Misa Saijo: By Clementine Light of Dawn

In July 1932, on the occasion of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, the Kashu Mainichi ran an article welcoming the Japanese athletes, written by an unlikely writer who called herself an "obasan farmer living in southern California." The author was a remarkable Issei whose progressive, feminist perspective graced the pages of both the Kashu Mainichi and the Rafu Shimpo newspapers for nearly forty years. Asano "Misa" Saijo (1891-1966) was also an educator and a dedicated haiku poet who lived amongst the orange, avocado, and walnut groves of the San Gabriel Valley. A writer perceives life as more than an assemblage of dates and events; a tangle of everyday chores required of being a wife and mother, all on a rural chicken farm. Asano "Misa" Saijo roused herself from her bed at dawn to write, to make poetry of the life she was given.

Asano Miyata was born in 1891 in Tokushima, to a family that ran a successful business fermented and preparing foods made from soybeans, and she shared with her children memories of the giant wooden vats of shoyu being tended by men with long poles to stir the dark brew. She graduated from Tokushima Kojo before beginning her career as a schoolteacher in a small fishing village. It was a long ways from where she lived, requiring her to walk several miles to and from the village, early evidence of a sturdy endurance for traveling by foot, and in solitude along mountain trails, which also had a later effect on her Nisei children's attitudes towards nature. Remarkably, she then accepted an opportunity to teach schoolchildren of Japanese businessmen in far-off Hong Kong, and remained in this position for several years before returning to Japan.

As a result of the establishment of universal education in late Meiji- and Taisho-era Japan, most Japanese were almost entirely literate — far more so than the average white American of their period. The only career acceptable for Japanese women was in education, however, women were forbidden to enroll at Japanese national universities. So in many cases, those who wished to continue their own studies found places at Christian schools or with the help of Christian missionaries, which ultimately facilitated a familiarity with and embrace of Christianity. Asano Miyata was one of the intellectual women of her time whose studies led her to marry an overseas Japanese. Because of their extensive schooling, these women scholars often remained single into their early to mid-20s, which was considered too old for a respectable bride in Japan. Thus, if they wished to marry, their only remaining option was to agree to unite with Japanese immigrant men.

Satoru Saijo was born in 1878 in Kumamoto prefecture and attended a Christian missionary school as a child where he was taught basic English. Travel was in Satoru's blood, luring him first to San Francisco and further on to excursions throughout the US in a variety of occupations, ranging from houseboy to ship crew. By 1909, he was working as a domestic for the Albert Holden family, who acknowledged Satoru's potential by arranging for enrollment at Kenyon College, with all expenses paid. From Kenyon, Satoru went to Drew Theological seminary in New Jersey, intent on becoming a Christian minister. A small photograph from circa 1920 shows Satoru Saijo standing in front of the Santa Barbara Japanese Congregational Church, where he presided as minister. He was later transferred to Los Angeles and eventually became a junior pastor at Union Church.

As it happened, the senior pastor was a distant relative of a thoroughly modern woman by the name of Asano Miyata, and a marriage arrangement was made. In 1919, Asano arrived as a picture bride in Los Angeles. Satoru was soon placed as pastor of a church and congregation of Japanese farming families in rural Montebello in the San Gabriel Valley. The church had a Japanese school attached to it, a regular necessity for the Nisei children. Asano was immediately installed as its instructor and remained an esteemed pillar of the Japanese American community for years to come. Following the market crash in 1929, which mired the country in economic depression, Satoru gave up the ministry entirely and set about a new vocation as a farmer, despite his total lack of experience. It was during those dire financial and emotional years that Asano adopted the pen name of "Misa" Saijo and began publishing her essays, writing whenever she had a spare moment.

As her son Albert recounts, "I see her desk with neat squared off manuscript paper covered with her fluid hand— scattered pages filled with revisions & additions— her desk was Arts & Crafts style in oak with drawers & built in shelves facing sideways at each end—at her desk writing she had a power of concentration which was hard to break— she was writing about what was happening around her— from her own point of view— she was now over 10 years in America—She was in a country where she understood neither the culture nor the language—she spoke hardly a word of English—she made no effort to learn English— she was in a country whose white majority actively discriminated against her kind…"

What also mattered to Asano Saijo was her haiku. Before the war, local haiku societies were found throughout California. Through poetry, the Issei invented new meanings and expressions to describe their immigrant experiences, reflecting the imagery, feelings and sensibilities of an often bewildering culture so far from home and the familiar. "Tachibana Ginza," was one of numerous haiku journals published pre-war, and was run by a USC graduate, poet and farmer named Tsuneishi. It was said that when he drove groups of local haiku poets to larger meetings in Los Angeles, Tsuneishi had an odd habit of taking his right hand off the wheel to snap his fingers at regular intervals, as though he were marking time to a stanza of poetry, which drove Asano mad with worry. By the late 1930s, "Misa" Saijo was writing more than ever. One night, the Japanese schoolhouse burned down in the middle of the night, likely of arson as relations between the Japan and the United States rapidly deteriorated.

Immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Satoru and Asano took all of their Japanese books, magazines and papers related to their community affairs, threw them into the garbage pit in the back yard and set them on fire. While they were spared arrests by the FBI, soon enough, they were forced into the Pomona Assembly Center and later, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Asano took advantage of the idle time that camp provided to indulge in her writing and as was the fad, to hunt dinosaur gullet stones. Ironically, incarceration brought poets from all parts of the West Coast into Heart Mountain; as a result haiku clubs at all ten concentration camps flourished as the Issei sought blindly to put their experiences and complex emotions into a form. Tragically, none of Asano's writings from this era survived the repeated moves that took place after camp. They finally returned to Los Angeles around 1950 and bought a house near USC. When the McCarren Act was passed in 1952, Asano made her first genuine effort to learn English, and both she and her husband succeeded in attaining U.S. citizenship.

After Satoru passed away, Asano, now in her late sixties, finally made the pilgrimage back home to Tokushima after a thirty-seven year absence, although she recognized almost nothing of the town she had left behind beyond the mountains and rivers. All three children had settled in Northern California following the war, and although she maintained residence in Los Angeles, she also made frequent visits to partake in excursions amongst the redwoods and cedars that covered the rugged northern coastline. Whatever it was that she channeled to build her own literary career, she passed on to her three children: Gompers, Albert, and Hisayo, all of who led fascinating literary and artistic lives.

In her final years, she finally moved to Mill Valley, bringing her life's work with her, and immediately began compiling a book of her essays, short stories, and haiku. Once the task of editing and revising was complete, Asano laid aside her pen and took to bed. She passed in 1966 in the home of her son Albert, at the age of seventy-five.

A limited edition of Asano Saijo's compiled work, Hinatabokko (Basking in the Sun), was published in 2002 by her family. Her son Gompers spent his own final years scouring the archives at UCLA piecing together his mother's essays from newspaper archives along with her own transcriptions and editions. Currently, Hinatabokko is only available in Japanese, and is seeking a translator who can bring Asano's Issei perspective of Los Angeles, of immigrant life and politics, of family, language, and learning to light.

****

My thanks to Greg Robinson, whose research and column, THE GREAT UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN GREAT in the Nichibei Times provided information on early Issei women's education.

Gompers Saijo: Earthly Manifestation

It is no great surprise that Eric Saijo's home is surrounded by a profusion of California native plants —ceanothus, manzanita, redbud—and the interior is richly punctuated with bronze bells and whimsical sculptures of turtles and owls. For years I've intended to find out more about Eric's father, Nisei artist Gompers Saijo, the eldest in an extraordinary family of artists and intellectuals who shared a profound reverence for the earth and were everything but conventional Americans. On the first day of April, the opportunity to do so appeared, and I stepped across the family's threshold.

Gompers Saijo ((1922-2003)was given his unusual moniker by his Issei father, an immigrant who frequently went to the Port of Oakland to listen to Jack London and other longshoremen preaching the power of union organizing and labor rights on a soap box. Thus, he consciously named his first son after Samuel Gompers, the man who united the working class as the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor.

Gompers knew he was destined to be an artist. His mother, Asano Saijo, in addition to being a renowned haiku poet and Japanese language teacher, was a skilled practitioner of traditional Japanese brush painting and had instilled a unique sense of composition, space, and beauty in her children. While the children were raised humbly on a rural chicken farm in the San Gabriel Valley, there were always the sweet, dusty smells of meadows and creeks and the seasonal perfume of orange blossoms, interspersed by the drunken antics of annual kenjinkai picnics and the delights of Oshogatsu. Gompers was only twenty years old and in his second year of art studies at Pasadena City College when the U.S. entered into World War II. With the passage of E.O. 9066, the Saijo family was forced into the Pomona fairgrounds and in the summer of 1942, to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

At the assembly center, Gompers encountered painter Benji Okubo (brother to Mine Okubo) who he described as "this guy who swaggers in with a sort of angry glare in his eyes…and is dressed like some buccaneer character off of a hollywood (sic) set…whoever, the initial image of benji (sic) has me totally blown away." Gompers also recalled meeting artist Hideo Date in the barracks, where he and Benji were working on an 8' x 20' painting to be used as a theatrical backdrop.

"The whole imagery was composed of flowing oriental lines and shapes painted in soft tonalities of mystically suggestive coloration. Never before or since have I seen the likes of this… " Okubo and Date, who were active with the Art Students League in Pasadena, founded by Morgan Rusel and S. Macdonald Wright, soon established the Art Students League Heart Mountain, a rigorous workshop where they expounded on spirituality, symbolism, and intellectualism through a myriad range of European, Mayan, Persian and Chinese arts and motifs that were carefully scrutinized and appreciated.

