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.
1. Here and now
Many things haunt me about the life story of Japanese American haiku poet and translator Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (1917–2007), but perhaps none more than the period she spent exiled in Japan after World War II. Born in Hawai‘i in 1917 as Kazue Yamane, de Cristoforo and her first husband, Shigeru Matsuda, ran a Japanese- and English-language bookstore in Fresno, California prior to the war.Footnote1 As a Kibei—a subset of Nisei who were educated wholly or partly in Japan and who then returned to the United States—de Cristoforo had spent some of her childhood in Hiroshima and visited once as an adult. After her incarceration from 1942 to 1946, de Cristoforo was stripped of her U.S. citizenship and “expatriated” to Hiroshima, taking her three young children with her. Arriving months after the atomic bombing, she discovered her mother severely burned, wandering the area near their damaged home. De Cristoforo’s husband, from whom she had been separated while incarcerated, had left her and their children. From 1946 to 1953, de Cristoforo remained in Hiroshima. She worked several jobs to make ends meet, including translating for U.S. occupying forces. Because the Kibei were bilingual and maintained transnational ties, they were viewed by the U.S. government as both a target of suspicion and an exploitable resource.Footnote2 For her translation work, de Cristoforo was paid as a “native” in devalued yen and had to barter for necessities. In these coercive conditions, she eventually sent her two older children back to the United States to be cared for by others, a decision she described as “heartbreaking.”Footnote3 As de Cristoforo recounted decades later, the rift this created in her family proved irreparable.
In the wake of incarceration, military-imperial violence, forced exile, and family separation, de Cristoforo’s major postwar literary project took over four decades to come to fruition. May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, an anthology of freestyle haiku from the incarceration camps that de Cristoforo compiled, translated, and edited, was published in Japan in 1995 and in the United States two years later, in 1997.Footnote4 Prior to the book’s publication, in spring 1993, three decades before this special issue, Amerasia Journal published an early version of the anthology, a 22-page collection titled “There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Wartime Haiku.”Footnote5 May Sky and its antecedent in Amerasia framed selected haiku with historical narrative, photographs, archival documents, and commentary. Together, the two publications form a powerful literary testimonial that went hand in hand with de Cristoforo’s vocal advocacy for Japanese American reparations during the 1980s, including her 1981 testimony before the Congressional Committee on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. De Cristoforo’s first chapbook, Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944 (1988), was published in the same year as passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which outlined a program of reparations.
May Sky documents the emergence of a distinctive literary form: a body of passionate, rule-breaking, Japanese-language American haiku in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Known as Kaiko haiku, this subset of modernist haiku originated in the 1910s with radical, young poets in Tokyo before traveling to the United States via young emigrant writers. Kaiko poets eschewed haiku’s conventional 5-7-5 meter while accentuating the form’s empathic potential through bold, emotional imagery and surprising juxtapositions. The Kaiko “movement,” as de Cristoforo called it, gained traction among a community of Japanese American writers by the 1920s, was transformed and then almost erased by the hardships of incarceration during World War II, and finally was partially recovered in the 1980s and 1990s, just as the decades-long campaign for reparations and apologies culminated. May Sky captures the trajectory of this poetic form, the historical and political conditions that shaped it, and Japanese American former incarcerees’ struggle for recognition.
I first read May Sky in graduate school and have carried it close for nearly a decade, along with de Cristoforo’s chapbook. As a scholar, I have struggled to ethically reconstitute a literary history that is so rife with personal loss, a story almost too layered to chronologize, and I fear I cannot do justice to a life’s work that doggedly pursued an elusive poetic justice of its own. De Cristoforo’s most intimate griefs reflected the various forms of state violence enacted upon her and her family, including the gendered impacts of both U.S. and Japanese military empire. De Cristoforo wrote and spoke widely about her experiences as a poet, activist, and mother during her incarceration. She publicly recounted her grievance against a white anthropologist who exploited her while she was incarcerated, including in a lengthy, self-published affidavit and a talk delivered at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in 1988, which detailed her children’s rejection of her.Footnote6 Although de Cristoforo passed away in 2007, her traumas reverberate through the lives of her descendants, and I am wary of the ethics of recalling them. Over time, I have accepted that there are many possible tellings of this story, all of them illuminating but inadequate in some way, and that the story is nevertheless important.Footnote7 So I return to the imperfection and honesty of all first tellings by weaving it with the here and now. This essay is a work of literary criticism, and it is other things, too: an excavation, an apology, a map, a yearning.
I am a newcomer to the Central Valley, having lived in Merced for just over a year. This mostly agricultural region separates California’s western coastal areas from the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east. Almost impossibly fertile, the long, narrow valley that runs north-south is semi-arid and desertifying due to climate change, yet supplies 40% of the nation’s produce (25% of its total food supply) through the dual miracles of irrigation and immigrant labor. Temperatures reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit every summer, when it does not rain for months and cloudless sun hangs over farmworkers who clothe themselves head to toe against the scorch. Theirs is a dangerous labor driven by dreams of safety and abundance for the next generation. Today, the labor is performed mostly by immigrants from Latin and Central America, but in the region’s palimpsestic landscape, Japanese immigrant and Southeast Asian refugee farmers have also made their mark. Here in the Central Valley, an eclectic Asian American history—including a literary one—continues to unfold.
