wasabi press

Animal Menagerie

2012-01-03T01:16:00.000-08:00

Susan S. has an annual tradition that she's followed for over thirty-six years, animal by animal. Having been lucky enough to have spent the past twenty years as an archivist at a world-class library where she gets to roam its stacks, attics and moats at will, she is a great lover of ephemera and the collectable memorabilia of our past. An accomplished author of many beautiful books, Susan also practices an art known to few in this country, a habit she picked up after living in Japan for several decades. Her art is parsed in extremely limited editions and made public only once a year through the US postal system. January 1, 2012 hails the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. Without fail, Susan has once again taken her carving tools to the task and interpreted the dragon in a hand-printed linoleum block nengajo with her unique combination of piquancy and zest.

Nengajo (also known as otoshidama-tsuki nenga hagaki) are postcards sent as New Year greetings on the first of the year. A special mailing system through Japan Post, which enables postcards that have been sent by mid-December to all arrive at once on January 1st, was purportedly started well over 100 years ago. Today, more than 4.1 billion nengajo are printed and mailed in the month of January. While commercial nengajo to email or send by phone are increasingly on the rise, the truly unique, paper nengajo offer a opportunity for one's inner creative to emerge once a year. Of course, pre-printed cards can still be purchased at stationary or department stores and customized nengajo software for printing on a home computer are always a hefty part of every year's nengajo haul, but it is the hand-crafted nengajo that I seek. Nine times out of ten, New Year postcards rely on the present year's zodiacal animal as the primary design, following the Chinese zodiac cycle. (For the record, the animals are, in order: r a t , o x , t i g e r , r a b b i t , d r a g o n , s n a k e , h o r s e , s h e e p , m o n k e y , r o o s t e r , d o g , a n d b o a r . And yes, the rat is always the first animal in the race around the twelve-year calendar). The original purpose of nengajo was to report tidings to faraway friends and relatives. In other words, this custom existed for people to tell others that they were still alive and allowed them to express hopes that the year ahead would be even luckier, richer, healthier and all around better than the last.

In the nineties, I spent several years living in Japan, which is how I first encountered the nengajo tradition, and was instantly smitten. As it happened, I was living with a traditional washi papermaker in the remote green mountains of Warabi, Gifu-prefecture, a place where paper wasn't simply a product of industry. For six months, I practiced the process of traditional papermaking, boiling young branches of mulberry in ash and lye, scraping tough knots where the node met the branch and any remnants of red bark from individual strands under a trickle of icy water, pounding and scooping the white fibers shot with gold onto bamboo trays. It was not mere learning, it was sheer worship. I also gained a profound understanding of paper's purpose: light reflects magically upon the pristine white sheets and with the application of the alphabet or numericals with black ink, history could be recorded and news of one's well being could now be sent to far-off places. My papermaking teacher was a g r e g a r i o u s fellow with h u n d r e d s of individuals to send his best wishes for prosperity, fortune and good health to, which meant his nengajo production was SERIOUS BUSINESS. Earlier in the year, he had introduced me to linoleum block printing, keeping a giant, economical roll of it in his studio in case he was ever struck with a desire to carve and print on the crisp sheafs of paper we stored throughout the wooden house all the way up to its rafters. But on this occasion and much to my surprise, my mentor reached into the closet for a totally new-fangled contraption that he explained was his nengajo machine. The machine was fashioned out of a powdery blue plastic, came with some rather ill-smelling flashbulbs and required AA batteries. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was staring at a Gocco, a fantastically clever screen-printing toy that was created in Japan specifically for the nengajo market, which explains to frustrated Gocco fanatics around the globe why the majority of its models fits 4" x 6" images, maximum. Gocco was developed in 1977 using flash bulbs, a carbon-based image and an emulsion-coated screen, allowing the user to stamp out hundreds of customized, personal prints and for nearly two decades, sales of the machines soared in Japan. It was the Year of the Ox, and as the papermaker's apprentice, I got the job of gocco'ing bulls kicking up their heels under the moon on an endless stack of blank postcards.

By the time I came back to California and mustered up the courage to make my own nengajo debut, it was the Year of the Snake. Using my own pet snake as my model, I went back to the papermaker's first printmaking lesson, and carved the image out of linoleum and printed the postcards using a tabletop platen press. The following year, I neglected to fire on all cylinders and skipped the Year of the Horse, but picked up the nengajo tradition again in the Year of the Ram.

