Category Archives: Tessaku

Project to translate and republish the literary magazines of Tule Lake

Tule Lake is the final frontier for the study of Japanese American incarceration. After 80 years, the Segregation Center at Tule Lake remains the least-understood and most-avoided subject in polite Japanese American society. And the fiction and poetry written by the Issei and Kibei Nisei during this tumultuous period and published in the camp’s literary magazines has languished unread by those who can’t read Japanese. A new project launched last month at the University of California at Berkeley promises to change that. Continue reading Project to translate and republish the literary magazines of Tule Lake

Coming May 2024: The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Floyd Cheung and I are pleased to announce that our new anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, will be published as a Penguin Classic on May 14, 2024. You can now pre-order the book from your neighborhood independent bookstore, or from one of these online sellers.
Continue reading Coming May 2024: The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Searching for families of these Issei writers

This is an appeal for anyone with leads on the families of Joji Nozawa, Kazuo Kawai, Hyakuissei Okamoto, Yoshio Abe, Iwao Kawakami, and other Issei writers whose work we plan to feature in a forthcoming anthology of camp literature [UPDATE: We’ve now heard from relatives of Nozawa and Kawakami].

blue cover of Tessaku magazine
A cover for Tessaku Magazine, in the collection of the Japanese American National Museum. Photo by Frank Abe.

Prof. Floyd Cheung and I have nearly completed the manuscript for The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration to be published by Penguin Classics in spring or fall 2024. The collection includes around 60 selections from Before Camp, The Camps, and After Camp. Continue reading Searching for families of these Issei writers

First preview of our forthcoming anthology of camp literature

For three years, Floyd Cheung of Smith College and I have been gathering pieces and building the outline for a new anthology of camp literature commissioned by the publisher of Penguin Classics. On Sunday I presented a preview of our work on translations of Issei writing in camp in Japanese, part of what the late Yuji Ichioka called “our buried past.” This video screen is cued to the start of that discussion:

Continue reading First preview of our forthcoming anthology of camp literature