Alan Llavore | Office of Marketing and Communications | (909) 537-5007 | allavore@csusb.edu
The poetry that emerged from one Japanese American couple’s incarceration during World War II will be the focus of a panel presentation at Cal State San Bernardino beginning at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29. The program, offered in person and on Zoom, is free and open to the public.
The CSUSB Libraries program, “By the Shore of Lake Michigan,” which takes its name from a book of poems by Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto, will take place in the John M. Pfau Library, room PL-4005. Free copies of the book will be available to the first 15 CSUSB students who attend in person.
“By the Shore of Lake Michigan” is a collection of Japanese tanka poetry originally written in Japanese and edited by Nancy Matsumoto, the granddaughter of Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto, who will be one of the program’s panelists. The book chronicles the couple's lives from their forced relocation from Los Angeles to Heart Mountain, Wyo., where they were unconstitutionally imprisoned in 1942 following then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, through their resettlement in post-World War II Chicago. The poems offer a deeply moving personal account, from an Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) perspective of adversity, identity and resilience.
Joining Matsumoto on the panel will be Eri F. Yasuhara, dean emerita of CSUSB’s College of Arts and Letters, who wrote the introductory essay for “By the Shore of Lake Michigan” and Mariko Aratani and Kyoko Miyabe, the two translators who worked with Matsumoto to translate her grandparents’ poems.
The program, co-sponsored by the CSUSB Asian Faculty, Staff and Student Association, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Robie Madrigal, Pfau Library, at rmadriga@csusb.edu or (909) 537-5104.
