Letters to Memory Read online

  You wonder what John thought of Reinhold Niebuhr’s view of “Christian realism,” especially in relation to the real injustice of camp imprisonment. I suppose I could stop to read Niebuhr myself and thread my speculations into this moment in time, but frankly, I need to stop. My PK devotion has its limits.

  As a writer and a PK who read the Bible as partitioned into old and new—a forced narrative of historical continuum—there might be a plot of: this happened and then this happened. But of course, the writer here knows this is absurd; too many narrators. Still, the beauty of Ecclesiastes is that it doesn’t seem to belong, that it could be a narrative leap. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but this seems to be what sermons tend to do: extract scriptures from their context and leap into contemporary speculations of faith and belief and moral action. What can the past tell the present? Maybe this project has been no more than an exercise in sermonizing, extracting archival letters as if scriptures, to inform or query the present. Only you, a fellow PK, might find me out, my desire for a narrative leap—not a prophetic leap mind you, but just a leap to some kind of clarity or truth.

  Lastly, there is your comment that Ecclesiastes is funny in a very wry way. I thought about this with some pause, but then it occurs to me that, given the appropriate and familiar contexts and narrative voice, it could all be rewritten as stand-up. It might be the banter of two old men, John playing the fall guy to Jack’s dry quips.

  All is vanity and pursuit of the wind.

  Wind?

  Yeah, no matter how you play your cards, eventually poof.

  What’s the point?

  Life is short.

  Yeah, tell me about it.

  I’m trying to. Believe me, I’m trying.

  With laughter to the wind,

  TO END

  Dear Reader:

  Asako Yamashita died this year, 2015, at the age of ninety-eight. She would have been ninety-nine on November 10. She was the last, by marriage, of the nisei generation of the Yamashita family. Occasionally I set before her these letters, and she perused them silently without comment. All these years later, the family into which she married still seemed too chatty and too voluble, a garrulous bunch. I think she disapproved of making this correspondence public or revealing private lives to others, and yet they contain a history that profoundly shaped her. Still, aside from honest outbursts, her thoughts remained contained, and she, mostly refusing to say. Living with her for over a decade, I heard her memories surface and recede, change and solidify, cloud and diminish. It is in this way that she bid us good-bye.

  With kind and gentle regards,

  AND FINALLY

  Dear Editor:

  You’d think by now this would be over, but there you are waiting beneath every sentence, dipping below the surface of the text, suturing the stuff of it by attachments of word to meaning, sentence to flow, and back to larger meaning. Are you the last critical filter, my best collaborator, or my ideal reader? After your scrutiny, will it be nearly perfect? Done?

  How many times have we together read through this thing? Unlike my other five epistolary muses, your concerns have been to make the book in its entirety work. If, for example, I answered their questions about the narrative “I” and “you,” you’ve removed my answers to their queries. Academic questions that offend the literary. Similarly, you’ve removed my apologies for my lack of knowledge in their fields and also my responses to their technical marginalia, questions about captions and archival access. Unnecessary, your marginalia implies and remarks. Save this for the afterword. And you’ve excised digressive references reflecting my fascination for historic serendipity. For example, in 1953, author of the song, “Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan, a.k.a. Abel Meeropol, and his wife, Anne, came to a holiday party at the home of W. E. B. Dubois, where they met and adopted two boys, Michael and Robert, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cut; interesting but extraneous. Phrases, sentences, entire paragraphs have been erased, so many precious words. This, you point out, is the center of the work, and you proceed to cut the surrounding stuff. Now the meaning can breathe. I think, okay, I’m cool with these cuts. I’m a grown-up writer. I’m breathing.

  I think more difficult in this process has been the excising of archival materials. The original draft included entire letters and other associated artifacts. You pointed out that the letters cannot be reproduced in the confines of a printed page at a size that can be read. The handwriting is aesthetically and historically interesting, but who nowadays can read this except my elderly epistolary muses? What remains is a selection of excerpts—of letters, photographs, art, and documents that frame my letter writing as physical gestures to lived history. The reader may access these records for full viewing in the big family archive online. And here is where we insert the link to the archive website: http://yamashitaarchives.ucsc.edu. This is a new literary world, completed by an infinite cyber cloud. It is part of the fictional experiment that I have come to be a part of and to embrace. I mourn the impossibility of print, but you reassure me. This experiment makes possible another way of reading, even as you carefully honor what is written, what I’ve written here. Your honoring confidence I assume with the vulnerability of an interpreter and translator, matching memory with artifact to the present.

  This matching of memory to artifact is perhaps finally the difficulty of what has been attempted here, to speak to the contrapuntal nature of reimagined encounters that are familiar but not similar—that is, metaphorically and fictionally familiar, but not commensurably or accountably the same. You have questioned and argued in some instances for a family story that corrals interpretations around similar histories, and I have pushed in another direction to expand the meaning of living and dead histories and belief systems across bodies familiarly defined by nation and race. Perhaps this was John’s project that I have attempted clumsily to complete. We are none of us the same. But there is my family and the familiar you beyond my family, here hopefully resonating.

