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