Okubo led his Issei and Nisei students through life drawing classes, utilizing a roll of tan-colored butcher paper, while lecturing on visual rhythmic patterns and abstract painting techniques using "prismatic colors almost out of the tube". The workshop completely engrossed Gompers, who even slept in the art studio at times. He also found work in the camp poster shop, silkscreening and mimeograph printing announcements for activities such as the haiku and shodo clubs that his mother finally had the leisure time to indulge in.

In 1943, when the "Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry" form was distributed, Gomper's younger brother Albert joined the Army, but Gompers didn't. Confronted with the "loyalty questionnaire", Gompers refused to complete it, and considered himself a conscientious objector, claiming the right to refuse military service on the grounds of freedom of his beliefs. According to his son, Eric, his status as a resister was a point of distinction; he wanted his children to know that "that he never wanted to be a follower; that he was always looking for the unique path to take." After Albert left for basic training, Mother and Father Saijo and daughter Hisayo went to Cleveland, leaving Gompers alone at Heart Mountain. After witnessing the slumping, devastating effect that news of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had on the camp's remaining residents, Gompers was ready to move on with his life. He moved briefly to Brooklyn, where he worked a string of odd jobs, including hand-painting chinaware.

Before long, the family reunited in Los Angeles, where Gomper began working as a sign painter and Albert attended classes at USC. When Albert joined a theatrical club known as Nisei Experimental Group, which included young writers such as Hiroshi Kashiwagi and Mary Oyama Wittmer (a passionate supporter, but not a member of the troupe), Gompers also got involved. As it turns out, he was also interested in NEG supporter Leonor De Queiroz, a young woman of half Japanese, half Mexican descent, who had always wistfully said she always wanted to marry an artist. She got her wish, and in 1951, Leonor and Gompers were married at the Los Angeles City Hall. Soon after, the couple spent a year in Mexico, hanging out with an avant-garde expatriate scene. Leonor had two aunts living in Mexico City who helped them find an apartment and make connections with both traditional and fine artists such as the Japanese Mexican muralist and landscape artist Luis Nishizawa.

In 1963, Gompers, Leonor, and their two children, Rani and Eric, moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Albert had moved up first, and in the late 50s, he bought a house in Mill Valley tucked into a dense forest of bay laurels, oaks, and redwoods at the foot of Mt. Tamalpais. However, while he was in the Army, he had contracted tuberculosis, so Albert was sent away to recover from a new bout. On his invitation, Gompers and family moved into Albert's house and never moved out. After Albert was released, he managed to buy the house right next door, so the two brothers lived side-by-side on a narrow, windy road for the next fourteen years. Eric recalls,"We could walk out of the house and at the end of the road just start out on trails into the woods. I remember going on numerous hikes with Dad, Uncle Albert or just us kids. Starting from kindergarten, we walked to school down a canyon with a creek running through it. "

To support his family, Gompers adapted by becoming a jack of all trades. "He had a basement workshop where he made paper-mache sculptures or wood sculptures, " says Eric, "and spent a phenomenal amount of time on each piece." This menagerie, inspired by folk art and patterns, were sold through Gump's San Francisco. Additionally, he did freelance work for Now Designs kitchen products, remodeled homes and decks, and did spot illustration on contract. In the 60s and early 70s, Gomper's illustrative acumen hit its stride, and he began utilizing his bold sense of line to print highly coveted, psychedelic posters for the Haight Ashbury scene, which led to an unexpected partnership with one independent publisher.

Zen Benefit Poster for the Zen Mountain Center, featuring Gary Snyder: Poetry with Mahalilia Mandalagraphy at the Fillmore Theater, by Gompers Saijo, circa1960. "Gompers had this low slow voice; he always wore a kerchief wrapped around his forehead. He had this lovely color and dark hair- most people probably assumed he was Indian, " reminisced Malcolm Whyte, publisher of Troubador Press.

When Troubador moved into a space at 126 Folsom Street, Whyte hired Gompers to design and paint the press' lute logo in a supergraphics style popular in the 70s on the building's rollup door, and remembers watching Gompers using a chalked snapline to mark out the sunburst design with absolute precision.

"Gompers' first book with us was a big, oversized 12" x 12" occult coloring book that came out in 1971, marketed for the emerging hippie audience, people into astrology and all that stuff". "Noone would let you publish that with that name these days, but we sold 12-13,000 copies".

Over the next few years, Gompers produced six coloring books with Troubador on birds, wildflowers, wildlife and jungles with great success; the sealife coloring book alone sold 190,000 copies.

North American Birdlife Coloring Book by Gompers Saijo, Troubador Press, 1972. The coloring books demonstrated his gradual shift of interests into nature. In 1972, Albert published The Backpacker , a semi-spiritual how-to guide on traversing lightly while hiking in nature, with black and white illustrations by Gompers. As his connection to the flora and fauna of California deepened, Gompers began a series of spring and desert wildflowers, which were first published as posters by the California Native Plant Society in 1979 and 1981, selling more than 120,000 posters. An early member of the Marin Chapter of CNPS,

Gompers also designed their logo featuring the Tiburon Mariposa Lily, and created the poster for the chapter’s first plant sale.

