Breathe?,” Washington Post, November 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/health-science/lost-years/; James E. Bennett et al., “Particulate Matter Air Pollution and National and County Life Expectancy Loss in the USA: A Spatiotemporal Analysis,” PLOS Medicine 16, no. 7 (July 23, 2019): e1002856, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002856; Maria Salinas, “Protecting California’s Farmworkers During the Wildlife Crisis: The State’s Response and the Need for Reform,” Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal 19, no. 1 (2021): 37–62; and Francine Uenuma, “The History of California’s Inmate Firefighter Program,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 1, 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-californias-inmate-firefighter-program-180980662/.
55. Eliot Elisofon, “Japan’s Lovely Look of Spring,” LIFE, April 30, 1956, 82–3, Google Books.
56. As Ford notes, some of Kerouac’s haiku relied on stereotypes of Native Americans to elegize bygone cultural values. Karen Jackson Ford, “Marking Time in Native America: Haiku, Elegy, Survival,” American Literature 81, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 338, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831–2009–005.
57. Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998); Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life,’” Modern Philology 104, no. 4 (2007): 510–28, https://doi.org/10.1086/519191; and Richard Iadonisi, “‘I Am Nobody’: The Haiku of Richard Wright,” MELUS 30, no. 3 (2005): 179–200.
58. Ben Yakas, “Richard Wright’s Haikus Turned Into Public Art Around Downtown Brooklyn,” Gothamist, September 21, 2021, https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/richard-wrights-haikus-turned-public-art-around-downtown-brooklyn.
59. Sonia Sanchez, “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman,” Poetry Magazine (April 2018), , https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146231/haiku-and-tanka-for-harriet-tubman.
60. National Visionary Leadership Project, “Sonia Sanchez: Reading Poetry,” March 22, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JxMXZVafKk.
61. Ford, “Marking Time,” 341.
62. Gerald Robert Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 257; and Ford, “Marking Time,” 336.
63. Gerald Vizenor, Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes (Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1999); and Vizenor, Native Liberty, 260.
64. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 245.
65. De Cristoforo, Poetic Reflections, E 23; and Ford, “Marking Time.”
66. Dorothy Wang, “The Future of Poetry Studies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, ed. Timothy Yu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 223, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108699518.017. Original emphasis.
67. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 25.
68. Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration (Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2016), 194, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucm/reader.action?docID=4415140.
69. Kimiko Hahn, “Angel Island: The Roots and Branches of Asian American Poetry,” Massachusetts Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 856, https://doi.org/10.1353/mar.2018.0149.
70. De Cristoforo, May Sky, 215, 223.
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Mai-Linh K. Hong
Mai-Linh K. Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced and a writer, scholar, and teacher of refugee story. Her work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, MELUS, and other journals and edited volumes, and she is coeditor and coauthor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021).