2013 Year of the Snake

I've decided to mix it up. The calendar, I mean.

Following wasabipress tradition, I have been meditating on the upcoming zodiac animal for the year 2013. As it happens, as faithful followers of this extremely feeble and poorly neglected blog know, I am quite fond of snakes. However, this year I did something wierd and experimental and not like other years before at all.

It happened thusly: While visiting Oakland back in the spring, I heard from my good friend Jimmy, who is an outstanding designer in his own right, that he had a whole crapton of amazing Fabriano cotton rag paper that he was GIVING away to someone who might make good use of it. So I nabbed it and drove those babies all the way back to LA.

Now this isn't your ordinary, flick of the wrist, inkjet your fourteenth draft of your poetry chapbook kind of paper. This is top of the line Italian, fer goodness sakes, which meant that each sheet is a golden slab of semolina-like, cream-to-the-top of the jug, fall-into-a-lush-embrace-from-three-stories-above kind of paper. I didn't want to fuck it up.

As it happens, I was miraculously offered my third artist residency in September, this time in Red Wing, Minnesota and lo and behold, the campus included a resident letterpress studio, replete with metal type, a guillotine, and two flatbed cylinder presses, housed in the old granary. Swoon.

So when I packed up my usual frocks and notebooks and various gone for a month accoutrements, I included my carving tools, some tracing and carbon papers, water-based inks, a brayer, and a heavy box of linoleum blocks to the heap. And the paper. Which were still in their original box and the parent sheets were 39.5 x 28 inches, 285 gsm. What to do?

In the end I hand-tore twenty three giant sheets four times each, for a total of ninety-four pages to print linoblocks- ganged up four at a time. THAT took only two days, but worked beautifully. (insert sound of weary applause)

I was even armed with this beautiful tool bag for my carving implements, sewn by my amazing husband, Sam.

While I was technically in Redwing to work on the biography, I reasoned that one can't write ALL the live long day, and thus, to keep me moving and balanced, I spent my mornings drawing, first in pencils then transferring the images onto the blocks using carbon paper, then finishing the image with good ol' Sharpie pens. Then, I carved like a demon.

I got to know the Challenge proof press quite well after a few days of cranking out prints.

What I have produced this year is a set of twelve two-color linoleum prints and a single page calendar,

which can be procured either as a full set...

...or as individual prints.

The full set even comes with these adorable chipboard stands that my astonishingly talented husband designed.

So if you're still searching for your 2013 time measurement device or are celebrating your snake zodiac year, or have a proclivity for block prints, cats, sparrows, or diving women....this is the time to strike.

Whaddya know? My etsy store, wasabipress is right here.

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.

The Ultimate Good: George Izumi's Grace Pastries

“Weddings are the most superstitious of holidays. And the cake? Well it’s like any marriage, right? I won’t say the cake is human, but the cake is something special.” —Mary, a former Grace Pastries customer

Talk to anyone who grew up in the Crenshaw district of southwestern Los Angeles and they'll tell you how they remember the sweet aroma that once spilled from the doors of Grace Pastries. At Grace Pastries, the cake was king; a symbolic reward that came as a result of the Japanese American communities' hard-earned post-war successes. For every wedding, every graduation, every grand opening or anniversary, and especially when a child's birthday was celebrated, there was a specialty cake from Grace; a bed of pastel roses, scalloped buttercream borders, a riot of plastic palm trees or circus clowns. These were edible trophies for a community finally rising from the harsh realities of World War II, and for a time, it almost seemed that the bakery couldn't be able to keep up with all of the demands.

The original store was a tiny retail space, only 50 feet deep, but the walls were neatly papered and the glass cases nearly burst with a dizzying array of buttery confections. The staff were always neatly coiffed and dressed in starched uniforms, ready to greet customers from the moment doors opened. As the customer base swelled expotentially, Izumi expanded to a larger location six blocks away on Jefferson and Crenshaw, right where the J Yellow Car line ended. Within a decade, Grace Pastries had the highest name recognition of any bakery in Los Angeles, and eventually boasted fourteen outlets throughout the greater Los Angeles county. Among his devoted customers was Marian Manaka, who remembers fondly; "My sister and I lived together right there on Jefferson Boulevard and used to take our two kids in a stroller past all the shops on our way to Grace, where we always got a treat. The dobash cake and oh, the teacakes!" These rapturous recollections are especially common amongst the Nisei and young Sansei, who describe a trip to Grace as "the ultimate good," for a generation craving sweet memories that lingered.