May Sky originated here. I consider this as I clock the small-town exits that mark the two-and-a-half-hour route from Stockton south along Highway 99 to Fresno. These are the two cities where Issei poets Neiji Ozawa (1886–1967) and Kyotaro Komuro (1885–1953) founded two Kaiko haiku kai, or clubs, a century ago; Merced lies between. Like other Japanese forms, haiku flourished in Japan through specialized kai that met regularly for critique, mutual encouragement, and friendly competition. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (then publishing as Kazue Matsuda), belonged to the Fresno-based Valley Ginsha Haiku Kai, which was founded in 1918 and led by Ozawa, a pharmacist. In Stockton, the Delta Ginsha Haiku Kai was founded in 1928 and led by Komuro, a newspaper publisher.Footnote8 A joint meeting between the Stockton and Fresno clubs in January 1929 yielded 40 attendees and over 300 submitted verses. Thus, Ozawa and Komuro brought to America not only the poetic forms they worked in, but also the social practices that supported their writing. This literary sociality distinguished Japanese American haiku from haiku written by American writers of other backgrounds.
When I first read May Sky, I lived on the other side of the country in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the state where I grew up. There, lush green and blue hills give way to vibrant red each autumn, generating vistas very unlike the golden treeless hills and orderly orchards that greeted me in California. Today, learning my new valley through both its literature and its ecology, I cannot help but center dislocation, and I think of my Vietnamese refugee parents who, wary of flying during COVID-19, now drive a camper clear across the continent several times a year to visit me. The Central Valley is the traditional homeland of Yokuts, Miwuk, and other Native peoples, and its topography and politics continue to reflect a troubled interplay of settler-colonial dispossession, forced relocation, and refuge. While majority Hispanic, it is an ethnically and religiously diverse place where numerous transnational histories converge, including from Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In Livingston, a Sikh community thrives; in Turlock, hundreds of Assyrian Christian families resettled. In Merced, I buy my produce from Hmong farmers, and when the Lao New Year comes, it is celebrated downtown with dances, music, and vendors. Prior to World War II, the Matsuda family’s bookstore was located in downtown Fresno near what is today a small, slowly revitalizing Chinatown. Not far from the site, a new night market takes place monthly. One recent Friday evening, I waited in 100-degree heat for a sandwich from a Cuban food truck, which had parked in front of a colorful Lao Buddhist temple. I shared a table with a family eating Filipino and Mexican food while their child played with the dirt in a roadside verge.
In the late 1800s, Japanese settlers began farming the Central Valley. Some moved to the mainland from Hawai‘i, where they had labored on white-owned plantations; others immigrated directly from Japan. The Japanese brought new crops like rice, and techniques to maximize production such as planting strawberries between orchard rows. Japanese Americans were segregated from their non-Japanese neighbors in employment, housing, businesses, and schools due to racial discrimination, so they had to be mostly self-sustaining. As a result, Japanese-speaking business districts developed in towns along the Valley corridor. Japanese cultural life was sustained by temples and churches, sports leagues, Japanese language schools for children, newspapers, and civic associations known as kenjinkai.Footnote9 In the early twentieth century, the xenophobic anti-Chinese movement in the United States gave way to similar campaigns against the Japanese. Already prohibited from naturalizing as U.S. citizens, Japanese-born people were barred from owning land and other privileges—measures intended to prevent them from establishing rooted communities. In 1907, a “gentlemen’s agreement” between the United States and Japan halted Japanese immigration, and in 1924 legislation barred it.Footnote10
In spring 1942, as the United States entered World War II, all residents of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forcibly removed to temporary detention centers (sometimes called “assembly centers”), local sites where they were held while more permanent, remote incarceration camps (sometimes called “relocation centers”) were readied. Temporary detention centers were often fairgrounds and racing tracks, dusty loci of rural social life. De Cristoforo and her family were sent to the Fresno Assembly Center, a horse racing track where food poisoning and allergies were common along with stifling heat and unsanitary conditions. Pregnant with her third child, de Cristoforo was admitted several times to the center’s infirmary and eventually gave birth in a converted horse stall. Weeks later, she and her baby were placed in a boxcar for the four-day train journey to Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas.Footnote11
An hour’s drive north of Fresno, the Merced County Fairgrounds also became a temporary detention center in 1942.Footnote12 Today, it hosts public COVID-19 testing, an annual fair, a flea market, and car races. Every month or so, I come to the fairgrounds to be tested, cognizant of living and teaching in a medically underserved region with low vaccination rates. Since March 2020, over one million lives have been lost to COVID-19 in the United States with communities of color disproportionately impacted and Asian Americans scapegoated nationwide.Footnote13 As I wait in line to be swabbed, I think of lives that unraveled and ones that began in captivity in these intermittently vital spaces. A turbaned man wearing a mask, gloves, and paper gown asks if I have an appointment, then points me to a desk shielded by clear plastic sheets, where his colleague hands me a numbered card. The quiet, bureaucratic shuffle belies a necropolitical reality, in which I hear echoes.
