Rare Japanese poetry translation offers first-generation account of WWII incarceration

A collection of Japanese poetry written by a Japanese immigrant couple incarcerated during World War II has been translated into English for the first time, offering rare, first-person emotional insights into the losses and injustices of those detained during wartime in the United States.

The collection, titled "By the Shore of Lake Michigan," follows the seventh-century traditional style of tanka poetry, the oldest form of poetry in Japan. It was translated and edited by the couple's granddaughter, Nancy Matsumoto, over the course of nearly 15 years. The finished product has been published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Written by Nancy Matsumoto's grandmother, Tomiko, and grandfather Ryokuyo Matsumoto (also known as Gennosuke Matsumoto), the poetry volume chronicles 17 years of their lives from when they were forced to leave their Los Angeles-area home and grocery store in 1942 to their resettlement in Chicago after the war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Matsumotos, their three children and Tomiko's mother, Iku, were placed in the Santa Anita racetrack assembly center and then transferred to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

From 1942 to 1946, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals, most of whom were living on the West Coast, were stripped of their possessions and relocated to camps throughout the western United States and Arkansas. Noncitizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated without due process when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

While there are many films, essays, stage productions and fiction stories from second- and third-generation Japanese Americans on wartime incarceration, there are a small number of accounts from the first generation, also referred to as Issei, largely due to language barriers. Many Issei writings about the carceral experience have not been translated from Japanese, the center says, which makes "By the Shore of Lake Michigan" unique.

Ryokuyo Matsumoto was born in the Chiba prefecture of Japan and immigrated to Seattle to work for an import-export store. He briefly went back to Japan to marry Tomiko, a friend's sister, before returning to Seattle as a family in the 1920s. Ryokuyo and Tomiko ran a fruit market in Seattle and a grocery store in Los Angeles after the Great Depression. During their incarceration, Ryokuyo began writing poetry and became a member of the Araragi poetry society.

Tomiko Matsumoto was born in 1900, also in the Chiba prefecture. During the family's incarceration in Wyoming, Tomiko studied tanka under poet Kashu Mainichi, former editor of the Japan-California Daily News. In 1955, around 10 years after the family was resettled in Chicago, one of the poems later featured in "By the Shore of Lake Michigan" was read at Utakai Hajime, an annual poetry reading hosted by the Japanese emperor Hirohito. Tomiko joined the Uta to Kansho poetry society in 1958.

In 1960, Tomiko and Ryokuyo published "By the Shore of Lake Michigan" in Japanese.

"Ranging from the lyrical to the objective, the political to the deeply personal, the poems trace the Matsumotos' passage through the darkest chapter of Japanese American history, the unconstitutional incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent," said Karen Umemoto, the executive director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

The word "tanka" can be translated as "short poem" or "short song," which reflects its 31-syllable structure. Two lines longer than a haiku, tanka is five lines long with a 5-7-5-7-7 meter. The first three lines of the poem are descriptive (the kami-no-ku, or the upper phrase), and the final two lines are reflective (shimo-no-ku, the lower phrase).

While traditional haiku mainly explores themes of nature, seasons changing and the feelings it invokes, tanka can feature any topic. Dating as far back as the seventh century, tanka was performed in contests at the imperial court, but it was also a common pastime for anyone, particularly lovers, in medieval Japan. Love remains a prominent theme in tanka, alongside other subjects like nature, places, time and relationships. The thematic freedom in writing tanka made it ideally suited for Japanese immigrants coping with trauma and loss after World War II.

One of Tomiko's poems grapples with complicated feelings of watching your children grow up during wartime:

Seeing my child
grown strong
and taller,
my heart aches
at this time of war

(takumashiku
setake mo nobishi
wako mireba waga mune itashi
senji no ima o)

President Donald Trump recently invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rapid deportations, without due process, of migrants allegedly affiliated with Venezuelan gangs to a prison in El Salvador. Umemoto said the Matsumotos' poems have taken on new relevance and provide critical insight into the destabilizing and traumatic impacts of forced incarceration.

Translating from Japanese can be very difficult, due to the reliance on implied meaning and indirect communication in Japanese writing. To rewrite "By the Shore of Lake Michigan," translators needed a strong understanding of cultural nuances and how to adequately convey them.

Nancy Matsumoto collaborated with translator Kyoko Miyabe and Mariko Aratani. The book features a foreword by Nancy and an introductory essay by Eri Yasuhara, dean emerita of Cal State San Bernardino's College of Arts and Letters. Alongside the poetry, annotations offer historic, cultural and literary insights into the poems.