The founder, George Izumi, is a Nisei— born in Hollywood in 1921 and raised on farms where his father Riyozo raised commercial flowers and vegetables, as the majority of Issei at that time did. He was one of eight kids, which taught him to be fiercely independent and some of his earliest chores was learning to harnass the horse to the wagon and spread manure on the fields. It was a hard time in America, and daily meals for a family of ten, let alone a powdered donut, were meager or non-existent. "In Santa Monica there used to be a city dump where someone would throw all their walnut shells out, and us kids, we'd pick through the shells and eat what we could find. Dad would go fishing and bring back whole sacks of bonita and mackarel, which we'd cook with shoyu and sato, turning it all into gelatin and pour over hot rice with cooked beet leaves. I'm also pretty sure my mom would pickle all of the fish guts,." Growing up in the 30s also meant picking up a sack of day olds from Wonder Bread that turned nice and soft in the steamer and eaten with oleo or lard if the kids were that lucky.

Izumi was eighteen when war broke out. The family was sent to Manzanar, where he first worked as a carpenter, but really what he wanted to learn was how to cook. He got a job in Mess Hall #16, which required getting up at three a.m. to fire up the oil stoves. But learning from the Issei men in the kitchen provided to be slippery:"the Issei just said, a piece of that, a scoop of that- it still tasted good- but they sure couldn't tell you how to make it." In the end, he claims he didn't learn much, since all he did was cut out biscuits. And he recalls that the mutton stew sure used to stink.

When the Nisei draft was re-enacted, George enlisted from camp, fully prepared to train for combat. Once the Army learned of his cooking experience, they sent him to the Cooks and Baker's School at Ft. Meade, Maryland instead. "Learning to bake? Its not that hard. Its all written out step by step, you got it made. Just like the Army- you follow directions." At the end of the war, he found work in Chicago flipping English muffins on a grill, and gaining more bread, cake, and cupcake experience before he earned enough to return to California in 1946.

George and Grace Izumi (nee Kato) began courting in 1948 and were married in 1949 at Nishi Hongwanji Temple in Little Tokyo. The young couple founded Grace Pastry Shoppe on March 13, 1950, six months after the wedding, on a $3,500 loan from Grace's parents. They acquired second hand equipment and cleaned and painted the place, pulling 18 hour workdays. On opening day, they took in $25 and the next day $30, and called it lucky if they made $100 a week. They even made wedding cake deliveries in their 1942 Pontiac, with Grace in the backseat, holding onto the cake for dear life. She eventually retired from the bakery and dedicated her time to raising their four children, all with auspicious "G" names: Grayson, Glenda, Garret, and Genelle. Grace revealed that even the pets had "G" names, so that they wouldn't feel left out: Gabby the Mynah bird, cats Gussie, Gigi and Ginny, the dog Gibo, and of course the fish were all Guppies.

According to Izumi, what really saved the bakery from mediocrity and turned it into a real enterprise was knowing the value of improving any product. "You have to have determination to make it better, " says Izumi, and for 39 years he perservered and like the rest of the JA community, made things better than before. Meanwhile, his reputation as a master baker grew.



He was the only baker in the National Association of Retail Bakers to have won Gold Cup awards in all fourteen categories, and while most assume that the popular layered Dobash cake is an invention from Hawai'I, it was in fact George Izumi who created it first and brought it to the islands during baking demonstrations. "I made a traditional Dobos torte, which caught on with some Issei ladies, and with their Japanese accent, they asked for that "Doba-shi" because they couldn't pronounce the Hungarian word."