2. Haiku moments
The history of Japanese American Kaiko haiku is a transnational, translingual story of literary adaptation, resistance, and survival under social and political duress. Japanese immigrant writers brought haiku to the United States in the early twentieth century as a live set of evolving social and literary practices shaped by continuing Japanese influences. This occurred during a time of growing anti-Japanese prejudice. De Cristoforo’s anthology shows haiku to be a malleable, socially responsive, migratory literary form. It also demonstrates how military and state violence helped produce the racialized literary and linguistic hierarchies that have kept Japanese-language writing and Japanese-speaking people on the extreme margins of American culture.
Haiku’s history in Japan extends back nearly eight centuries, but by the nineteenth century, the miniature form known for its contemplative tone and nature themes had become, in the view of some critics, “trite” and “lifeless in overall emotional appeal.” A new generation of haiku poets emerged in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century, “broke[] free” of the 5-7-5 meter and sought to renovate the form.Footnote14 Their modernist approach, known as Hiteikei or Jiyuritsu, was free in length and meter but remained extremely concise.Footnote15 The new haiku poets expanded haiku’s subject matter to include private emotions, ordinary life, and social issues, harkening back to haiku’s roots as performed verse addressing a wide array of themes. For example, Hekigotō’sFootnote16 (1873–1937) poem about a widower, “recently wife died/grocer’s/stacking greens/stacking onions/husband/daughter,” and Hōsai’s (1885–1926) tiny verse about solitary illness, “coughing, even:/alone,” center human experience and social connections. They conjure emotions—grief, comfort, loneliness—that underlie quotidian gestures. Haiku’s conventional air of timelessness and universality sometimes gave way to historical specificity: Hekigotō writes, “mountain roses bloom/factory girls at every window/of the tenement,” in a poem that suggests urban industrialization and rejects the prevalent image of haiku as a conservative, upper-class pastime.Footnote17
Kaiko haiku, a subset of the new freestyle haiku, began in Tokyo with Hekigotō’s student, Ippekirō (1879–1946), who believed the essence of haiku lay not in its formal structure or subject matter, but in its ability to distill a spare, intuitive “thought-picture” in as few words as possible, words that “seem to flow from ‘heart to heart’.”Footnote18 Japanese for “crimson sea,” “Kaiko” refers to the red quince flower on the cover of the journal Kaikō, founded by Ippekirō in 1915. The juxtaposed images of flower and sea, joined by vivid crimson, signaled a newly bold, emotional tenor and an emphasis on intuition and visceral experience. Kaiko sought to provoke in readers strong responses via unexpected combinations of images. In the first issue of Kaikō, Ippekirō wrote, “Haiku merely limited to sketching from nature is out of the question. A poem born of my own uncontrollable excitement, itself evoked by a thing or an event at a certain time in a certain place, and a poem that is nothing but my own whole body, such is my kind of haiku, the kind of haiku I thirst for.”Footnote19
Ippekirō’s individualism, “uncontrollable excitement,” and bodily exuberance were aesthetic departures. However, Kaiko haiku preserved the form’s longstanding, distinctive air of instantaneity and contemporaneity, encapsulated in the “haiku moment,” the single moment of concentrated insight that is “the intent of all haiku, and the discipline of the form.”Footnote20 The haiku moment, which crystallizes a connection between poet and reader, was deployed in fresh ways by the Kaiko poets. Ippekirō’s wistful, intimate poem about grieving a lost mother, “May I be with my mother wearing summer kimono/By this window in the morning,” provides a figurative window into the speaker’s emotional life.Footnote21 Following convention, the deictic “this” and present tense convey temporal immediacy, and the poem incorporates a kigo, or season word; but the poem’s moment of insight comes when the reader, after perceiving the speaker’s longing, realizes the mother is absent and unlikely to return. Desire and a dawning grief flow, as the Kaiko poets say, “from heart to heart.”
Even before Kaiko, haiku’s extreme sparseness emphasized the reader-poet relationship by requiring the reader to “fill in the blanks and capture the emotion not spelled out in words,” as Makoto Ueda writes in the preface to May Sky. Ueda continues, “haiku is only one-half of a circle; it invites each reader to join the poet and complete the other half.”Footnote22 For Kaiko poets, this aspect of haiku acquired political valences. Individualism and the ability to provoke emotional empathy became unlikely markers of poetic brilliance in a society that was growing increasingly militant and authoritarian. During the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), the Imperial Court took steps toward industrialization, militarization, and increased foreign cultural exchange, while suppressing any emergence of democracy.Footnote23 Kaiko’s ethos and writing symbolically challenged Japan’s relatively rigid social structure following Japan’s return to imperial rule. Free-verse haiku styles appealed to some poets who emigrated to the United States in search of opportunities or to avoid military service. Among those emigrants were Neiji Ozawa and Kyotaro Komuro, young men who befriended one another during their voyage to America in 1907 and later founded at least three haiku kai in California, including the Stockton and Fresno clubs.
