Thou Knowest Thy Bliss

Last sunset of 2007, as seen from our lovely apartment on the hill in East Oakland.

Lily Jane Jigmeister!

Here is a Christmas portrait of our niece, Ms. Lily Jane Jigmeister. She's growing into her specs.

BR and I gifted her a primary color themed xylopiano, which against better judgement (heeding parents' pleas not to get babies noisemakers) we thought was a good way to get her Julliard scholarship resume revved up.

New Year Nengajo

Two color linoblock of Poppa Rat and Baby Rat eating New Year's morning ozoni, printed onto silver coated paper. Looks pretty cool when I get the registration to hit, but its gonna take some time for that ink to dry....

Mission Peak

Tramping upwards from the Ohlone College parkinglot in Fremont.


Ruddy windchapped faces.

Somehow Anthony managed to eat sandwiches through his wind protection devices.

Kimi, Anthony, Oliver and I braved arctic winds and climbed to the top of Mission Peak, one of the most underrated summits in the East Bay. The determined hikers who make it to the top can see Mt. Hamiilton to the south, the Santa Cruz Mountain range to the west, Mt. Tamalpais to the north, and Mt. Diablo and the Sierra Nevadas to the northeast. Sights along the route included lots of turkey vultures and hawks, feral cows and cow pies the two boys delighted in dropping heavy rocks into (it is their favorite thing to do in the world apparently).

Kimi and I high tailed it to a guided tour of the current Asian American art show, "One Way Or Another", up at the Berkeley Art Museum straight from the hike, so if you can imagine us, cow mud splattered and sweaty amidst the elegant donors and museum patrons, you can just guess what a warm reception we got, especially since we stuck around for the wine and elegant snacks reception. Classy.

Do as you are told

Make haste to the Pacific Center for the Book's Calendar Show, cuz I JUST finished printing the last two months (pant pant) after various snafus in production... but I've got the evil German binding machine in my studio now (Thanks to David Watanabe of Salmon Graphics) and am punching and wire binding away like a madman.

The party is on Friday, November 30th, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, from 6-9. More letterpress calendars than you can shake a stick at!



Wait, we aren't finished installing yet! Look somewhere else!





Mulled cider and cookies and platen presses.

The Rat Race is On!

I have about a month to finish printing Shortwave Production (Garret Izumi) and Wasabi Press (Patricia Wakida)'s 2008 Year of the Rat Calendar.

All months have been linocarved and printing on the letterpresses has begun....Garret is doing half of them in Portland, and I'm doing the other half here in Oakland.

Cheese out!

Jack O'Lanterns of Berkeley

I went trick or treating with my little friends, Anthony (pirate with skeleton hands) and Jeremy (spider guy? he wore a shirt with cobwebs screenprinted on it), through the haunted streets of Berkeley on All Hallow's Eve. Kids won't stand still for photos, but gutted pumpkins sure will.

NaNoWriMo

I'm a gonna do it this year! I already started a day late (started November 2nd) and have only 1,084 words clocked in. I'm not panicking. I'm writing. No working on the Shig book for this though, since it is a novel writing deal breaker, but the good news is that I have indeed started writing parts of the Shig book too. I'm turning in a short biography piece for the 50th Anniversary issue of Beatitude on Monday, and it better look good since the audience is 100% Shig cronies. Eek.

But back to the novel-

May Sky: Violet de Cristoforo (1917-2007)

VIOLET KAZUE DE CRISTOFORO She and her family were detained at camps in California and Arkansas. Her experiences there inspired her to write poems, for which she recently was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts.


I am sad to report that dear Violet de Cristoforo has died, at the wonderful ripe age of 90. Her death comes merely two weeks after she had returned from Washington D.C., where she was nationally recognized for her influence and artistic contributions to haiku, in particular the work she has written, translated and anthologized from the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. Prominent obituaries have appeared in the SF Chronicle, the Hokubei Mainichi, and the LA TImes (which I have copied and reposted in its entirety below). I was also surprised to receive an email last week from Valley Public Radio in Fresno asking for people to interview who knew Violet when she was a Fresnan.

As it turns out, on a very recent trip home to Fresno (where I was attending another funeral, a service for my uncle, John M. Wakida) Violet's name was mentioned several times by my extended family members and others. Clearly, Violet was to be remembered. My aunt Julie Nakagawa said that Violet used to visit Fresno monthly to see friends, and recalls her as "strong- she had lived a hard life." But her poetry will be with us.

My thanks to Bessie Chin, J.K. Yamamoto, and Stan Yogi for all writing to tell me about Violet's passing.

****************************************************
Violet de Cristoforo, 90; California haiku poet survived WWII internment camps

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a California poet and scholar who wrote, collected and translated haiku that compressed into a few lines the heartaches and realities of the detention camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died Wednesday at her home in Salinas. She was 90.

