Celebrating AANHPI Month: Mitsuye Yamada, AM’53: Poet, Essayist, and Human Rights Activist
Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AANHPI) observed in May in the United States and Canada, celebrates the rich and diverse history, cultural heritage, and contributions that generations of AANHPIs have made to American history, society, and culture. During the month of May, we are honoring the diversity of our AANPHI community by highlighting and commemorating the important contributions of remarkable scholars who have helped enrich the educational excellence and reputation of the University of Chicago.
Fun fact: AANHPI month celebrates people whose origins and ancestry include countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to name but a few.
Mitsuye Yamada, AM’53: Poet, Essayist, and Human Rights Activist
In 1942, when she was 19 years old, Mitsuye Yamada, her mother, and her three siblings were taken from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. They were among the approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, whom the federal government incarcerated out of fears about national security in the wake of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Yamada’s father, who had worked as a translator for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, was arrested on the day of the attack and held in a prisoner of war camp on suspicion of spying for Japan, despite no evidence against him being found. He was later transferred to a different internment camp, apart from his family.
After being released from the camp, where she was held for a year and a half, Yamada earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s degree in English Literature and Research from the University of Chicago, which she received in 1953. She went on to be a poet whose verse reflects her experience of internment and racism. Her work includes the poetry collections Camp Notes and Other Poems (published in 1976) and Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988).
Yamada grew up surrounded by poets, including her father and other Japanese immigrants, who would gather around her family’s dining room table while she served them sushi and tea her mother had prepared. “I was totally enthralled by the process of writing poems,” she told UChicago Magazine, which published an article with her recollections in 2017.
“They would take an hour to talk about what had happened since the last meeting and then go into their corners and write poetry. Then they would come back as a group and recite their poems to each other. It was a magical moment for me to sit there and listen to the music of the poetry that they were reciting aloud.”
She’d begun writing in high school—"Most of my heroines were blue-eyed blondes. I was totally unaware of my ethnic identity at that time,” she recalls—and continued by “sticking bits of paper into a shoebox.” Though she’d begun publishing poetry in the late 1960s while teaching writing at Cypress Junior College in Southern California, Yamada regarded her writing as a hobby.
She finally began seeing herself as a poet in her 50s, when she met the late poet Alta Gerrey, who convinced Yamadato let her publish Camp Notes. In poetry readings after the collection was published, Yamada met feminist activists, which kindled her own interest in women’s empowerment.
Her work includes two essays published in This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings from Women of Color (1981), and she co-authored the book 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003). She was featured, along with the poet Nellie Wong, in the public television documentary "Mitsuye and Nellie: Two Asian-American Woman Poets."
In addition to writing, Yamada became involved with the human rights organization Amnesty International USA, eventually serving on the organization’s Board of Directors for six years. She combined her roles as poet, educator, and activist in her book Teaching Human Rights Awareness Through Poetry (1999).
In 2019, at age 96, Yamada published Full Circle: New and Selected Poems, which was celebrated with a poetry reading at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Yamada turned 100 years old this past September. In celebration of her centennial birthday, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center presented an online tribute and poetry reading.
Want to learn more? Click on the following links for additional information:
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The Poetry of Mitsuye Yamada (Tableau: The magazine of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago)
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Japanese Internment Camps (history.com)
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Mitsuye May Yamada (Densho Digital Repository)
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