As recounted in May Sky, in a typical Kaiko haiku kai meeting, 15 to 20 attendees would submit poems to the group for lively critique. Submissions were anonymous and managed by a “master,” the evening’s host and leader. Members made suggestions, revised poems, and at the end of the evening, voted on the best haiku. The clubs were multigenerational and crossed social groups, drawing “grape growers, onion farmers, teachers, housewives, bankers, pharmacists, and others”; and anonymity meant contributions were treated equally regardless of the poet’s age, gender, or class.Footnote24 Quoting Issi Fukushima, de Cristoforo recounts, “Having established their own unique life style over the years with their exceptional talent, [the poets] were enjoying life.”Footnote25
The Kaiko poets were not the only early Japanese American poets to write haiku, but the political trajectory of their work distinguishes them from other, more well-known poets. Audrey Wu Clark observes that Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) and Sadakichi Hartmann (1867–1944), for example, wrote haiku without directly addressing the anti-Asian racism of the day, as they forayed into a modernist literary establishment dominated by white Orientalists such as Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Because the Kaiko poets were a grassroots community and wrote primarily in Japanese, they circumvented, to some extent, the “limited agency and subjection” that can come from engaging with white literary mentors and audiences, which Noguchi and Hartmann experienced.Footnote26
Kaiko club membership by young women like Violet de Cristoforo was notable. While Japanese literature has a long history of celebrated women writers, Japanese American women in the 1910s–31930s navigated evolving gender roles in two cultures amid racial hostility, which gave certain contours to their literary participation. Anti-Japanese activists warned of the arrival of Japanese women as a dangerous watershed because it would enable families; they highlighted the practice of working-class, rural Japanese women and children laboring alongside men in the fields, which they argued threatened white male laborers with competition and eroded women’s domesticity.Footnote27 De Cristoforo references the stereotypes early in May Sky: “Contrary to the general belief that all immigrants from the Far East were from rural areas and uneducated, prewar Japanese immigrants had the potential to write and express themselves adequately, but most of them were prevented from doing so by the simple necessity of making a living.”Footnote28 Prewar Japanese American women were under pressure to perform a kind of genteel femininity to both refute stereotypes and fulfill the traditional Japanese ideal of “good wife, wise mother.”Footnote29 Simultaneously, some aspired to embody the independence of the American New Woman, who was usually coded as white, educated, and middle-class. Chrissy Yee Lau places this sociohistorical dynamic within the “long racial formation of the model minority,” in which a figure Lau calls the Transnational New Woman often pursued racial uplift through “respectable” institutions such as churches and civic societies.Footnote30 For de Cristoforo, who was informally adopted by a white family in high school and then married soon after graduating, joining the haiku kai to which her husband belonged provided a socially acceptable creative and social outlet and eventually a vehicle for activism.Footnote31 De Cristoforo notes in May Sky that her husband also wrote for several Japanese American newspapers and was involved in local theater, embedding the family in organized cultural life. The haiku kai also collected Japanese literature and archived their poetry, creating small Japanese-language libraries that reflected and encouraged an evolving literary culture that was both transnational and highly localized.
All of this work was cut short by the war. The haiku kai libraries did not survive: de Cristoforo notes that immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when thousands of Japanese Americans were rounded up for interrogation and incarceration, literary clubs destroyed their archives, fearful (with good reason) that the accumulation of Japanese-language text would place their members at risk of persecution.Footnote32 Much prewar Japanese American literature was lost as “evacuees,” as incarcerees were called by the U.S. government, were forced to liquidate or abandon belongings in short order. Some Kaiko verses that did survive the war were later discarded by poets’ descendants who could not read Japanese. Such discarding due to language loss should be understood as an effect of racial persecution, as Japanese language use was viewed with suspicion and sometimes severely punished during World War II. Incarceration was, among other things, a tool of cultural coercion through which Anglophone supremacy was pressed upon a bilingual community.
American Kaiko haiku thus reflects forms of human assembly that were vulnerable to state suppression but could also nurture resistance to it. Ozawa and Komuro were among the last Japanese to immigrate prior to the long period of Asian exclusion. The Kaiko clubs strengthened bonds among Issei who were far from home and targets of discrimination. Issei members mentored Nisei poets, as Ozawa did for de Cristoforo, establishing the intergenerational literary lineages necessary for a form’s endurance. Like slam poetry clubs of the 1990s and twenty-first-century writing workshops aimed at writers of color such as Kundiman and Voices of Our Nation, the haiku kai in America provided a platform for community building and cultural reproduction in an otherwise oppressive writing environment.Footnote33 Early Asian American writers could find “ambivalent belonging” at best among mainstream literary communities.Footnote34 However, by convening, collaborating, and even competing through haiku kai, Kaiko poets supported each other’s writing and developed lasting social bonds that enabled the form to continue.