And so the nengajo custom began, although noone else in my family had ever heard of, let alone made or sent nengajo in California before. A purposeful visit to specialty stationary stores such as Kinokuniya might yield packaged pre-printed nengajo, but for the rest of us, we have to make our cards by hand. Presumably, everyone just thought of me as being animal fixated, and indeed for a few years I collaborated with a sansei artist to produce zodiac animal calendars in addition to the annual nengajo print fest. Susan's nengajo artwork came to my attention when she sent one to the publishing company where I worked at, knocking me out with her illustration and design finesse, while delighting me with the simple fact that she observed this arcane and remote tradition. Looking ahead I see that next year is the Year of the Snake, which brings me at last, to my first full zodiac cycle. I still have a long way to catch up to her; she's been around the zodiac block three times. Sigh.

In a marathon gocco printing on New Year's Eve with assistance by my husband, the 2012 dragons have been laid out, huffing smoke. As I finished penning the last of this year's greetings and fixing postcard stamps on each of them, it suddenly occurred to me (consistent to my overall weakness for rare and endangered cultural species such as books and museums) my nengajo habit is entirely reliant on the US postal service, which has begun voicing throes of an elegy. For what joy is left in sending a group spam affixed with glittering gifs when I can still sketch, transfer, carve and print my nengajo by hand, its ink and paper poetically tactile?

Halloween night when you're old

2011-10-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

Notes for the CCH grant proposal discussion tomorrow? Check. Final draft of the powerpoint presentation at Loyola Marymount University on Tuesday? Check. Bio sent to Central California Asian Pacific Women fundraiser in December? First stab at the Kaya press release? Typed notes from the Bancroft Library research on Wayne Collins? Check check check.

We did, in fact, try to make it out to two themed bars on our side of town tonight, but discovered that they were closed on Mondays (even on a Monday like tonight!) So we settled instead for a roughly 11 mile bike ride down the Los Angeles River wearing our panda masks. This included a request stop at the Bigfoot Lounge for a Rude Bear Float (adult root beer float) and a Newcastle, and for huffing Indian spices at a local market and restaurant off of Los Feliz. My treat? Fig yogurt with mini choco chips and almonds while lying in bed wearing fuzzy pants.

foxtrot forgeries

2011-09-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

First stages of sketches in pencil

After a few weeks of carving

Around the time that I started posting these musings on the Fresno temple and the Obon season in general, I was on the third or fourth week of carving this linoleum block which I *SWEAR* started out rather innocently, with the children leaning into one other as the focal point. I wasn't quite sure what the context was going to be around them (as it must be evident in the way that the background and foreground are very slowly being filled in) and kept sketching and even carving as June, July and August crept in and surrounded me.

It is well nigh into September, and I think I'm only a few steps away from completing the lino, which surprise surprise, ended up as a street scene at an Obon Festival. I concentrated on new styles of making stars and lantern light, while screwing around with shaping shadows. The last few steps will involve me drawing out the silhouettes of the rest of the festival attendees and dancers, which is harder to do when you don't really have good models to work off of.

As for the girl fox, well...she has long been a favorite of mine in Japanese folk tales and superstitions, even if she has a greedy, cunning streak running through her like the wind.

Fate of the Fresno Betsuin Building Project

2011-09-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

When I was nine years old, the Sunday ritual was to drive the five miles or so from our home in Tarpey Village in Clovis until we were out where long dirt driveways led to vineyards and farmer homes, where a single oak tree shaded a tiny, unmarked bungalow. Steel grey folding chairs were brought from the closets and the children were instructed to plunk zabuton on each chilly metal seat, candles and thin green rods of incense were lit, as an overhead heater roared to life. That tiny bungalow was where I attended weekly dharma school and even played "Hotokei Sama" on the piano for our very small Buddhist congregation who lived out in the sticks; Sunday School for the outlying areas such as Fowler, Madera, Selma, Dinuba, Kingsburg and Parlier.