Ultimately, those intimate stories connecting the strawberry pie, the coffee danishes, or a cream pastry with so many personal memories, combined with Izumi's community work has left a lasting impression. Leftover baked goods went to Maryknoll school, he gave to Centenary and Senshin church, donated a cake annually to Nisei Week and dozens of city celebrations and events, and was an active fundraiser for Yellow Brotherhood. He also credits the sweat and tears of his staff, Richard Kojima, general manager; Tak Teramae, office manager; Bob Wright and Emma Englund, cake deorators; Peggy Nishima,; Toggie Nakamoto; all of the Sansei girls who got after-school jobs working behind the counter; Kaz Furuto, the original bookkeeper, who would bring Grace and George dinner so that they could keep pushing into the night.




Grace Pastries was sold in 1989 and George Izumi doesn't complain. Taking into account the whole of his story, an American life filled with contradictions; the life of a baker whose toughness and business acumen brought a touch of salt along with the sweet, you see the essential ingredient to everything he did. "How do I make the tea cakes? Simple cake. You have to know what you're doing, that's all."

Readings of Identity: Asian American Portraits of Encounter

Artist Tam Tran: Writer Kazim Ali

Renowned portrait artist Steve Pyke has said that he is interested in the story each face has to tell, the story that is etched into the landscape of our faces. In 2011 the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC debuted its first Asian American exhibition, Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter (the Gallery was established in 1856). The National Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the American story, through images that captures the spirit of the person. Accordingly, Portraits of Encounter offers visual representations beyond the stereotypes that obscure the reality of being Asian in America.

The exhibition is filled with experimental images of great complexity, challenging the very notion of a portrait and is well worth visiting in my opinion, especially since six of the seven artists are women. I also learned recently that seven writers, David Henry Hwang, Garrett Hongo, Bao Phi, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Marianne Villanueva, Kazim Ali, and Anna Kazumi Stahl were commissioned by the Asian American Literary Review to compose literary responses to the portraits by the seven contemporary artists, Tam Tran, Satomi Shirai, Roger Shimomura, CYJO, Hye Yeon Nam, Hong Chun Zhang, and Shizu Saldamando. A one-day symposium at the Gallery, which I was lucky enough to attend, staged the encounters while aptly demonstrating how portraiture and its interpretations are not just a means of depicting people, but are a way to express and contain complicated themes of cultural interaction and conflict in one's particular mode of expression.

For this column, I focused on two women from the symposium, both of Japanese descent and with remarkably mirrored stories, whose work worry away at the heart of displacement and cultural conflict, of being a 20th century immigrant.

I. The writer: Anna Kazumi Stahl responding to Shizu Saldamando's Cat and Carm

"So many layers go unspoken, unwritten, untold. We are more than meets the eye yet so committed to systems of meaning that work like grids: neat, even, linear…letters on paper. Papel. Kami. A portraitist shows a face. Cara. Kao. But the artwork uses more to reach us than just the composed still-life. Naturaleza muerta. Seibutsu. There is also the background. Fondo. Haikei. This is what catches my eye, directs my gaze…"
—Anna Kazumi Stahl



Cat and Carm
Shizu Saldamando
Gold leaf and oil on wood, 2008
Collection of the artist
© Shizu Saldamando

Born to a Japanese mother and a father of German ancestry at a time when the state of Louisiana did not recognize interracial marriages, Stahl is particularly attuned to the peculiar displacements of history—including the post-Internment migration of many Japanese Americans, her family among them, to the American South and with defying our language and culture's fixities and points of reference. Stahl deftly absorbs three countries at once, and it was evident that the confluence of language drives every sentence. Stahl writes in Spanish, English and Japanese in varigated ways, challenging herself and her audience to interrogate the purity of the words we choose by offering a multiplicity of vocabularies. Her counter-desire to free us from easy interpretation was evident from the very beginning as she stated, "I inflicted a foreign language upon you [the audience] rather than a bilingual piece, oh…because I think we're ready."

The genesis and content of her writing are clearly predicated with themes of transnationalism and multiraciality, reminding us that "navigating multicultural waters doesn't have to be a labyrinth or a mine field or any of these negative metaphors, after all, we do it, and raise our children to do it." Although she didn't communicate with the artist whose work she was responding to, she was instantly struck by the power and beauty of Saldamando's paintings and her mixed racial heritage. "'Cat and Carm' is a portrait, yet the two women of the title are slightly off-center. My gaze goes simultaneously to them and away from them, to the wide expanse of gold-leaf sheen… I begin to sense this piece speaking– via its layered effect and its play of arrangement and displacements- of identity as not fixed but fluid, as a practice rather than a product."