Both brothers moved to the remote fogbelt of California's Northern Lost Coast in the 70s, where Gompers rented a cabin to work on a series of landscapes in oils and pastels. There, he produced astoundingly beautiful drawings that reached for that essence of wild and open abandonment of the region's grass prairies and staggering cliffs. After a decade, Albert left California to move to Volcano, Hawai'i, and eventually Gompers also returned to the Bay Area, where his final works of art had a clear Asian influence. He died in Point Reyes Station in 2003.

He didn't keep a diary, but what remains are nearly a thousand sketchbooks, most of which are in Eric's basement in Oakland. These sketchbooks show a total love and desire to understand the western landscape, and what is equally amazing is the determination with which he approached the same scenes again and again with his pencil or pastels. Gompers didn't exhibit much at all, so the memories of this remarkable Nisei's contributions on earth are as ephemeral as the bloom of an indigenous shooting star. He once said, “To love flowers is to make some deep connections between the animal and plant kingdoms, the knowledge of complete inter-dependence, a symbiosis of all earthly manifestations that can only be sustained by love.”

My sincere and humble thanks to Eric Saijo for his patience and allowing me access to family archives and interviews.

Albert Saijo: Karmic Heart

When the phone rang unexpectedly early one morning in 2009, I couldn't believe it, but it was Albert Saijo on the line, calling me from the rainforests of Hawai'i. It seemed serendipitious. His book, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, not only lay on the kitchen table, but I had engaged in conversation that very morning about his poems, which were insistent and dense, full of remembrance yet muscular in its intellectual content and tone. In an attempt to emulate Saijo's block handwritten style, Outspeaks was typeset in ALL CAPS, which I interpreted as a prophet incanting at a feverish pitch, upon a burning volcano. In life, his voice was unexpectedly clear, soft and luminous with humor, and his spirit was still as green as a bay tree.

Albert Fairchild Saijo (1926-2011) was the author of numerous books and as equally skilled as a designer, woodworker, as he was a philosopher and poet. It appeared that life and its great, fathomless menagerie of art, language, and spirituality had always had its pull on him. His childhood was marked by the aspirations of his parents, and include a lovely pre-dawn vision of his mother scribbling poems and newspaper columns at her desk. He has also written about a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, inscribed "Satoru Saijo November 1908, Chicago, Illinois in his strong hand with flourishes," a treasured momento from his father's early education in the US. At the turn of the century, Saijo's father worked as a domestic for the Albert Fairchild Holden family in Cleveland, who later sponsored him as a university student. In remembrance, Satoru's second-born son bears the family namesake: Albert Fairchild Saijo.

Editor Albert Saijo inspects a copy of Echoes, the Heart Mountain high school paper with co-editors Alice Tanouye and Hisako Takehara. Photographer: Hosokawa, Bill Heart Mountain, Wyoming. 6/43

At eighteen, Albert Saijo fought in Italy with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, shortly after graduating from high school in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. In camp, a teenaged Saijo first learned of Rinzai monk Nyogen Senzaki, who held lectures and sittings in a barrack located in Block 2. Back in LA around 1950, Senzaki held zazen sessions twice a week in his tiny apartment on the 6th floor of the aging Miyako Hotel on the corner of E. 1st and San Pedro Street, which Saijo regularly attended and recalled, "Senzaki was seated in a Roman camp chair in front of the altar—before him was a folding card table & on it was the text of his lecture for that nite...his dentures creaked as he spoke." Although he was also in graduate school studying international politics at USC, Saijo dropped out, just as he began to suffocate from the city smog.

Allured by a blossoming literary renaissance, the young poet moved to San Francisco in the mid-fifties, where he found a job at the Chinatown YMCA. There, he met David Hunter, a pioneer in what later became known as the Human Potential Movement, which attracted others interested in alternative thinking. "When I first read about what his class was going to be in the office at the YMCA, it struck me that as very similar to things I had been active in LA. Mostly it was kind of zen-ish, it kind of appealed to me, and that’s why I went to the class and that’s where I met my initial friends mostly poets and writers and people in the arts and so forth. In the 50s, zen was just beginning to become an interesting subject. In fact, not many people had heard of zen." Also on the scene was a charismatic Englishman named Alan Watts, who taught Zen buddhism at the newly formed Academy of Asian Studies and had amassed a following through a regular program on KPFA, Berkeley's free radio station.