I live in Los Angeles now. As news that the historic Jodo Shinshu Buddhist temple located in downtown Fresno was up on the auction block reached the southern California Japanese American community, colleagues began leaving me both physical and digital copies of an article that was published in the Los Angeles Times on August 1, 2011— in the heat of the annual obon season. Being a semi-native Fresnan (I was born in San Diego and raised for the first seven years in Honolulu, but lived in the Fresno area from age eight until seventeen), I was asked for my candid opinion about the temple everywhere I went: over dinner, in the hallways at work, and on my Facebook page. But as the initial spell of dismay over the abandonment of the old for the new washed through the network, I realized what a tremendous piece of my identity as a Japanese American was formed by that very temple and by being raised Buddhist in the Central Valley. Fresno, like so many mid-sized American cities, has expanded expotentially since it was first incorporated in 1847. What were once thriving ethnic enclaves scattered around a downtown base bordering the newly laid Southern Pacific Railroad line has now grown a thousand fold in circumference, as people built outwards from the original central core (where transportation and commerce was once the hub), conjuring up cheaper housing and the mini-malls by the hundreds to support its growing suburban populations. What is left behind in the downtown district is then left to decay.

This story is similar in some ways, but of course different from what happened in Little Tokyo with the Los Angeles Hompa Hongwanji Temple on the corner of 1st and Central street, which happens to be a sister temple to the one in Fresno. In the mid 1950s, the L.A. Hompa Hongwanji, (affectionately known by locals as Nishi Hongwanji) having outgrown the temple that their Issei congregation built in 1925, launched an ambitious fundraising effort to build a new and larger temple further down 1st street to Vignes and subsequently sold their old temple to the City of L.A. The original Nishi temple, like the Fresno church, was a physical testament to Issei fundraising acumen and a manifestation of their determination to put their hard-earned capital into a more productive way of living while remaining on American soil. From the stories I've heard, Little Tokyo and downtown Los Angeles in general suffered during the war years by the two-pronged forced incarceration of the Japanese and the arrival of African Americans, Mexicans and others who were lured to California by offers of work in the US defense industry. This rush of migration resulted in crowded, squalid conditions in the aging historic districts, which is what the Japanese Americans returned to in 1945. As the community struggled to find some sense of normality in their lives in the traumatic years following war, Nishi Hongwanji, in both its physical and spiritual form, sheltered dozens of homeless families and provided the foundation on which the community slowly began to rebuild. By the mid-1950s, the congregation had swelled back to its pre-war numbers and beyond as the Nisei generation reached its marriage and child-bearing peak. Simultaneously with (although most likely not in consideration of) the temple's plans for possible relocation, the Los Angeles Redevelopment Commission had its eye on the entire swath of buildings that flanked Nishi Hongwanji, as city plans emerged in 1963to tear down the so-called decrepit buildings and widen 1st Street. So when decision to rebuild the temple were official ten years later, the City of Los Angeles purchased the historic building, which surely had a part in helping raise funds for the new temple on Vignes. The street widening along 1st Street never happened (I'm not sure why), and thus, the former Nishi building was left standing. There may have been brief periods of habitat, but to my knowledge, the historic building was by and large empty for decades. In the meantime, a resurgence of Japanese American cultural traditions such as Nisei Week and the opening of other nonprofits nearby such as the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and East West Players in the old Union Church building helped establish Little Tokyo as a vibrant, living community once again.

Fresno did not have this same experience. While the population of Fresno proper soared in the second half of the 20th century and continues to experience dramatic increases into the 21st century, downtown continues to suffer. In 1992, Fresno City Hall itself moved out of the heart of downtown, re-envisioning itself as a futuristic neo-architectural swoop on the edge of downtown. I first heard of the new/old Buddhist temple quandry about a year and a half ago, when I found out that my family had donated funds towards the new temple. It isn't sheer coincidence that the proposed new Buddhist temple will be built on a swath of land out by Clovis that, if the stories I've heard are accurate, is land that the Buddhist community purchased decades ago, perhaps with this kind of shift in mind. This area was once all grapevines, fig orchards, strawberry fields and cow pastures, but today it is filled with tract houses lined by advertising banners that whip in the wind and achingly new elementary schools. It’s where the new generations of Japanese American community lives. It is a mere stone's throw from where that lone oak tree and the tiny Buddhist bungalow I practiced in once stood.