  Well, I owe you a drink. Okay, dinner.

  Dinner it is,

  YAMASHITA FAMILY TREE

  Kishiro Yamashita (12/15/1873–11/16/1931) +

  Tomi Murakami (12/2/1882–3/1/1972)

  1.Kimi (8/8/1902–7/25/1980) +

  Tokiroo Robert Ono (1/14/1888–11/5/1971)

  a.Theodore Kiyoshi (6/22/1921–2/26/2015) +

  Barbara Fumiko Yamamoto (10/12/1918–11/25/1998)

  1.Carole Janice (12/23/1946–)

  2.Kathryn Anita (7/19/1951–)

  3.Peter Robert (12/14/1956–)

  4.Nancy Gale (9/2/1957–3/10/1958)

  b.Masako (b. and d. 1928)

  c.Martha Chizu (1/5/1930–) +

  Eugene Shigemi Kiyozumi Uyeki (5/26/1926–9/5/2014)

  1.Timothy Mitsuo (8/18/1959–)

  2.Robert Hideki (4/18/1961–)

  2.Susumu (Wilfred) (3/21/1905–9/26/1989) +

  Kiyoko Kitano (10/26/1916–3/20/2005)

  a.Kimiko Susan (8/18/1941–)

  b.Evelynn Haruko (3/21/1944–)

  c.Kenneth Akira (9/11/1945–)

  d.Michael Shaw (1/28/1949–)

  e.Alan Kei (5/23/1950–)

  3.Chizuru Dorothy (4/18/1908–4/9/1998) +

  Edwin Kikutaro Kitow (5/28/1899–5/20/1964)

  a.Edwin Kikuo, Jr. (8/11/1934–)

  4.Hiroshi John (2/1/1912–7/23/1984) +

  Asako Sakai (11/10/1916–7/30/2015)

  a.Karen Tei (1/8/1951–)

  b.Jane Tomi (8/12/1953–)

  5.Iyo (Grace) (1/23/1915–2/1/2004) +

  Minoru Tamaki (12/23/1918–7/24/2004)

  a.Ellen Mitsu (9/11/1946–)

  b.Ann Yuri (5/24/1948–)

  c.Donald K. (5/26/1951–)

  6.Kiye Kay (Carolyn) (3/31/1918–5/30/1995)

  7.Isao Thomas (5/23/1921–12/20/1990) +

  Carol Osaba Shinsato (9/12/1921–5/19/2011)

  a.John Galen (11/23/1952–)

  b.Lynn Robin (2/14/1956–)

  c.Ro
bert Charles (8/15/1957–)

  IN THANKS

  This project began, for me, with the initial retrieval of a folder of carbon-copied wartime letters from Kay Yamashita to her family. And there were also the photographs and collected artwork of Tomi Yamashita that I’ve kept over the years since her passing in 1972. Very gradually, as our parents all passed, my cousins also collected letters, diaries, documents, papers, sermons, articles, art, photographs, films, audio recordings, phonographs, and assorted memorabilia. This has been a family project, the bulk of collecting accomplished by Ann Tamaki Dion, Kix Edwin Kitow, Bob Yamashita, and Ken Yamashita. Martha and Eugene Uyeki also contributed their time by scanning materials and making their home available as a meeting site. Mary Jane Boltz and Jane Tomi Boltz helped to collect, collate, and create descriptions of the materials. Pat Boltz and Mary Marquardt have helped to gather War Relocation Authority files at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Susan Yamashita Bowers transcribed Susumu and Kiyo Yamashita’s diaries, and Hisaji Sakai transcribed many of the handwritten letters. Very significantly, Lucy Asako Boltz has worked most consistently with the growing archive, retrieving, digitizing, and organizing materials, and creating the archival website that holds this memory.

  Through yearly grants from the Senate Committee on Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I have been able to travel to various national archival sites, and I am grateful for the support of librarians and archivists at many institutions: Wendy Chmielewski at Swarthmore College Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace Archives; Jaeyeon Chung at the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary Llbrary; Donald Davis and Barbara Montabana at the American Friends Service Committee Archives in Philadelphia; Christopher Densmore at Swarthmore College American Friends Library; Reverend James Hopkins at the Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland; Diane Peterson at the Haverford College McGill Library Quaker Archives Special Collections; Laura Russo at Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, housing the Howard Thurman Papers; and the Stanford University Hoover Institute. At my own institution at UCSC, I am especially grateful to bibliographer Frank Gravier and to Elizabeth Remak-Honnef, director of Special Collections at McHenry Library, where the Yamashita Family Archive will be finally housed and supported.

  UCSC Senate COR faculty grants also made possible funding for research assistants who digitized and scanned materials for the website archive. I am grateful to Jonah Stuart-Brundage and Sebastian Honnef for their work, and especially thankful to Michael Jin, who created the initial website platform to house this archive. Thanks also to Alan Christy, Jay Olsen, Tosh Tanaka, and Angela Thalls for their guidance and technical support.