American writers Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969) (left), Albert Saijo (right, with glasses), and Lew Welch (1926 - 1971) sit around a low table as they collaborate on a poem, which is typed by Gloria Schoffel in the apartment (304 W. 14th St.) of her and her soon-to-be husband, photographer McDarrah, New York, New York, December 10, 1959. The poem was entitled 'This is a Poem by Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, and Jack Kerouac' (later published as 'Trip Trap'), and was based on the trio's journey from San Francisco to New York in Welch's car. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

Saijo soon bonded with Beat writers who were deeply influenced by East Asian art and poetry, sharing what he had learned from Nyogen Senzaki about zazen and his experiences in American concentration camps. The group of artists eventually formed the East-West House, where the residents expounded all hours on religion, philosophy, sex, and poetry. Saijo joined East-West House and later moved to a similar community home known as Hyphen House, located on the northwest corner of Post and Buchanan of San Francisco's Japantown, which was on the brink of a major city-led eradication in the name of "post-war redevelopment," forcing its JA residents to flee the neighborhood for the second time in a few decades.

"[Hyphen-House] was in a neighborhood half Black and half Japanese, with mostly Japanese shops and restaurants," Saijo wrote in a May 1973 recollection. "Then there was Jimbo's Bop City around the corner that opened after hours, and nearby Sullivan's Liquor Store that delivered both day and night...The area south of Post was being demolished. There were empty houses waiting with human detritus, eerie to explore. And there were cleared off lots already taken by lush grasses, and weeds like brome, dandelion, common mallow, and filaree and a few left-over stately trees, and drifts of trash...Hyphen-House was in a large wooden building painted battleship gray with a poolhall, shops, and restaurants at street level and five or six apartments in a row above. It had a second-story level overlooking Buchanan Street. We had the middle apartment. It was two storied with a commodious feel, especially downstairs where the ceiling was at least ten feet high."

In 1959, he took a remarkable cross-country trip to visit Allen Ginsberg at his apartment on the lower Eastside of New York with Lew Welch and Jack Kerouac, penning humorous haiku along the way that were later published in a volume titled Trip Trap: Haiku On The Road (simultaneously referring to Gary Snyder's book, Riprap and Kerouac's On the Road. ) Kerouac later memorialized their trip in his novel, Big Sur recasting Saijo as George Baso, "the little Japanese Zen master hepcat sitting crosslegged in the back of Dave's [Lew's] jeepster."

ALBERT

Lonely grain elevators

on Saturday

—Abandoned toys

By the time he had returned from the jeep trip, Saijo decided to abandon city life entirely, and set up residency in Marin County, with what he deemed "the Gary Snyder crowd." Snyder had a cabin in a part of Mill Valley known as Homestead Valley, and was neighbors with one of the original light show artists and sound engineer named Sandy Jacobs, who was married to Sumie Hasegawa, daughter of an influential Japanese painter, printmaker, and educator, Saburo Hasegawa. Although Saburo Hasegawa was a recent immigrant to the US, he was a serious practitioner of tea ceremony, calligraphy, and Zen buddhism. His arrival in San Francisco in the 50s was exquisitely timed with the growing movement of American buddhist studies, and he was quickly offered a position of lecturer at Alan Watt's Academy of Asian Studies, and then at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Soon artists from San Francisco were trickling over the bridge into Marin, Bolinas, Inverness and Point Reyes Station, founding communes and farms. This also marked the beginning of Saijo's psychedelics period and experiments with peyote, mushrooms, and acid. By the "60s & 70s I WAS YOUR BASIC MARIN COUNTY HIPPIE STONER—LONG HAIR LOOSE CLOTHES FREE LIVING & ON THE FLOOR CUZ CHAIRS SEEMED A FORM OF REPRESSION...I CONSIDER MYSELF A CHILD OF THE 60S—IT WAS WHEN I BECAME A REBORN HUMAN."

When Snyder moved to Kyoto to study Zen, Saijo took over his humble cabin and also cooperated in the maintenance of a "floating zendo" for sitting meditation that Snyder and Whalen had established. He immersed himself in long hiking trips over the Inverness ridge and through the Sierra Nevada mountains and engaged in blissful fasts that lasted up to forty-five days.

By then, Albert's brother Gompers and his sister Hisayo had joined him in Mill Valley. The Saijo siblings were remarkably intertwined, with their lives overlapping and their homes often being exchanged with a certain ease; as one sibling would vacate, the next would move in. (According to Saijo's nephew Eric, Hisayo came up north, and hung around similar circles as Uncle Albert. In the 60s she even worked as Alan Watt's secretary on a houseboat.) He wrote and published The Backpacker, a straightforward guide to treading lightly and experiencing wilderness in 1972, with Gompers as illustrator.