De Cristoforo died two weeks after returning from Washington, D.C., where she was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts with a National Heritage Fellowship award for achievement in traditional and folk arts. She died of complications from a stroke, said her daughter, Kimi de Cristoforo of Santa Rosa.

A native of Hawaii who grew up in Fresno, De Cristoforo was one of about 110,000 Japanese Americans who were sent to 10 camps in seven states after the bombing of Pearl Harbor cast suspicion on people of Japanese heritage.

De Cristoforo, who ran a Japanese-language bookstore in Fresno with her husband, had two young children and was expecting a third. She still was weak from an operation to remove a tumor when an executive order was imposed on Feb.19, 1942, authorizing the military to remove any citizen from a broad swath of the West Coast who might be a threat to national security.

By April of 1942, she and her family were living in 110-degree heat in a tar-paper shack at the Fresno Assembly Center, formerly a horse track.

She gave birth to her third child over an orange crate and two weeks later was on a dilapidated train with a sick baby to another camp in Jerome, Ark.

At Jerome, her husband, Shigeru Matsuda, and his parents decided that because they were forced to leave behind everything of value in Fresno they would return to Japan, where they still held some property. When it came time to fill out a loyalty questionnaire, De Cristoforo followed her husband's advice. "My husband had told me, 'Don't answer this. . . . Don't trust the government. Don't trust anybody. Just say you're seeking repatriation with my family.' And that is the only thing that I wrote. I did not answer yes or no to the questionnaire," she said in "And Justice For All," a 1999 oral history of Japanese-American internees by John Tateishi.

From Jerome they were sent to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, a high-security camp built on old lava beds in Northern California, near the Oregon border, where Japanese internees who had refused to sign the loyalty oath were imprisoned.

Her husband and her brother were arrested after they joined a committee to investigate food shortages at the camp. Her brother was thrown into the stockade, and her husband was sent to a camp in Santa Fe, N.M. De Cristoforo remained at Tule Lake for the duration of the war with her three young children, a sick mother-in-law and a father-in-law who went mad with grief after his wife's death from cancer.

De Cristoforo, who had belonged to a haiku club in Fresno, wrote poems on whatever scraps of paper she could find.

"Throughout, haiku helped hold me together," she told the Salinas Californian in 1993. "It was an escape, and it let me express my feelings."

Sometimes what she expressed was simply that life went on:

Myriad insects

in the evening

my children are growing

Other times her thoughts drifted miles away to her husband, whose letters were rendered almost indecipherable by the censors' scissors:

Misty moon

as it was

on my wedding night

She also was inspired by Castle Rock Mountain, a landmark east of the camp where the Modoc Indians had made their last stand. But any thoughts of rebellion she may have had were contained, repressed, transformed:

Foolishly -- simply existing

summer days

Castle Rock is there

De Cristoforo left Tule Lake with her children in 1946. Her husband had been repatriated to Japan first, and when she arrived in March of that year she learned that he had remarried.

Seeking reunion with her mother, she took a train to Hiroshima but found only the devastation from the atomic bomb dropped eight months earlier. When she finally found her mother, after walking two days through the mountains, the older woman "looked like a monster" with severe burns and barely any hair.

De Cristoforo returned to the U.S. in 1956 after marrying Wilfred H. de Cristoforo, an Army officer who had been stationed in Japan after the war. They moved to Monterey, where he attended the Army Language School, and she went to work for the McGraw-Hill educational publishing company.

Wilfred died in 1998. De Cristoforo's survivors include two daughters, a son and two grandchildren.

Wilfred "is the one who really encouraged my mother to publish her work," daughter Kimi said in an interview Monday. Her books include "Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944" (1987) and "May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow" (1997), an anthology of free-form haiku, called kaiko, written in the camps.

According to her daughter, De Cristoforo spoke little of her wartime experiences except in her poems. She was to read one of them at the ceremony in Washington, when she was one of 12 artists honored as a National Heritage Fellow. "She was so excited about it," her daughter said. "This trip to Washington, D.C., was the culmination for her."

Already in poor health, De Cristoforo was unable to recite the poem she had chosen.

It was read instead by Norman Mineta, the former congressman and George W. Bush administration official who as a boy was incarcerated at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.

My heart perceives nothing

day to day

summer at its peak in highland

A notation suggests that the poem was written when prisoners in the Tule Lake stockade were on a hunger strike. Her brother, who had been falsely accused of taking part in a food riot, was locked up for 10 months.

Another cruel injustice came afterward, when De Cristoforo struggled to make a living for herself and her children in Japan. She found a place to live outside of Hiroshima and worked as an interpreter, but the economy was in ruins and Japanese Americans often were not warmly received.

