Fifteen years ago, Nancy Matsumoto, an award-winning journalist and author, took on a new project. Although she has written extensively on the World War II incarceration of West Coast Japanese, this was more personal.
Translating a book of Japanese tanka poetry that her grandparents published in 1960 ミシガン湖畔 (Mishigan Kohan, or By the Shore of Lake Michigan) began as an after-hours side project with her friend, teacher, artist, and translator Kyoko Miyabe. Over nearly 15 years, it grew in scope to include translators Mariko Aratani (The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan) and Amy Heinrich, former director of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. Eri F. Yasuhara, Japanese literature professor and former dean at California State University, San Bernardino contributed an introductory essay to the book.
At Awa Amatsu
looking across the open sea—
beyond the horizon
it reaches our grandchildren and children
in America– Ryokuyō Matsumoto
“My initial impulse to translate the poems grew out of my deep love for my grandmother Tomiko. I wanted to get to know her better, as a writer, a poet, and as a mother during a fraught time for the U.S., for Japan, and for her family,” says Nancy. “It was a project I thought I could share with my family. But as the project went on, Kyoko and I began to recognize the poems’ wider historic and literary significance.”
For Nancy this was a journey of self and family discovery. Her grandparents’ poems chronicle the period between their 1942 incarceration at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming prison camp during World War II, through their years of resettlement in Chicago after the war.
Her family did not discuss their imprisonment except to occasionally recall old friends or amusing incidents from that period. Her own mother told her that the collection of tanka poems was a vanity publication her parents had undertaken on their own.
Yet within the volume’s seventeen years’ worth of poems, Nancy, Kyoko and Mariko found a treasure trove of material: firsthand accounts of these years filled with her grandparents’ thoughts and emotions about their abrupt shift from hardworking immigrants to imprisoned enemy aliens and the long resettlement period in Chicago that followed.
This is Nancy’s and the Matsumotos’ family story.
Behind Barbed Wire at Heart Mountain
In the midst
of swirling dust,
I live temporarily in this barren land
during wartime– Tomiko Matsumoto
Before their imprisonment, Tomiko and Ryukuyō were both interested in literature and poetry. Yet like many first-generation immigrants to America they had little opportunity for leisure pursuits.
In By the Shore of Lake Michigan, Ryokuyō notes that during his first Pacific crossing in 1917, his only company was the volume of tanka poetry written by Takuboku Ishikawa, which he brought with him in his single wicker suitcase.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s February 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast were put in prison camps in the most barren lands across the West and Midwest.
Tomiko and Ryokuyō’s destination was Heart Mountain, Wyoming, alongside ten thousand other prisoners. Accompanying them were Tomiko’s mother, Iku Takahashi, and the couples’ three children, Toshio (Tosh), Teruko (Terry), and Sumie (Sumi), Nancy’s mother.
In the midst of war,
along with our countrymen,
there might come a day
when we live the camp—
how poignant that moment will be– Ryokuyō Matsumoto
Toshio would leave within a year to enroll at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and later join the army as an officer stationed in Alaska. Teruko took jobs in the prison camp canteen and on the outside, in a canning and ketchup-making factory; the poorly paid prisoners were deployed to offset wartime labor shortages.
Though speaking Japanese was officially banned at public meetings and functions in the ten prison camps, and camp publications were subject to censorship, cultural clubs such as the tanka group were encouraged by the War Relocation Authority as harmless means of self-expression that would ease prisoners’ stress and anxiety. Writing tanka and haiku, along with celebrating cultural holidays, gardening, or engaging in baseball, sumo, and basketball made prisoners’ lives a bit more bearable.
Yet despite these few freedoms they were allowed, nothing would change the fact that prisoners were under constant surveillance by the machine gun-wielding guards who manned prison watch towers.
As we are handed
our plate of food
one by one, and sit down at the table –
tears come flowing through– Tomiko Matsumoto
At Heart Mountain, Ryokuyō and Tomiko found themselves in the company of a number of prominent literary figures and teachers, who would help shape their emergence as tanka poets. They joined a tanka group led by Shasui Takayanagi, while others gathered around Shisei Tsuneishi and Kentsuku Kurowaka, who would later be considered the founder of the Issei senryū community.
Tanka, also known as waka, is the oldest form of poetry in Japan. Its 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllable format is two lines longer than haiku, and can be found in the Manyōshū, Japan’s oldest poetry collection, completed in the eighth century. While haiku often focuses on nature, tanka embraces a wide range of themes, from personal emotions to political struggles.
Editors of the Heart Mountain Bungei requested writers avoid mention of current affairs, likely to stay clear of censors and retain their freedom to write. Yet in the five-line structure of their tanka Tomiko and Ryokuyō managed to capture their feelings of loss, love of their mother country, and—on a brief foray into the nearby town of Cody—fear of being identified as an enemy Japanese.
Tomiko wrote of how farming brought her joy and a reconnection with the land, and the odd spectacle of Japanese living outside the prison camp attending a Heart Mountain kabuki performance. Their poems were read aloud in the prison camp tanka kai, and published in the literary publication Heart Mountain Bungei.
