Yamada, Mitsuye

Biography

Mitsuye Yamada was born Mitsuye May Yasutake in Kyushu, Japan on July 5, 1923. When she was three years of age, her parents immigrated with their young family to the United States. Although she was sent back to Japan to live with her grandmother for eighteen months when she was 11-12 years old, Yamada spent most of her formative years in Seattle, Washington.

On December 7, 1941, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mitsuye's father, Jack K. Yasutake was arrested and imprisoned at Fort Lewis, Washington. The rest of the Yasutake family was sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho. This experience made a deep impression on Yamada and informed much of her later literary and political career. After the war, she completed a B.A. at New York University and an M.A. at the University of Chicago, both in English literature. In 1950 she married Yoshikasu Yamada. The couple lived in New York for some years prior to moving to Orange County, California in the 1960s. In 1966 Yamada began teaching English at Fullerton Junior College. Her teaching career later included Cypress Junior College and a visiting professorships at campuses within the University of California system.

In the mid-1970s Yamada began publishing her poetry and editing the poetry of others, and was soon actively involved in the Orange County literary scene. According to her own accounts, she moved away from the formalist training she received at NYU and later at the University of Chicago and embraced a style of poetry that emphasized "substance." In 1975 she co-edited an anthology written by like-minded poets, and in 1976 her own book, Camp Notes and Other Poems, was published by the Shameless Hussy Press. These publications were followed in 1986 by The Webs We Weave: Orange County Poetry Anthology, which she co-edited, and in 1988 by a new book of her own poems, Desert Run: Poems and Stories, published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Her books reflect themes from her Japanese American heritage and her experiences in the internment camp. From the 1970s until well into the 1990s, Yamada engaged in an increasingly busy schedule of public readings, which became more and more focused on the political ideas underlying her poetry and often served as platforms for calls to political action.

In part due to her camp experience, Yamada has been sensitive to issues involving ethnic diversity and women's rights. By 1975 she was a member of the Irvine chapter of Amnesty International (AI) and has since continued to support AI's goals and objectives, at times serving in national offices for the organization. She was also actively involved in supporting the redress movement, a political and legal campaign by Japanese Americans to receive financial and moral recompense for their treatment by the United States government during World War II. Her teaching career has reflected her political interests, and she was a strong early proponent of using lower-division English courses as an introduction to multiculturalism. She was a major participant in the successful movement to establish an Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine.

Biographical/Historical note

Mitsuye Yamada is an acclaimed poet and human rights activist whose published poems deal chiefly with her family's internment, along with all Japanese Americans living along the western U.S. coast, by the United States government from 1942-1945.