By Audrey Fong
Last May, Penguin Classics published The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, a collection of dozens of writings about Japanese American wartime incarceration co-edited by writers Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung. This anthology is unlike previous collections in how it both builds off of previous ones and highlights many works that often do not receive the attention they deserve, including newly translated works. At Chapman University’s Day of Remembrance event, I had the pleasure of talking to Frank about both the anthology and his graphic novel, We Hereby Refuse. In this interview with both Frank and Floyd, we discuss the anthology more in-depth while also covering some of the key points from the Day of Remembrance talk.
Audrey Fong: It’s been almost 80 years since the end of World War II and a little over 80 years since the signing of Executive Order 9066. What made now the right time to put together this anthology?
Floyd Cheung: Under the leadership of VP Elda Rotor, the Penguin Classics series recently began to include more Asian American writers. After I finished editing The Hanging on Union Square by H. T. Tsiang for this series, VP Rotor asked me what I could work on next. I pitched to her a version of the course reader that I use at Smith College when teaching the literature of Japanese American incarceration, and she agreed.
Frank Abe: Any anthology could have been created in the time since World War II, and several have. But it’s taken 80 years for this anthology to emerge, with its particular point-of-view, because it’s based on all the work that’s come before it. It took Japanese America 40 years to be able to articulate the case for redress, and marshal the evidence and build the support to compel the government to admit the camps were wrong and to apologize. It took another 20 years for Japanese America to look inside and acknowledge and embrace the existence of resistance against the camps and wartime incarceration. It’s taken another 20 years for scholars to dig into the creative work of Issei and Kibei Nisei in camp who were writing in Japanese. That’s 80 years. So these things take time.
Floyd first called me in 2017 to ask if I thought there was room for a new anthology of camp literature in the time since the publication twenty-four years ago of Lawson Inada and Patricia Wakida’s Only What We Could Carry. I said yes. For starters, we’ve had new translations of writing in Japanese from the camps. And I knew I had two bookcases of books and six file cabinets of photocopies of camp writings I’ve collected over the years that have been long ignored or overlooked and needed to be seen.
AF: Fascinating–I love how you wanted to highlight works that had been overlooked or missed in previous anthologies. How did you approach selecting what would and would not be included in it?
FA: I asked Floyd how we would define “literature” and he said it could be “any writing by those in camp.” That immediately freed us from thinking only in terms of fine writing, of fiction and poetry, and opened up the entire realm of writing from diaries and letters to confidential memos to the government’s orders and edicts. Once we settled on the idea of presenting these selections chronologically, so that readers could experience the arc of camp as the incarcerees experienced it over time, the material fell into place, with each piece building upon the ones before it to form a coherent narrative of life before camp, in camp, and after camp.
AF: I know that John Okada, author of No-No Boy, is an important writer to you. You co-edited John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy and helped get Okada on the Seattle Literary Map. What about Okada’s work draws you to him? And how did you choose his poem, “I Must Be Strong,” originally published anonymously in the University of Washington Daily, as the piece to include in the anthology?
FA: There’s a reason why No-No Boy is cited not only as a great Japanese American novel, but as a great American novel as well. The anger and rage in Okada’s prose and the burning inner monologues are like nothing else I’ve seen in Japanese American literature–with the exception of the stories we’re now translating from the Japanese written by Kibei Nisei for a Tule Lake literary magazine called Tessaku.
In our first draft of this anthology, we included three excerpts from No-No Boy along with work by such well-known authors as Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and Julie Otsuka, but we were advised that the manuscript was twice as long they could publish. Elda suggested we omit familiar works which are readily available in favor of the lesser-known material new to readers. But we still wanted to include something by Okada, and his student poem reacting to the instant change in the look of people he passed on the street after Pearl Harbor, which we first discovered and put into the Okada book, slots perfectly into that moment within our larger narrative.
AF: During our talk at Chapman University’s Day of Remembrance event, you mentioned that living in Seattle allows you more freedom with your work. Would you mind explaining why this is?
FA: Working with writer Frank Chin and the Nisei in the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee–an offshoot of Seattle Chapter JACL, what was then called the “maverick chapter”–ignited my pursuit of Japanese American history as one that needed some recovery and correction. My work since then continues to challenge many accepted norms in the community, and nearly 50 years later I still feel I can see things more clearly by living apart from the larger Japanese American communities. Seattle is a book town, a UNESCO City of Literature. I feel supported by the presence of groups like Densho and the Wing Luke Asian Museum. I can connect with the larger JA community through books and social media. Whenever I come to LA, I feel the pressure of the crowd. LA is an industry town for film and TV. I love film and TV and the creatives behind them, but when you feel its presence everywhere you can feel the pressure to repeat what’s familiar. I work best having space to myself.
AF: The anthology features a staggering 68 pieces. As you combed through the possible selections and narrowed it down to these 68, was there anything that surprised you or that you learned from working on it? Or was there a specific piece that surprised you?
FC: I knew that there were writings in Japanese contained in journals like Tessaku, but I had never read any before working on this anthology. The few pieces that we include in this anthology shed light on perspectives by Japanese Americans who were born in the US and educated in Japan. I am so excited that our translator, Andrew Way Leong, will be leading a team to translate more.
FA: Yes, first in learning about the literary magazine Tessaku and then discovering how it was founded as a direct response to the creation of the Tule Lake Stockade. When I was at the 2018 Tule Lake Pilgrimage and casting a wide net for material for the anthology, I was introduced to Tessaku by Junko Kobayashi of Nagoya, Japan. In her doctoral thesis, Bitter Sweet Home, she had synopsized some of the stories she found most compelling in the magazine, and based on that Floyd and I commissioned Andrew Way Leong to translate two of them. When Andrew turned in his translation of “Father of Volunteers,” I was stunned by how author Jōji Nozawa so vividly conveys the anger boiling within his title character. The similarity in tone to the inner monologues of Okada’s No-No Boy made me wonder what else is out there still unread by those of us who can’t read Japanese. I think Andrew does too; he has just secured a major grant to translate all nine issues of Tessaku.
AF: This collection spans generations of writers from those who lived through wartime incarceration like Toshio Mori and Mitsuye Yamada to those who didn’t experience it but had relatives who did like Brandon Shimoda and traci kato-kiriyama. Why was it important to include voices from multiple generations?
FC: The consequences of the incarceration reverberate in the lives of descendants. For instance, they felt the effects, consciously or not, in their families’ economic, educational, medical, and other circumstances. We know, too, that stories about, as well as silences surrounding, incarceration affected the psychology of descendants. See, for instance, Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-generational Impact of the Japanese American Internment by Donna Nagata. Writings by descendants like Shimoda and kato-kiriyama provide a window into how later generations grapple with the cultural trauma of incarceration.
FA: The collective voice of Japanese America can only be captured by including all of its generations, because each confronts America at a different point in its history. For the Issei, it is the experience of making a life and raising a family in America without having the privileges of citizenship like their children born as citizens by birthright will have. The Nisei are the first to write about camp in English. The Sansei, my generation, seek to connect with the past and work to recover an authentic Japanese American history through oral histories and the campaign for redress. The Yonsei are just coming into their own as adults, as they confront the repeating of America’s exclusionary history that we’re seeing today. Each generation confronts the reality and consequences of mass imprisonment in its own way which is why, as we say, the literature of Japanese American incarceration continues to be written to this day.
Join Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung for a talk at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, October 12. Tickets here.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.