A few of Tomiko and Ryokuyō’s other tanka pushed back a bit against the no “current affairs” policy requested by the editors. They wrote about the anguish of parents who lost their sons in the war while fighting for America, listening to the radio for news from Japan, or how they felt living between two worlds: Japan, their homeland, and America, their adopted home and birth country of their children.
As the Japanese American literature scholar Satae Shinoda explains, poetry was an important and vital escape from the harsh reality of the life of men and women who still had strong ties and loyalties to their homeland, yet wanted to succeed in becoming American. The ability to express these complex feelings heightened the value of poetry for writers such as Tomiko and Ryokuyō.
In the afterword of the original publication, Tomiko wrote, “Poetry has been part of my life; it has been a source of strength and solace… Even in the midst of our daily lives, I have continued to write poems…”
Ryokuyō, meanwhile, wrote that he made it his “goal to make one poem a day,” adding, “I wrote as if I was keeping a diary… a form of recollection.”
Tomiko expressed her love and need for poetry writing in the following tanka:
A glimpse at a poetry salon
became my destiny;
now, even on days of blizzard,
I won’t miss
a poetry meeting
The Matsumoto’s Resettlement in Chicago and By the Shore of Lake Michigan
After the war the government encouraged prisoners to move to the heartland of America rather than returning to the West Coast, where anti-Japanese racism still ran high. Out of the 60,000 internees who left camp by war’s end, almost 20,000 settled in Chicago.
Chased
by waves of war’s devastation
we wander from place to place,
arriving at last in Chicago
seeking safe haven– Tomiko Matsumoto
After their release from Heart Mountain in 1945, Nancy’s grandparents joined the 20,000 who would be directed by the government to relocate inland and to Chicago. They resettled in the Lake Park area in the Southside of Chicago, near Hyde Park and the University of Chicago.
There, they faced the challenge of forging new lives with only a few possessions and little money. The government provided each family twenty-five dollars and a one-way ticket out of the location of their camp.
They found that their hew home in the bustling city of Chicago was a far cry from their previous homes in Southern California, Seattle, and the barren high desert of Wyoming.
The size
of the house we bought
sinks in;
it seems too precious,
more than I deserve– Tomiko Matsumoto
After several years, they were able to leave their cramped basement apartment for a much larger home in the Oakland-Kenwood neighborhood, one of the few areas that they, along with African American and Jewish residents, were allowed into. All were victims of redlining, kept out of all-White neighborhoods. Within their allowed neighborhoods, they navigated the still-polarized racial politics of this more “tolerant” city.
During their years in Chicago from 1945 to 1959, Tomiko and Ryokuyō continued to write tanka.
In Chicago, Ryokuyō would find work at the publisher, stationer, and book wholesaler, McClurg’s. Tomiko worked in a sewing factory. They also continued to write tanka. Tomiko joined the Uta to Kanshō poetry society and Ryokuyō became a member of the Araragi society. This would not only keep them writing but also allowed them to be part of a larger, international tanka network.
As I stand for a brief while
by Michigan’s
lakeshore
ripples cross it
in the early autumn breeze– Ryokuyō Matsumoto
It was here on the shore of Lake Michigan, in 1955, that Tomiko received the news that one of her tanka was selected for the utakai-hajime, the Japanese Emperor’s annual New Year’s reading ceremony. That year the theme was izumi (spring or fountain).
The Chicago Sun Times featured the news, with the headline, “Lonely Heart Wins Jap Prize for Poetry.”
This was the poem that was chosen:
Moonlight
filtering through the trees
onto a clear, flowing spring – such serene beauty
cannot be found in this country
But Tomiko was not the only one who wrote award-winning tanka poetry. One of Ryokuyō’s poems was chosen as an “excellent tanka” and published by Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo in 1973, controversial for its enshrinement of a number of war criminals. Yet the tanka that he wrote is not about politics, instead reflecting upon his long-gone mother and his own mortality:
Mornings, evenings
lifted up over the years,
offerings to the photo of my deceased mother –
I grow old in America
Mishigan Kohan came about when Tomiko’s poetry teacher in Japan, world renowned tanka poet and Uta to Kanshō poetry society founder Iwao Okayama, suggested that she contribute a volume in the society’s long running series of tanka anthologies.
I pray to
this year’s
first sunrise of peace,
which dyes the waves scarlet
by the shore of Lake Michigan– Ryokuyō Matsumoto
Tomiko’s and Ryokuyō’s Pink Study
In 1960, following a six-month sojourn in Japan—their first return in 35 years—Tomiko and Ryokuyō returned to Southern California, settling in Rosemead.
In her preface to By the Shore of Lake Michigan Nancy writes, “My grandparents shared a small corner study in their home in Rosemead, California, where they wrote tanka poetry. The room was painted a cheerful pink, with two wooden desks—one for each of them—placed before its two windows. I didn’t realize it at the time, it was a kind of shrine to poetry.”
It was lined with trophies, and the long, narrow tanzaku wooden plaques that Ryokuyō made, some bearing poems by the Matsumotos, others by their friends, teachers, or famous poets they admired.
© 2025 Tai Bickhard