II. The artist: Satomi Shirai's Itch, the basis of a response by poet Garret Hongo


Itch
Satomi Shirai
Digital chromogenic print, 2006
Collection of the artist
© Satomi Shirai

According to Shirai, the genesis of her photograph was her apartment in Queens, New York. Looking around the room, she first decided that she wanted to photography the messiness, a space she had created filled with the objects she'd brought with her from Japan in an attempt to create "home". "My relocation to New York is not about overcoming a culture that is distinct, but about encountering and understanding cultural difference and similarity." One senses from the intense scratching, clawing and twisting in the photograph that she is trying to ease that terrible, persistent itch in her life, that she isn't yet comfortable in her environment, even if in the privacy of her own bedroom. Shirai uses herself as the subject of her photographs, using an old shutter timer which allows her only ten seconds to pose. She also conceals or obscures her face from the camera in order to capture her nuance of the scene without making it too documentary. The results are vivid, often hilarious, and fraught with a sense of nervous tension. "What's inside my apartment and what I want to keep and save is also like a portrait of Asian America."

As David Ward, one of the exhibition curators said, "while scholars like categories and neat analytical frameworks and tidy conclusions, artists are subversives, haring off after their own idiosyncratic vision in a way that suits them and with a language of their own devising- not anyone else, and certainly not scholars. Scholars make rules, artists break them. It is always thus and we should delight in the consequences." So such consequences were invited into the room from the very start. The sheer diversity of literary genres present (which included translators, poets, prose writers, memoirists, playwrights, novelists and short story writers) added to the experimental notion of writers responding to artworks, in which the portraits were minutely fractured through literary techniques, linguistic complications and distortions, and the workings of the imagination. "It was an artistic production of bodily delight," claims Asian American Literary Review's Gerald Maa, "demonstrating how the imagination is pleasing when you use it. We hope that from this experiment of word and image, more discussions will ripple out, valences of thought and conversation."

Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter is on display until October 14, 2012. The symposium was a collaboration of the Asian American Literary Review, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, and the National Portrait Gallery held on April 14, 2012 at the National Portrait Gallery. For more information visit http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/encounter/index.html.

Akira Horiuchi: A Reluctant Hero's Journey to the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony

"To be drafted by the Government, to serve your country in time of war under such conditions that existed at that time, incarceration of all persons from the west coast with the wrong color face by abrogating all constitutional rights, racist discrimination wherever you went…left me quite apprehensive about my future."
—Aki Horiuchi, testimony to the 1981 Los Angeles Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

Of the three hundred and thirty-three Japanese American veterans of World War II that convened in Washington DC last November 2011, Aki Horiuchi felt that he "wasn't like some of the guys who were in before me while the fighting was still going on". In fact, his personal journey to the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony to recognize the more than 30,000 Japanese American World War II veterans was peppered with small doubts and memories of a war that had cost him so much. He was eighteen years old when he was drafted into the Army- a mere two weeks after he had graduated from high school in Utah, and served in occupied Japan as a translator for the Military Intelligence Service. Having served his time in the Army, combat or not, Horiuchi qualified to partake in the prestigious award ceremony held in the nation's capital. For the first time in more than sixty years spent in a quiet, humble life, Horiuchi stepped into the national spotlight, even if just for a moment, wielding this triumph for the veterans with a humility and shoulder shrugging that almost suggests that he had nothing to do with the World War II quandary that has transformed every American of Japanese descent.