May Sky includes a small selection of prewar Kaiko haiku that express, de Cristoforo writes, “tranquility, as well as hope for their future in America.”Footnote35 Hekisamei Matsuda (1906–1970), the name under which de Cristoforo’s first husband published, observes their son playing: “Autumn sun setting/Ken-bo learning/sword fighting skills.”Footnote36 The year’s waning is offset by the child’s playful initiation into sword fighting, suggesting growth and cultural endurance. However, with the start of war and incarceration, de Cristoforo notes that the poetry begins to express “the internees’ dejection, the oppressiveness of their lives behind barbed wire, and the sadness caused by this tragedy which daily faced them.”Footnote37 A poet called Hiroshi (dates unavailable) captures the anxiety felt by Japanese Americans in the months leading up to the United States’ entry into World War II: “Chrysanthemum blooming/near fence/American soldier passes.”Footnote38 The chrysanthemum, a common Japanese icon representing longevity, blooms in alien surroundings, but in the enjambed second line it is stunted by a fence; tension develops into fear when an American soldier crosses the scene. In hindsight, the poem seems premonitory, as if it foresaw barbed-wire fences and armed sentries.
Despite the poets’ displacements and deprivations, Kaiko haiku continued in the camps. At the Stockton Assembly Center, Kaiko club members met regularly during six months of detention in 1942, submitting over 2,000 verses for critique before they were dispersed to more permanent centers in other areas of the country. Komuro led a Kaiko haiku kai at Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas; he edited two volumes of haiku that were published in December 1944 as a supplement to a camp newspaper. The incarcerated poets documented vivid, emotion-laden details of camp life, a function for which Kaiko haiku’s imagistic and empathic style were suited. De Cristoforo offers the verses in May Sky as evidence of “the emotional impact of being uprooted … the turmoil and anguish [the poets] suffered.”Footnote39 She recounts writing for self-consolation: “I became more and more introspective and found solace in my Haiku as the humble expression of the dejection experienced by a lonely young mother with small children.”Footnote40 As Josephine Park elaborates in her study of incarceration literature and art, consolation is not the same as comfort; what Park calls “a highly self-aware poetics of consolation” is rather an aesthetic “effort to draw strength within a precarious existence.”Footnote41 In his introduction to the second volume of camp haiku, Komuro wrote, “In order for us to transcend our condition we must immerse ourselves in nature, and be grateful to find happiness in the life of haiku poetry,” while also criticizing their incarceration: “Who ever dreamed we would be forcibly evacuated from California and confined in this desolate area of Arkansas, surrounded by a barbed wire fence?”Footnote42
Incarceration’s indefinite duration made the turning of seasons particularly poignant, as incarcerees’ personal losses deepened the longer they were held. As a result, the season word, rather than announcing a timeless encounter with nature as it traditionally would, calls attention to the speaker’s circumstances. In this verse by de Cristoforo, writing as Kazue Matsuda, the pace of activity in the camps is disjointed: “Women are busier than men/people living in disarray/and there are Irises.” Despite the provisional nature of camp life, where chores as well as resources were unevenly distributed, the speaker notes in wonder that spring arrives nonetheless. In another haiku, set in summer, de Cristoforo writes, “Myriad insects/in the evening/my children are growing.”Footnote43 What could be a tender, sentimental moment – a parent noticing how fast children grow – becomes frustrated, as the reader realizes the children are growing in captivity. The first two lines hew to convention in their concise description of nature, but the final line presents an unusual first-person interjection, the speaker’s sudden, unfiltered thought. The swarm of summer insects becomes irritating, inescapable. Summer insects recur in a poem by Senbo Takeda (dates unavailable) that laments the boredom of incarceration: “Much idle time – even adults/angling for dragonflies/black barracks.”Footnote44 Far from seeking transcendence in nature, the incarcerees seek diversion like the darting dragonflies – temporary escape from their thoughts and literal escape from the stationary barracks. Instead of instilling haiku’s traditional sense of infinitude, seasonal references in all three poems underscore that time is waning while lives are on hold.
Approximately one third of the poems from May Sky are by members of a Kaiko club at Tule Lake Segregation Center in California, a high-security prison that in 1943 began housing incarcerees who had been deemed disloyal via the infamous screening questionnaire. De Cristoforo and her family – husband, parents-in-law, one brother, and three children – were sent to Tule Lake to await deportation to Japan after they left blank the question about forswearing loyalty to Japan. Because Shigeru Matsuda and his parents were born in Japan, answering yes would have left them stateless; de Cristoforo followed her husband’s family and did the same, though it endangered her U.S. citizenship. She later stressed that her decision “was not the product of free will, but was forced upon me in an effort to survive, to keep my family from disintegrating, and by the unlawful detention and humiliating and degrading conditions prevailing in the incarceration camps.”Footnote45 At Tule Lake, the conditions of their incarceration worsened.