When De Cristoforo's oldest child, Ken, was 12, she begged friends in the U.S. to find him a home. Two years later, she sent her second child, Reiko, too. Bounced from one place to another, the children felt abandoned, and De Cristoforo, as a noncitizen, was powerless to help them. De Cristoforo spoke frankly in her oral history of their rejection of her but also tried to accentuate the positive: how she kept track of their lives, how well they turned out without her.

"I've learned to realize there are so many things in life beyond your control," she told the Salinas Californian some years ago. "Rather than being bitter or angry over it, I began to think it was a mission in my life. . . . God gave me the gift to go and come back."

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Me n' Mas in Merced

The UC Merced Reading Series has invite meself and my central valley ja senpai, David Mas Masumoto, to conduct a literary conversation of sorts in late October. Here are the deets:

Thursday, October 25, 2007
Merced Multicultural Arts Center
645 West Main Street,
Downtown Merced, CA
7:00-9:00 p.m.

Utilizing the format of a "literary interview" David Mas Masumoto (sansei) and I (yonsei) will talk about growing Japanese American in the Central Valley, our literary beginnings and inspiration, and stuff about books. Books! Mas has a new book out by Heyday's Great Valley Books imprint (of course) entitled "Heirlooms" which he will be signing; I'll talk briefly about my Shig project.

************************************
David Mas Masumoto is an organic peach and grape farmer and the author of Letters to the Valley, A Harvest of Memories, published by Heyday Books, 2004. His previous books include Four Seasons in Five Senses, Things Worth Savoring (2003, W.W. Norton), Harvest Son, Planting Roots in American Soil (1998, W.W. Norton) and Epitaph For A Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1995, HarperCollins).

A third generation farmer, Masumoto grows certified organic peaches, nectarines, grapes and raisins. He works with his family on their organic 80 acre farm south of Fresno, California and also helps care for his parents who still live on the family farm.

Masumoto is currently a columnist for The Fresno Bee and has written for USA Today and The Los Angeles Times. His other books include Silent Strength (1984), Home Bound (1989) and Country Voices, The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987). He received the James Clavell Japanese American National Literacy Award in 1986.

Outskirts of the Moment

I was recently commissioned to do the sweetest, loveliest job ever. That was to hand bind a copy of a woman's poetry (her milestone birthday was approaching, and her partner of many years wanted to have a "real book" (cloth hardcover with sewn signatures) to give her as her gift). She had discovered me via the vast world of the interweb, after learning that I was teaching an upcoming Introduction to Book Arts class via the Associated Students of UC Berkeley art studio.

So inbetween the hectic work of special donor development for The Crucible, lecturing at UC Merced, and doing research for the California Council for the Humanities, I was given reprieve by retreating into the quiet concentration of doing Julie's book of poetry justice. Her partner Toodie chose the book cloth and endpapers, did the designwork and even chose the color of the ink I'd use on the front cover- a real custom job. I ended up with three finished books rather than one, which was a bonus.

I forgot to take photographs of the final product (gun to head, duh) but here are a few shots of the work in progress. Happy Birthday, Julie. It was a real pleasure to put this together in your honor.

Lots of little lino blocks for sale!


Buddyray manning the wasabi press table (along with Kathy Aoki's prints) , very manly style.


Our beloved former executive directors, Anne Smith and Kathy Barr.


Colleen is a freaking superstar. Only girls drove the steamrollers here. Katherine Case is the real hero of the day, but somehow she evaded my camera (not only did she organize the whole shebang, she also drove the steamroller inbetween leaping tall buildings).


Mary Laird's goddess block


The genius carver Maia de Raat inking up her insane mermaid block.


Here's Kathy Aoki! We finally met after passing like ships in the night for many years. She has amazingly produced a blue eyed blond little girl.


Kathy's teddybear construction worker block.


Kind volunteers inking up my very own Akuma block.


The inky block is placed on premarked areas of the street, right in the path of the steamroller...


Then they lay down the damp paper onto of the blocks, and add some heavy blankets, which Colleen runs over.


Voila! Roadworks steamroller print.


Michael Carabetta (creative director at Chronicle Books) did this amazing color print.


But as always, Rik Olson steals the show. This is his fourth year of carving a 3 x 3 lino for Roadworks, and as expected, the results were mindboggling.

Shbolts.

Mysterious seasick green photo.

Two more cruddy days of carving! I'm in a sad, permanent Quasimoto hunch, hands palsyed, and scraps of battleship linoleum keep sneaking around, appearing in unexpected places like in the kitchen sink, one's underwear drawer, and on the ice cream bonbons. The good news is- I got a job (part-time) AND Roadworks is Saturday so lord, the end is in sight.