After twenty years in Marin and a broken marriage, Saijo began the quest for a more solitary wilderness. With his new bride Laura, herself a musician and teacher, Saijo settled on California's Lost Coast, where the couple resided peacefully as homesteaders—clearing land, building a primitive shelter by hand, and gardening their own food for nearly twelve years. Albert and Laura moved to the Big Island in the 90s, claiming a small plot in a upland forest beneath Mt. Kilauea to build a second home of Saijo's own design. Six years later, his stream of conscious response to the world, Outspeaks, was published by Bamboo Ridge Press, unleashing Saijo's plaintive cry "UTOPIC MIND CAN'T EXIST IN CIVILIZATION BECAUSE UTOPIC MIND IS FREE OF THEORY & CIVILIZATION ISNOTHING ELSE—THE GOLDEN AGE CAN'T BE DESIGNED FROM OUTSIDE- IT MUST HAPPEN LIKE DAWN OR DARWIN'S FINCHES" or "I WANT TO RHAPSODIZE BUT I WOULD NOT BE PUT INTO ANY LITERARY CATEGORY I AM AN ANIMAL IN A CAGE & I AM BARKING TO BE LET OUT AS IT HAPPENS MY BARK IS RHAPSODIC"

Noone missed the unusual punctuation, or as long-time literary colleague Hisaye Yamamoto Desoto wrote, "At long last, Albert Fairchild Saijo has let loose his poems upon the world. Whether you read them in amazement, read them in an attitude of reverence, or read 'em and weep, they are not to ignore—the collection eschews the lower case entirely." Gary Snyder described it as "All caps and dashes, Albert Saijo's poem is a great life's strong song." In one particularly sensitive review, Juliana Spahr claims "Saijo writes a visual poetry of scribble and revelation in different colored inks. There is an interesting reproduction on the cover and there are tantalizing black and white glimpses of the visual poems throughout the book but the book itself presents word by word translations of these poems. Saijo, I want to argue, is a new Blake and his readers deserve an illustrated edition."

The poetic work (some may argue that they are rants) succinctly described Saijo's vision of human conflict and the environmental disasters we have brought to fore, and his role as an observer. The poetry also meanders on topics such as Saijo's constant battle to justify his use of resources, dependency on technology and the dreamstates he experiences in writing.

2 BOMBS

1

TERRORIST BOMB

HERE IS A BOMB— IT IS MADE OF WORDS— READ IT & IT GOES OFF IN YOUR HEAD & BLOWS YOU AWAY

2

BOOM

WOKE UP THIS MORNING TO FIND I HAD EXPLODED ALL OVER THE WORLD— I WAS BLOWN TO BITS— I WAS SCATTERED OVER THE WORLD IN SMALL PIECES— WHERE I USED TO BE WAS A BIG EMPTY HOLE THAT FAIRLY REEKED OF PEACE PAST UNDERSTANDING— I COULD NO LONGER SAY I EXISTED YET I WASNT EXACTLY DEAD— I HAD BECOME MYRIAD— EACH SMALL PIECE OF ME HAD REGENERATED INTO ANOTHER WHOLE ME & EACH WHOLE ME WAS STUCK TO SOME PART OF THE WORLD LIKE GUM OR SNOT — SO NOW WHEN THE WORLD WIGGLES EVERY LAST BIT OF ME WIGGLES IN UNISON

I count myself as one of the lucky few who were invited to spend a quiet afternoon in Albert and Laura's spare, warm home in Volcano, punctuated by her grand piano and the playful folk-style paintings by Gompers, to chew sandwiches and talk about a life of ecology framed through literature and language. Saijo died in the cottage he and his wife built together in the shadow of Kilauea, still an active volcano, on June 2, 2011. One bright spark in an indelible sea of ink.

"But you're out. You went away and you came back. Now as you head back to civilization, you have a wildness in your heart that wasn't there before. You know you're going outback again." —Albert Saijo, The Backpacker

NATUREMART

HOW VERY PRESUMPTUOUS OF US TO RESIGN UNILATERALLY FROM THE REST OF NATURE & MAKE EARTH SUN STARS ATMOSPHERE NEAR & DEEP SPACE INTO ONE BIG NATURAL RESOURCE CALLING FOR EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN HOMO SAPIENS' BEHALF SOLELY— HOW VERY PRESUMPTUOUS OF US WITH NO PARLEY TO TELL NATURE OK FROM NOW ON WE'RE TREATING YOU LIKE INSTAR HOROLOGII RATHER THAN INSTAR DIVINE ANIMALIS—KEPLER YOU BLEW IT— HOW VERY PRESUMPTUOUS OF US TO PLUNK OUR TRIP DOWN ON REST OF EARTH WITHOUT A NATUREWIDE REFERENDUM— BIBLE SEZ WE GOT DOMINION— BUDDHIST SAY LUCKY YOU BORN HUMAN & NOT A LESSER ANIMAL SO IT'S OK YOU TURN EARTH INTO INDUSTRIAL SITE & MORE ANGKOR WATS WHILE YOU'RE AT IT PLEASE— ANYWAY LIKE HUI NENG SEZ SINCE ALL IS VOID WHERE CAN THE DUST ALIGHT– EVEN THOREAU AT WALDEN WITH HIS I WANT TO MAKE THE EARTH SAY BEANS —RATHER THAN WHAT IT WAS SAYING BEFORE HENRY— WE LOOK AT PANORAMIC SCENERY & SAY IT LOOKS LIKE A PAINTING IN A GALLERY— WHATS OUR TRIP— CONTROL — DOMINATION— CAUGHT IN A TRULY MONSTROUS INSTANCE OF PATHETIC FALLACY— ANTHROPOMORPHIZE EARTH— TURN ALL OF NATURE INTO STOREBOUGHT— SCREW LOOSE IN BRAIN PAN MAKE EARTH LOOK LIKE GOODS ON STORE SHELF

### This article is the third in a series, briefly profiling the Saijo family. Albert was the only one I met in person, and I was blessed to befriend his nephew Eric, who subsequently shared his grandmother and father's stories.