The Tule Lake haiku poets wrote vividly of camp atrocities and protests. “Segregees” suffered harsh treatment by guards, shortages of food and medical care, and turmoil created by sharp political divisions among the incarcerated. The center maintained a stockade known as the “Bull Pen” in which people accused of being “troublemakers” were interrogated and tortured. De Cristoforo’s brother, Tokio Yamane, was sent to the Bull Pen and beaten for involvement in a protest related to food, after which martial law was declared in November 1943.Footnote46 De Cristoforo’s husband was removed to the Santa Fe Internment Center in New Mexico along with others, to spend the remainder of the war imprisoned as an “enemy alien.” In the incident’s wake, Hyakuissei Okamoto (dates unavailable) wrote eerie haiku depicting an atmosphere of fear and unease: “Jeep patrolling slowly/stove is glowing/at night” and “Winter night/pale faced man/taps my shoulder.” Stockade prisoners, including Yamane, staged a hunger strike, to which de Cristoforo responded in haiku: “My heart perceives nothing/day to day/summer at its peak in highland.” While one brother was punished for disloyalty, another Yamane sibling, Richard (Dick), was fighting in the war, having joined an all-Japanese regiment of the United States military, an irony experienced by many Japanese American families. In lines dedicated to Dick Yamane, de Cristoforo writes, “No letters/thoughts wandering/to distant South Pacific war zone.”Footnote47 With her husband and brothers taken from her and her children and ill mother-in-law to care for alone while incarcerated, de Cristoforo wrote poems with an almost dissociated tone of grief and disbelief, her heart “perceiv[ing] nothing” and thoughts anxiously wandering without reply.
For Japanese Americans, war and incarceration were acutely stressful, with trauma and shame creating psychological barriers to expressive work in the years following, not to mention the extreme economic and practical hardships of resuming disrupted lives in a still-unwelcoming nation. It was not unusual for former incarcerees to avoid speaking about their experience to children and grandchildren. One Sansei recalled of his parents: “My feeling was that there was much more to their [incarceration] experience than they wanted to reveal. Their words said one thing, while their hearts were holding something else deep inside.” Tetsuden Kashima, a U.S.-born sociologist who was incarcerated with his family as a baby, calls this withholding a “social amnesia,” an adaptive response to group trauma.Footnote48 Moreover, Japanese Americans living in Japan who experienced the effects of the atomic bombings suffered a unique betrayal along with their trauma, an experience that has gone underrecognized because their transnational lives defy conventional understandings of citizenship.Footnote49
As it turned out, Kaiko haiku was a form unusually suited to combatting the social amnesia and cognitive dissonances created by atrocity. Sometimes it divulged details that would have gone unexpressed; just as often, it honored silence and contradiction as crucial aspects of self-expression. Mira Shimabukuro urges readers of Japanese American incarceration literature to “attend to” the totality of circumstances in which such literature was written, such that gaps and reticence may attest to the power of speaking at all in spite of history.Footnote50 This dynamic is well illustrated by May Sky. On the surface, the anthology seems straightforwardly commemorative, a collection of facts and artifacts with de Cristoforo herself as a crucial witness: “there is no one [else] left who could have recorded the thoughts and emotions of the former internees.”Footnote51 But haiku is also, paradoxically, anti-commemorative in its extreme brevity, and Kaiko haiku in particular celebrates individual subjectivity over historical objectivity. Like other incarceration poets, such as Lawson Fusao Inada (b. 1938) and Janice Mirikitani (1941–2021), the Kaiko poets instill uncertainty and partiality into any remembrance, implicitly refusing the idea of a complete or linear historical record.Footnote52 The fact that a reader must “complete the circle” means that haiku not only accommodates but activates the wonder of partial telling and of delayed, incomplete, and mediated reading, even generations later.
3. After the fire
When I moved to California with my family in 2021, we flew into San Francisco. Shortly after leaving the airport, we drove our rental car past a hillside that was on fire. We later learned small brush fires are common in California summer, but they were not an occurrence we were used to as East Coasters who had only known summer to be wet and humid. Larger fires that swept many miles of forest and engulfed towns were incomprehensible to us.
It was June, the start of what turned out to be a historic wildfire season. Trapped indoors for weeks by dismal air quality, we wondered about the wisdom of our move. In recent decades, wildfires have increased in frequency, intensity, and geographic spread. Once a natural cycle of clearing old growth for new, fire is now a recurring natural and geopolitical disaster linked to human-caused climate change and settler-colonial ways of managing land, water, and people, including suppression of Indigenous fire management practices.Footnote53 The southern Central Valley, known as the San Joaquin Valley, has long had some of the worst air quality in the nation. In Fresno, where de Cristoforo lived, airborne particulate matter reduces life expectancy by up to two years; poorer, browner communities suffer most, an inequity made starker by the region’s reliance on outdoor agricultural labor. Moreover, the fact that incarcerated people, who belong disproportionately to communities of color, are sent to fight wildfires tells us of the continuing interplay of race, carcerality, and environment in the Central Valley.Footnote54
Nevertheless, this is my home now, and of the three successive rural valleys to which academia has sent me, this one is the most diverse, for which I am thankful. My astute, resourceful students are mostly, like me, nonwhite and the first in their family to attend college. They read with a sincerity I wish for all teachers to witness. When I teach poetry of social injustice, they immediately recognize the world that produced it. And it is no small thing that for the first time in 13 years, I have an Asian grocery store in my own town.