"Spry" was the word my father, Donald Wakida, used to describe 84-year-old Aki Horiuchi, upon meeting for the first time in Visalia, California. Wakida and Horiuchi were paired together as a part of the Honor Flight Network, a non-profit based in Virginia, whose mission is 'to transport America's veterans to Washington, D.C. to visit memorials dedicated to honor their service and sacrifices.' Out of the over 300 veterans who attended the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony in DC, 156 were transported by Honor Flight on Southwest Airlines, with approximately 100 volunteer "guardians" who traveled with the veterans as their personal escorts. Torrance-based National Veterans Network (NVN) first approached the Honor Flight program about the possibility of hosting the Nisei veterans very early on; before it was known what day, or even which month the ceremony would be held in. Once Honor Flight accepted the request, NVN appointed an Honor Flight Coordinator for each geographic region to contact veterans and coordinate efforts. According to recent statistics posted on the Honor Flight Network website, the nation is losing WWII veterans at the rate of approximately 900 per day, so in response, Honor Flight Network does whatever it can to fulfill the dreams of WWII veterans to travel to national memorials honoring our military, absolutely free. Even with the offer from Honor Flight, Horiuchi still hesitated.

It took the efforts of brother Edward Horiuchi, who lives in Chicago and is a Korean War vet to convince Aki to fill out the necessary forms and book an actual ticket. My father, who is in fact a Vietnam vet, had never met Aki before, but he took his responsibility dead seriously; emailing travel plans to him repeatedly and enthusiastically.



I was one of many family members who were at the Los Angeles International Airport at 5 a.m., but sure enough we were "cutting it pretty close" according to Nisei earlybird standards. Aki had already been at the airport two hours ahead of us. As his Honor Flight escort, my dad's responsibility was to treat the war heroes as if they are family and ensure that the veteran he is in charge with had a safe and rewarding experience. As it turned out, Aki needed absolutely no escort whatsoever—he turned out to be so splendidly in shape and had planned to meet his brother in DC where they spent the bulk of the trip touring together, which meant my dad was pretty much free to haul around 5 lb bags of almonds and pistachios from the Central Valley and socialize with buddies he'd met at annual Friends and Family of the Nisei Veterans reunions held in Las Vegas. Still, since my father boarded the plane before Aki, he reserved a seat for him right up in front, which meant that Horiuchi was the very first veteran to deplane in Chicago where they changed planes. At every junction, Nisei were met with enthusiastic greeters donning green t-shirts, lining both sides of the gate, a sight our hesitant hero wasn't entirely prepared for. When a gentleman gently stopped Horiuchi and asked him, "442?" Aki admitted that he just flushed through as fast as he could and said no, rushing past the brou-haha. It was no better for him in Baltimore, where a cluster of bearded veterans (Horiuchi guessed they might be Vietnam veterans) awaited to cheer on the Nisei envoy. "I took one look at this and took a breath… Oh boy, here we go."

"You fought World War II on two fronts," Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California reminded the veterans at the ceremony, quoting former President Harry Truman. "You fought not only your enemy; you fought prejudice, and you won." Senator Boxer and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, were primary forces in pushing the Senate version of the bill forward in early 2011, granting the Congressional Gold Medal in the House of Representatives. However, upon first hearing about the ceremony in Washington DC, Horiuchi didn't bother with ideas of participating. "I wasn’t in combat," he insisted. By the time I was in the MIS, the war was over so, I just forgot about it."



Despite his personal misgivings, Horiuchi's contribution to the war effort cannot be underestimated; he was one of more than 5,000 Nisei who were recruited and specially trained to serve as an US military linguist, before, during and after WWII. Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers on August 14, 1945, thereby ending the war and changing the Army's strategic application of much needed Japanese American interpreters. In addition to keeping a lower public profile due to the nature of their intelligence work, the Military Intelligence Service interpreters who were involved in every aspect of the post-WWII occupation and reconstruction of Japan, might be perceived as less essential to the story of the heroic Nisei soldier, simply since they were no longer in the line of fire. However, the MIS were an essential piece of the US occupation of Japan, playing a significant role in facilitating repatriation, war tribunal, and counter intelligence functions, and immediately following surrender, they were among the first Americans to land in Japan. With their linguistic skills and cultural understanding, the MIS served as a vital link between the US General MacArthur's headquarters and the citizens and government of Japan, helping to implement a peaceful transition to a democratic Japan and cementing a postwar alliance between the two countries.