  Very significantly, a United States Artist Ford Foundation Fellowship supported a year’s sabbatical leave supplemented by funding from the Humanities Division at UCSC to complete the writing of this manuscript. I am very grateful for this generosity.

  Today, the Yamashita Archive seems to me to be immense and varied, a large cache of hoarded stuff, now somewhat organized and curated. Several years ago, when my cousins discovered that my next project would be to tackle this growing archive, they arranged a reunion, ostensibly to visit Asako, but probably to check out what I would be writing. It’s true; you should never trust a fiction writer. I had to admit that I wouldn’t really be writing a family history, wouldn’t be airing the laundry so to speak, that I had something more particular and narrow in mind. Maybe they were disappointed or relieved; in any case, someone else will have to write the great generational epic, not me. Ann Dion has written a family story of the Yamashita and Tamaki families as they arrived from Gifu, Tokyo, and Okinawa, and Ken Yamashita has meticulously researched the histories of Yamashita and Kitano families as well. If I need to check on particulars, they are my go-to family historians, and I’m indebted to their knowledge and support.

  In the meantime, for this particular project, I’ve had special collaborations from very special friends. Early on, I met Alma Gloeckler and Olive Thurman Wong, whose memories are embedded in this work. And there are those scholar friends who unwittingly accepted dinner invitations, shared their stories and scholarship, or read early versions of these so-called letters as I stumbled around questions aroused, sometimes by only a short passage or fading photograph, in the immensity of this archive. I humbly thank: Bettina Aptheker, Anjali Arondekar, James Clifford, Gildas Hamel, Ruth Hsu, Lelia Casey Krache, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Boreth Ly, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, and Mitsuye Yamada for your patience, your scrutiny and care. I apologize for my assumptions; the correspondent muses I’ve here created are my fictions to play with the gaps and speculations of this history and are entirely my fault.

  As always, thanks to the excellent staff at Coffee House Press, in particular to Caroline Casey and Chris Fischbach, with special memories of Allan Kornblum. And grateful thanks to my literary support system at UCSC, faculty friends and staff, but especially to Micah Perks and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

  In the interim between drafts and continuing edits of this project, cousin Ted Ono and cousin-in-law Eugene Uyeki have died. And so, too, my mother Asako, almost reaching this year the age of ninety-nine. For a short year, we enjoyed in our immediate home a household of four generations. I will miss this joyful commotion. My kids have said that the best times at home are when I’m writing, because the house is clean and the food is great. Which is to say that cleaning and cooking are how I get through the writing. But families with writers know the drill, that we writers spend a large space of time ignoring them or blabbing and waxing on about things of which they have no interest. And so, continuing thanks to my family—Jon and Angie, and Jane Tomi and Pat in L.A., who are always there to fill in for me on my trips away, and to the immediate Santa Cruz household: Ronaldo, Jane Tei, and Javon.

  —Karen Tei Yamashita, August 2015

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adachi, Jeff (director), You Don’t Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story, documentary film, 2006.

  Austin, Allan W., From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II, University of Illinois, 2007.

  Benedict, Ruth, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, Meridian Books, 1967.

  Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University, 1988.

  Cone, Margaret, and Richard F. Gombrich (translators), The Perfect Generosity of Prince Vessantara: A Buddhist Epic, Oxford, 1977.

  D’Emilio, John, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, University of Chicago Press, 2003.

  DuBois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.

  Dutt, Romesh C. (translator), The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Long J. M. Dent & Sons, EP Dutton & Co, New York, 1910.

  Gandhi, Mohandas K., Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, (translated from Gujarati by Mahadev Desai), Public Affairs Press, 1948.

  Hamel, Gildas, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine: First Three Centuries C.E., University of California Press, 1990.

  Homer, Iliad (translated by Robert Fagles), Penguin Books, 1990.

  Kitano, Harry, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, Prentice Hall, 1969.

  Kroeber, Karl, and Clifton Kroeber (editors), Ishi in Three Centuries, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003.

  Kroeber, Theodora, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, University of California Press, 1961.

  Okihiro, Gary Y., Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II, University of Washington, 1999.

  Radhakrishnan, S., The Bhagavad Gita, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1948.

  Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1993.

  Seow, C. L., Ecclesiastes: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible, Doubleday.

  Smith, Lillian, Strange Fruit, Reyanl & Hitchcock Publishers, New York, 1944 (24th printing, Cornwall Press, New York).

  ———, Killers of the Dr
eam, W. W. Norton & Company, 1949 (new edition, 1961).

  Takemoto, Paul Howard, Nisei Memories, Scott & Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies, 2006.

  Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, Charles Kikuchi, and James Sakoda, The Salvage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, University of California Press, 1952.

  Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, and Richard Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement during World War II, University of California Press, 1946.

  Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited, Beacon Press, 1976 (first published 1949).

  ———, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, Friends United Press, Indiana, 1975.

  ———, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979.

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