Revisiting Violet de Cristoforo’s life and work today, from the region where American Kaiko haiku was nurtured and nearly extinguished, I consider what the escalation of “wildfire season” means for a body of poetry so linked to seasons, environment, displacement, and inequity. Conventionally, haiku poets cultivate the sense that their verses take place outside linear time, in a perpetual present where poet and reader meet. Haiku’s tradition of marking seasons through the kigo presumes a dependable, perennial cycle of ecological changes, expressed through weather, plants and animals, and people’s moods and behavior. Nature recalls its former self: the croaking of frogs in spring, the heat of late summer. On one hand, these markers counteract migration and the passage of time by bringing us home to nature. On the other hand, in an age of drastic ecological and meteorological change, might they become a yardstick by which we measure unprecedented transformations of nature? How will our seasons change? In every place I have lived, trees now flower too soon. Animals migrate out of season.
Kaiko haiku has vivified for me the form’s political urgency and critical potential—that is, its timeliness rather than timelessness. With Kaiko, there is a before and after and someone who experiences these; that someone carries grief and rage as well as illumination. In America, Indigenous poets and poets of color have long understood the form this way, approaching it as a vehicle of personal and cultural recovery, solidarity making, and social activism against a backdrop of human history.
This was not the case with mainstream, postwar American reception of haiku, which recapitulated the form’s ostensible timelessness. Haiku appeared mostly as a decorative Eastern import for Western consumption: charismatic poetry about “flowers and birds,” as more than one critic has put it. On the heels of the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945–1952), a 1956 LIFE photographic essay titled “Japan’s Lovely Look of Spring” paired photographs of Japanese springtime landscapes with translated classical haiku about spring from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. It opens, “The good life, Japanese believe, involves a proper adoration of the beautiful,” and describes haiku as “unmetered poetry which, to Western ears, often lacks clarity but seldom lacks beauty and imagery.”Footnote55 Magazine readers could skirt the recent past and imagine a simpler, unchanging Japan populated by lovers of beauty and nature, free of kamikaze pilots and atomic bomb fallout. “[A]doration of the beautiful” was the new diplomacy enabled by U.S. military supremacy. Beat poets of the 1950s–60s like Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), who positioned themselves as countercultural, also treated haiku stereotypically as an enlightening Eastern alternative to Western individualism.Footnote56
In contrast, also in the late 1950s, the African American novelist Richard Wright (1908–1960) expatriated himself to Paris, France to escape Jim Crow racism and violence. During his final eighteen months, in failing health, he wrote thousands of vivid haiku on myriad topics, often juxtaposing social realism with moments of awe. Shortly before his death in 1960, he sent a collection of over 800 verses to a publisher, but it was rejected; his manuscript would sit in a special collections library until 1998, when it was published as Haiku: This Other World under the stewardship of two scholars.Footnote57 In 2021, a public art project imprinted several of Wright’s haiku on murals in New York City: subway riders and pedestrians read idiosyncratic reflections such as “Could this melody/Be sung in other countries/By other birds?” and “A train crashes past:/A butterfly still as stone/On the humid earth.”Footnote58 Picking up from Wright, Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) experimented with haiku and other Japanese forms, turning them toward Black history. In “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman” (2018), she powerfully uses second-person to command a revival of Tubman’s liberatory legacy: “Picture this woman/saying no to the constant/yes of slavery … //Picture a woman/jumping rivers her/legs inhaling moons.”Footnote59 In an interview, she compares her use of haiku to John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” a song popularized by white artists in the musical The Sound of Music, then reinvented by Coltrane on jazz soprano saxophone in 1961.Footnote60
Native American poets such as Gerald Vizenor (b. 1934) and William Oandasan (1947–1992) have used haiku for “tracing and maintaining connections to the indigenous past … for cultural survival,” as Karen Jackson Ford argues.Footnote61 Both poets write against and despite white literary conventions that portray Native Americans as noble savages long dead and gone, representations that enable settler colonialism by imaginatively clearing the continent of Indigenous life. In Vizenor’s treatise on cultural “survivance,” his term for Indigenous art and literature’s persistence in the face of genocide, Vizenor describes haiku as “a mood of creation, an elusive, ironic, sense of place, motion, and impermanence; a tricky fusion of nature, emotion, ethos, culture, and survivance.” He embraces human subjectivity in haiku via “mood,” “emotion,” and “ethos,” in contrast to white poets and scholars who have typically viewed haiku as a form that “promise[s] impersonality” and romanticizes an ahistorical idea of nature.Footnote62 Vizenor’s collection Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes (1999) is divided into sections titled after the four seasons, with each poem preceded by a city or place name. The book’s organization emphasizes a speaker’s mobility across a continent that Native Americans know deeply and travel in spite of dispossession: “grand marais, minnesota//timber wolves/raise their voices overnight/trickster stories” and “vietnam veterans memorial//columns of names/come alive in a snowstorm/sound of children.” Vizenor’s nature images reclaim Indigenous understandings of land and ecology as vital to human society; wolves revive a tradition of Indigenous storytelling and even a war memorial “come[s] alive” in snow. Comparing haiku to Anishinaabe dream songs, he writes that both “are visions of motion and perception, and, at the same time, tease nature.”Footnote63