When we first chug-chugged over the Tehachapi mountains on the I-5 and into Los Angeles that wintery day in 2010, I full expected to find the city as I had always seen it portrayed in the movies: white hot, limned with a skyline of frowzy headed palms, with every human in sight slicked down with suntan lotion, neon blue shades, and a coat of cherry red lip gloss. In my mind, LA was flat as a pancake (hoho, says the calves as one struggles, unsuccessfully to climb up Sunset Boulevard on a bike) and impossible to traverse other than by car.

I'll be honest: I took the job at the museum because I had discovered during my most recent visit for an in-person interview, that a train line had just opened across the street on Alameda Street, and it sure looked and sounded, and felt a whole lot like BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) that I was so fond of back home. No way was I gonna do a murderous commute to and from work in LA.

So I took the Metro to and from work gleefully, although with three transfers and four trains twice a day, it was a bit wearying. Plus my husband still had to pick me up at night in the grim parking lot in Norwalk at 8:30 or so every night, since I worked ten hour days. Once we moved into our own place in LA, nearly every apartment we investigated began and ended with a Metro train station search: how far, how crummy of a walk, what could I walk to in particular neighborhoods, where were the cheap grocery stores stocked with cilantro and nori, or the quarter laundromats, huffing toxic puffs of perfumed steam? I made a few feeble attempts in subsequent months to rejuvenate my hiking habits of the Bay Area, but was discouraged by the long drives, the slow-roasted ascents with no overhead coverage on exposed desert hills and wondered if I would ever learn to appreciate the city outside of a motorized vehicle.

In early 2011, I took the Metro one morning into Chinatown to join the Big Parade LA, a two-day community walking tour, usually held in May, that starts in downtown and ending at the Hollywood sign.Nearly a thousand stairs and a staggering sixteen miles later, I was calling it quits and looking back in awe at what these people are doing. The Big Parade is run by a map and chaos freak by the name of Dan Koeppel (and a runner, and cyclist, and incidentally a really great writer. In fact, he's penned a best-selling book on the history of the banana, I kid you not.) The Big Parade covers roughly 40 miles of urban hiking through the streets of Los Angeles, meandering through secret public walkways, hidden staircases, freeway medians, and spiraling ramps. Not only is it meant to destroy the idea that nobody walks in L.A.; the Big Parade slows us to the pace of pedestrians moving at the rate our bodies can take us, one step at a time. It is just as much an exercise for the eyes as it is for the exercise, and along the route, we met "sixth-generation shopkeepers, local historians homeowners, artists, and even a few Trail Angels who provided us with free cookies, water, and lemonade" (from Modern Hiker's blog post, 2011.)

The Big Parade opened me to a whole bevy of folks who burned with the desire to get to know the city intimately, by exploring the mosaics and community gardens, the groves of wild elderberry bushes best for harvesting flowers for wine, to explore the many iterations and layers of the L.A. River, the remnants of the extinct streetcar lines, and to climb a zillion stairways while we're at it. I quickly understood as we approached the Silverlake and Echo Park portion of the walk that Dan is a zealot for simply ascending and descending, and the quickest route from point A to Z was not what he intended to lead us on. We did strange switchbacks on curvy roads, trudged up a set of stairs, trickled down another flight, crossed Sunset, and did it again. There were stairs tucked into shaded groves of purple-hued jacarandas and ivy, and stairs that corkscrewed delightfully around freeway pillars. Some stairs were mere hiccups in sets of five or six, while others were epic, to the tune of some classic Led Zepplin ditty.

All along the way, baffled folks poked out of their houses and stood on their lawns (at times clutching their pets) and asked what the hell was going on. "Its the Big Parade! Anyone can join!" we would crow.

Here are a few other intriguing websites about LA urban walks worth lacing up your hiking boots up for, which I myself have yet to explore: http://www.secretstairs-la.com/welcome.html http://www.walkinginla.com/ http://www.losangeleswalks.org/ http://greatlawalk.blogspot.com/

I've also joined LA Common's neighborhood walks two years in a row during their annual festival: Found LA.

Dia de los Muertos

This is a Sufi tale that has been reincarnated in many tongues, with variations in its size and color and ornamentation, but in essence it remains the same. It is a story about a man a mere servant, who is walking through the market one day, say it is in Jerusalem, when he feels an odd, needling presence watching him from a far. He turns and finds that he sees Death staring directly at him. Even more frightening is the way in which the gaze of Death bores straight through him.