Akira Horiuchi was born and raised in Southern California. In the pre-war years, his father ran a small fruit stand on the Westside of town, and then picked up work as a truck driver hauling vegetables from farmers to the produce market on 9th street. On December 7, 1941, Horiuchi's father went to visit friends who lived and worked on Terminal Island, San Pedro. Unfortunately, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, certain businesses and districts along the West Coast came under high security, including Terminal Island, which was suspect for its fishing industry. Before he knew it, Horiuchi's father had been swept up in a wholesale arrest of all Issei and was imprisoned in a local jail, unable to communicate with his family or come home for four to five days.

In March 1942, the first of 108 civilian exclusion orders was issued by the US Army, resulting in the forced removal of forty-five families off of Bainbridge Island near Seattle. By the end of the March, the Army issued Public Proclamation No. 4 prohibiting the changing of residence for all in Military Area No. 1, effectively ending the "voluntary evacuation", when Japanese families could technically leave the government designated military zones in California, Oregon, and Washington, and try to eke out a life in the mountain states, the Midwest or East Coast. Shaken by his experience with the FBI, Horiuchi's father and mother could not interpret the possible meaning of the evacuation into relocation camps that the government were then promising for Japanese Americans living in Military Zone No. 1. So they packed up the paternal grandmother and the seven children into a single two-door automobile and "voluntarily evacuated" to Utah, accompanied by an uncle and niece living in Sawtelle and a family friend living in the San Fernando Valley.

They lived as sharecroppers for the next three years, moving on an average once a year, in search of more favorable conditions, but without much success. Sharecropping work included day and night irrigation, loading cow manure, harvesting tomatoes, sugar beets, fruit, potatoes, beans and working in the cannery when the harvesting season was over. The first year, the family lived in a two-room house in Layton, Utah with only a wood burning stove and kerosene lamps for cooking, heating and light to study by and no running water or electricity. With no beds to sleep in, they put mattresses on the floor and withstood torturous bedbug infestations. Accustomed to city life in California, the Horiuchi children were wholly unprepared for primitive rural living and in extreme weather conditions. As a result, one of the younger children died in an accident while the rest of the family was working in the fields. Months later, they would also lose their mother. After delivering seven children at home with the assistance of a midwife, she agreed to go to an American hospital, where she developed complications and died giving birth her youngest daughter, who never had a chance to meet her mother.

Just before graduation from Layton High School in 1945, Aki Horiuchi received his draft notification to report for induction as soon as school was over. When he received notification, he was both glad and fearful to get out of the slave labor conditions of sharecropping conditions forced upon him and his family, as a result of EO9066. Despite the forced exile and persisting racism he and his family, he willingly went to basic training with over 11,000 other young men to prepare for serving his country at war. "Just before I finished training in Ft. Hood, Texas, they gave the Buddhahead kids a test to see if we knew any Japanese. There were about a half a dozen Japanese in our company, and for the first time in my life, I met Nisei from Hawaii. Then they picked certain ones who got sent to Ft. Snelling in Minnesota."

Aki was one of them. Before the war, the Horiuchi children lived with their Issei grandmother and parents, which required them to speak Japanese at home all the time. In addition, he regularly attended Dainin Gakuen Japanese Language School, which was about a mile away from his regular public school. His proficiency in the Japanese language qualified him for further military training at a top-secret Army program known as the Military Intelligence Service. In 1941, as war between the US and Japan began to seem inevitable, a few members of the US War Department foresaw the need for qualified Japanese interpreters. Assuming that qualified linguists could easily be identified within the 3,700 Nisei serving in the US military, initial recruiters were dismayed to find that the Nisei were “more American than Japanese” and that only about 10% were potential candidates for the language program.

Horiuchi also chose to continue his training at the MIS school at Fort Snelling outside Minneapolis, since his family had relocated by then to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the proximity allowed him to visit his widowed father every weekend. By 1943, his oldest sister had found work as an Army secretary to MIS commandant, Captain Kai Rasmussen, and once she had settled in she called the rest of the family to come to Minnesota. In early 1946 Horiuchi's class of MIS graduates made their way to Seattle, where they sailed on a small liberty ship for Japan, which was now under supervision of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. According to Horiuchi, half of the ship's passengers were Japanese Americans who were expatriating and repatriating to Japan from the Tule Lake Segregation Camps in northern California. As a result, this forlorn group of about 100 Issei and Nisei were treated as prisoners, and in the supreme tragic twist of fate, the Nisei soldiers, specially trained by the government were forced to stand guard over their own community of Japanese Americans for eight hours at a time over the ten day trip to Japan. They were forbidden to speak a single word to the expatriates.