The isolated Tule Lake poets, too, drew on their proximity to nature to reveal the land’s intertwined geological and human pasts, particularly settler-colonial violence that was evident in the land. The poets explored nearby, cliff-like Castle Rock Mountain and the sandy, shell-strewn area around Tule Lake where incarcerees were permitted to wander. Suiko Matsushita (dates unavailable) writes, “Oh shells – /the cliff, your bygone world/is slowly crumbling.”Footnote64 Time’s passage appears as a cliff’s “slow[] crumbling,” a gradual undoing of millennia of sedimentation, leaving shells to memorialize a “bygone world” of once-vibrant aquatic life. Alongside loss, the mountain also symbolized endurance: de Cristoforo explains in Poetic Reflections that Castle Rock Mountain was “the last battle ground of the Modoc Indians,” the tribe that lost the land in 1873 but whose resistance gave de Cristoforo and others “inspiration” at Tule Lake, albeit inspiration “complicated” by historical defeat.Footnote65
In the hands of incarcerated Kaiko poets, other poets of color, and Indigenous poets, American haiku has documented injustice and provided a space of protest, reinscription, and repair. This multiracial history of American haiku should be taught with, perhaps even instead of, the conventional English-class narrative in which haiku, “discovered” by the modernists, is notable because it inspired non-Japanese poems like Pound’s famously concise “In a Station of the Metro.” The study of poetry, including the poetry of incarceration, should “engage with concrete materialities and structures of power so as to look fully at the topic of race and colonialism” not only as context but as a dynamic that, as Dorothy Wang writes, “inheres in the very form of the works.”Footnote66 In the aftermath of war, May Sky was a transnational project that attempted to rebuild ties between writing communities in the United States and Japan and memorialize linked literary archives that were lost to war. While Japanese American literary clubs in California burned their libraries out of fear, in Tokyo, the entire repository of Kaiko verse was destroyed during a U.S. air raid.Footnote67 Thus, military violence on multiple fronts – Hawai‘i, the West Coast, the camps, Tokyo, Hiroshima – converged to curtail this literature and obscure its writers. How does such literature recover? What remains after the fire, and what can be reconstructed, or built new, from ash?
Violet de Cristoforo insisted on the importance of one body of poetry and spent decades gathering and tending it against odds. Her recovery of Kaiko haiku may help develop the “Nikkei activist literacies,” to borrow Shimabukuro’s term, that are necessary to meaningfully represent such a history despite language loss, gaps in memory, and silences created by generational trauma.Footnote68 De Cristoforo’s work inspires questions of literary justice: What might American literary and cultural history look like had certain strands of cultural production not been cut short? What could it look like if this foreclosure were acknowledged as part of the process of canonization? What might American practices of writing and reading include had certain forms of minority literary sociality, such as Japanese American haiku clubs, been permitted to flourish and spread on their own terms? What might they include in the future, now that such histories are available to us? Poet Kimiko Hahn (b. 1955), discussing literature by Angel Island detainees, demonstrates that Asian American literature continues to uncover its multitudinous “roots and branches” – coexisting genealogies of American literature. For Hahn, de Cristoforo’s work offers an “exhilarating” touchstone.Footnote69
Kaiko haiku may also create Nikkei activist literacies by recruiting the reader to participate even far into the future, through its compelling addresses and sensory-rich memories. Several verses by Neiji Ozawa characteristically blend visible and invisible, spoken and unspoken, aspects of camp experience, such as “Sensing permanent separation/as you left me in extreme heat/on gravel road” and “From the window of despair/May sky/there is always tomorrow.”Footnote70 In the former poem, the speaker’s discomfiting physical exposures to heat and gravel are subordinate to an amorphous, yet more painful, “sense” of “permanent separation.” The poem’s second-person address drafts the reader into the scene, not only to witness but to play the part of a potentially responsible party who “left” the speaker to his lonely fate. Literacy is about the reader as much as the writer. As the final poem makes clear, the poet-speaker looks toward a more just future, to which his audience holds the key. Haiku, an enduring form best known for its stricture, provided a tiny window through which imprisoned poets saw both the “May sky” and the promise of “tomorrow.” That promise includes us, reading in the here and now.
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).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
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).
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.