Frenzied, he rushes in a panic from the market to his master. He beseeches, "Please please, my lord send me to Egypt on the very next boat. Today, as soon as it is humanly possible!" His master is a kind man and recognizing the faithfulness of this servant to him over many years, he grants him his wish.

So the man is quickly transported from Jerusalem to Egypt, and the next morning, he is happily walking down the ship's gangplank, relieved. No sooner that he has made his way from the wharf, the morning crowd seems to melt away and as he looks before him- there he sees Death once again, approaching with his steady gaze locked upon the face of the man. Resigned, he steps forward to meet Death directly.

"I concede, Death. You have found me. But I must ask, why were you staring at me so terribly yesterday?" and Death answered "I was looking at you because I had been instructed to collect your soul today in Egypt, and I was astonished and wondered why we were in Israel instead."

(artwork by the awesome John Dyer Baizley, who is also the bassist/vocalist for the crushingly beautiful band, Baroness, who had a severe near-encounter with Death this past summer.)

I moved to Los Angeles several years ago (it will be a full three come February) after twenty-three years of growing-up, girly yet gritty and sorta granola, in Oakland. The day I drove away from my apartment laden down with a million pounds of books and letterpress equipment, it was of course raining. Despite the faint rainbow that broke out and warbled in the mist over the 580, tears streamed down my face for the first forty-five minutes as I drove away. I stepped out of the car in Norwalk (in front of Grandma Margaret's house, which is where we would live for the first month) and took a deep, post-sobbing breath of desert air. The exhale has been slowly on release ever since.

There was so much to learn, and not in a vacation sort of way, but the heft and curve of responsibilities and consequences to be made in the wake of a decision. I chose to come here. My husband agreed. (although his circumstances were a bit more tenuous. He had been coming and going to and from Norwalk for nearly six months to care for Grandma Margaret, who at age 92, had fallen recently and broken a hip. Since she lived alone in her dry crumbly, low-slung home it was necessary for someone to care for her in this state, and Sam volunteered to do the job starting in July 2009, amidst sweltering heat waves that knocked out power in thousands of homes and businesses.) I remember those first weeks here, and the way we gingerly felt the hard, sun-baked ground around us to navigate which street to follow, which neighborhood we were in. Where were we? It was exhilirating to know that at least he was as lost as I was.

The job soon started which gave me a reason and place to rush to with purpose on a clock, and new friends to point to a map and ask, "Where do you live?" "Where is Diamond Bar?" "Is there a bus that goes to Westwood?"" "Is Westwood a city or a neighborhood?" Is Santa Monica part of LA?" "Where does LA end?" "Why is 'The Valley' San Fernando Valley, not San Gabriel Valley? Where IS San Gabriel Valley?"On a side note, I had been to both valleys in the past, coincidentally for weddings on both occasions, but had no context to where I had slept or the name of the restaurant until I stumbled upon them more recently and the visual memory eased into place as my familiarity with the landscape became personal. But really, Los Angeles remained snap shots scattered in a drawer of separate encounters and pale grids on a map for over a year.

I dared not take the car out for a drive. First, I am not a stellar driver to begin with, riding the clutch a bit too much, second guessing the parallel parking space, terrified to navigate on freeways at 70 miles an hour. I don't have a Garmin and I don't have smartphone. When I go somewhere new, I must look up the address for directions, which I usually write out on a piece of paper, and if I veer somehow off the route, god help me- especially if I can't figure out which freeway I'm supposed to be on. So I depended on my husband to take me places, or I rode the Metro, or I walked. Or I didn't go anywhere at all.

So how could I have possibly learned to know about LA? Has it already been three years, the time one of my best friends back in Berkeley had sternly allotted to me for the sojourn southward, before I was to return home to Oakland (she capped this statement with the gift of a tiny ceramic frog and a bell which is a Japanese pun on the word "kaeru= frog=to return").

Happily, serendipitiously, I had landed in the right neighborhood. Right for me. Right for my shivery transportation needs by providing a train station, right for my need for a working class, for people of color, for guavas and plumerias and songbirds in cages, and as it turned out, right for my desire for a great library, a quirky bookstore and bookseller who would become a close friend, a political printmaking studio, a neighborhood garden and fierce teacher, a neighborhood newspaper, a Friday and Sunday farmer's market, a doctor and hospital I can walk to, historic bridges to cross, the Los Angeles River a thin sliver of silvery sky in its concrete bed.

At night, we hear at intervals the wail of a trumpet or accordion wheeze, the dissonance of three competing ice cream trucks blaring their tin tunes, a cloud of parrot calls overhead, and the thrum of police helicopters. Something turned a corner in me about a year ago, and I think it was this neighborhood that did it. Now I'm exploring Los Angeles by car, reading everything I can get my hands on, and knocking on doors to ask people about the Los Angeles that takes you by surprise, the LA that has the potential to transform.