[While I did teach a couple online courses during my Spring semester sabbatical, I didn’t have my usual slate of classes by any means. So in lieu of my usual Semester Reflections series, this week I’ll share a handful of texts I read over the last few months, leading up to a weekend post on what’s next!]
On three of my many takeaways from Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung’s vital anthology.
I picked up the anthology as part of the research for my podcast’s second season, Diamond in the Rough: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America, Season Two. There turned out not to be a ton of pieces that specifically focused on baseball, either for Japanese Americans overall or in the incarceration camps in particular. But there were two that did, and both of them were by an incredibly talented author whom I discovered through this book: Toshio Mori. Mori’s pre-war short story “Little Yokohama” (published in a collection after the war) tells the story of a fictional Japanese American community in California through the lens of a baseball game; and his chapter “She is My Mother, and I Am the Son Who Volunteered,” from his novella The Brothers Murata, presents the perspective of a Japanese American young man who volunteers for the Army from an incarceration camp through an extended metaphor of a baseball game. I ended up talking about both stories in my podcast’s Eighth Inning, and would recommend them and Mori to all AmericanStudiers.
Mori was the individual writer who most stood out to me (partly for podcast reasons, but also because of his talent to be sure) among the huge number of impressive voices present in this anthology. On a more collective note, I was likewise surprised and impressed to learn through Abe and Cheung’s editors’ notes about the literary magazine Tessaku (“Iron Fence”), which was created in early 1944 by three writers (Joji Nozawa, Kazuo Kawai, and Masao Yamashiro) who were incarcerated at the Tule Lake Segregation Center and was published through July 1945 (a total of nine issues). As Abe and Cheung put it, “the magazine eschews the imitation of Japanese literature, the praise of natural beauty, and expressions of nostalgia for Japan prevalent in other Issei journals, instead nurturing an authentic camp literature that confronts the reality of their lives in a segregation center without beautiful flowers.” Indeed it does, and yet I’m not sure I’ve encountered a more beautiful—if equally and vitally bracing—literary project than this one.
While I had not heard of Mori nor Tessaku before picking up this anthology, the third takeaway I want to share in this post was an example of how situating authors and texts in this kind of collection powerfully reframed them for me. The anthology ends with a couple pages from We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (2021), the graphic novel from authors Frank Abe and Tamiko Mimura and illustrators Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki which tells the interconnected stories of three incarcerated Japanese Americans who in various ways resisted. I had previously read and loved this graphic novel not only after it first came out, but reading this excerpt at the end of the anthology helped me both to see its work as part of a long tradition and legacy and to understand how 21st century authors and artists are connecting that legacy to layers of our own society and moment. The final words of the excerpt and the graphic novel are “It happened to us. We refuse to let it happen again,” and hard-hitting as they had always been for me, they were even more moving and crucial at the end of this must-read anthology.
Next sabbatical read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What have you read recently?
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