The ship landed at the Camp Zama Army Base, and that is when the realization that Japan had lost the war hit the men. "If you went to Tokyo, the main train station were bombed out. They hadn’t started fixing anything yet, buses weren’t running on gasoline but ran on a woodburning stove. The streets were crowded with a lot of horses and carts and everybody you met was hungry and had no clothes." The MIS interpreters were quickly integrated into the Tokyo Kanagawa military government, stationed in Yokohama to help in the monumental task of rebuilding Japan. "Early every morning, five days a week, we reported in front of the Kensho building in Yokohama. All of the different outfits in our general area would call our office and say 'We need 10 electricians, carpenters, skilled workers, plumbers for today.' An everyday, about 3-400 guys lined up before us, all wanting work. None of them spoke any English."

Most remarkable the role that the MIS translators played in building trust and empathy between the US and Japan on a human level; in most cases, the Japanese were astonished to encounter bi-lingual Americans of Japanese descent, and had mixed feelings about how to interpret the Nisei. "A lot of guys didn’t like Nisei guys cause they were going out with girls and acted like big shots. You had to be careful about where you went and not to stray too far from where other people were hanging around. On the other hand, you could also just go to someone’s house and borrow a yukata and geta, change out of your Army uniform, and noone would know that we were Americans." The entire MIS company lived in a small three-story building, waited on by maids who cleaned their rooms, and waitresses who served their meals in the downstairs canteen. Horiuchi remembers that they had a barber in the billet and use of a jeep for assignments that were up to a half a mile away. Horiuchi had never been to Japan before, so when he got leave, he got on a train and went to visit his parents' relatives in Fukuoka, where he added poignancy to his experience in Occupied Japan. "Whew, I had a hard time out in the country. In the bathroom you don’t sit, you squat. I took with me all the canned goods I could carry, and stopped at the PX and bought some doughnuts and stuff like that. They were so happy to get food." In total, his time in Japan was less than a year, and he came home in early 1947.

Upon returning to the United States following service in the MIS, he chose to stay in the Midwest after the trauma of their removal from the West Coast, like many Japanese Americans who once claimed California, Oregon, and Washington as their homes. Horiuchi stayed a decade. He graduated from pharmacy school, got married, and started a family— all in Chicago, where life seemed fresher, with fewer memories for good or for bad. As evidence that the Japanese communities were slowly rebuilding grew, in 1960 Horiuchi made the decision to move back to where he grew up, in the Los Angeles neighborhood bordered by Vermont and Western, on Olympic. He found work in his new profession in Beverly Hills for a year before settling down in Torrance, California. Eventually he and his wife had relocated to Oceanside, but soon after retirement, they considered another move to a drier climate for their health and subsequently moved to the Central Valley, which is how he was ultimately paired up with my father, who lives in Fresno, as his Honor Flight escort, bringing our two families together in this unexpected way.

Sadly, Horiuchi was not reunited with any of his wartime buddies who served in occupied Tokyo, despite his attempts to seek out familiar names and faces and the list of friends he had jotted down on a paper he carried in his pocket throughout the week.
Soon after both of our fathers returned to California, I spoke to Horiuchi's daughter Akemi, who also lives in Los Angeles. According to Akemi, her father rarely ever told her of his life during the war, and had surprised the family in 1981 by testifying for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. It was the first time she had ever heard him openly speak about what had happened to him and his family as a consequence of the forced removal and their harrowing years in Utah. But this trip had changed some things in him and the pleasure of the ceremony and the long-neglected recognition of the Nisei soldier's services and sacrifice couldn't be denied.

"When he got home, he showed me the gold medal. Its really big and really heavy. He didn’t seem embarrassed, as he was before. Going into Congress was an incredible experience for him— seeing the White House, meeting Senator Inouye. I imagine it would almost be overwhelming, knowing how far things have come for someone with these memories and war experiences. He described it as a trip of a lifetime and had no regrets."