I felt a terrible yearning for the old Fresno Betsuin Buddhist temple when I heard that it might be replaced, and that sense of nostalgia has slowly eaten away my heart. Like so many other generations of Japanese Americans from the valley, our central identity was rooted in the old temple on the corner of Kern and E Streets, and with little effort my mind was flooded with memories of the numerous funeral services, Hanamatsuri, and especially the annual Obon festivals, when stopping in at Komoto's Department Store and Central Fish were all part of an organic experience of visiting West Fresno. Granted, much of those Buddhist services were actually exercises in controlling our gasps of air and giggles when the sound of unearthly priests chanting in incomprehensible Japanese struck our dumb yonsei ears. Yet it was sorrow I felt, that certain kind of mourning, upon realizing the end of a previously unbroken line of history. Up until now, every single couple in my family had been married at that temple; in fact, my maternal grandfather, Johnson Kebo, was even the temple board chairman in 1956. (Johnson married Miyeko Okamura on July 18, 1938 at the Fresno Betsuin Temple, which was a double wedding with Johnson's younger brother George and his wife Evelyn. I even investigated getting married there this past May, but opted to have the ceremony at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles.)

But the inherent reality of the congregation's 21st century needs became apparent when I was asked to participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Buddhist "Dharma Family Center" last spring. The Dharma Family Center is a spanking new gymnasium/community center that is currently standing in for the temple services while the new one is being constructed adjacent to the gym. I certainly couldn't refuse. I arrived with the rest of the family, and as I saw dozens of tables groaning with tupperware dishes and watched row upon row of chairs fill with three generations of Central Valley Buddhists, it dawned on me. Man, everyone here is so over it! What is alive in Fresno today isn't something held to a fixed point on the map or even housed within sacred walls. The needs for ritual and to teach tolerance and humility, and well...even the need for basketball gyms and potlucks in a place where people conveniently congregate---that is where the community thrives. I was one of many people that day who held a pair of scissors and symbolically snipped the ribbon at the ceremonial breaking of new ground. It genuinely moved me to witness this transition, even as I stood behind a row of Nisei, Sansei and Yonsei, whose families had undoubtedly contributed to our way of life and whose shoulders we were standing upon that day.

To acknowledge the well-intentioned appeals by preservationists and historical monument supporters, I know that objects steeped in memory are the artifacts we seek out for telling stories. The temple has tremendous power as a historical site of conscience and has hundreds of entry points for reflecting our community's history, having borne witness to decades of community life, especially when it carried the weight of the Japanese forcibly ousted from the once crowded West Fresno neighborhood in 1943. Yet for all of the value we place on the Fresno temple's marble stairs which we all walked up, and the 3,000 lb bronze bell that carried our prayers, perhaps that weight, those seemingly permanent structures are not what they simply appear to be. Isn't that what Buddhism teaches us, to lose our attachment to earthly belongings, and that all things are impermanent? To not hold on?

So what is the elegant solution to this most complex personal /community/ economic/spiritual conundrum? Perhaps the old Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple could be purchased and moved across town as some people are suggesting. But is there another way of thinking about the tenets of honoring ancestors and impermanence? Maybe the old temple can be converted into something like a center for alternative medicine to heal the homeless population that now camp beneath its cloud-shaped gates or into a legal center to represent the myriad immigrants that still pour into the valley everyday, searching for work and a home and a strategy for survival. Do not do any evil and cultivate good, the old temple reminds us. Which brings me to the last part of my story in relating the history of the L.A. Nishi Hongwaji temple with the experience we are living today in Fresno. After lying fallow for nearly twenty years, the historic Nishi Hongwanji building was riddled with holes and bore the worst evidence of neglect. It wasn't until 1987 that the unimaginable happened and the future of the temple was revived. On that year, the City of L.A. signed a lease with an emerging non-profit to open a national museum dedicated to the history and experience of Japanese Americans. Exercise and honor the power of a community's strength and perhaps someday we can make the beloved home another home for others.

Today, we dwell upon our dead

2011-09-11T18:07:00.000-07:00

I just unearthed this piece, which I wrote in August/September 2009 in Taos, NM. I had forgotten all about it until now, and though the 2011 Obon season has just passed, it is especially apropo for me to share it since Bachan died this spring. In addition to my gratitude and thanks to Nanao Sakai (December 2008), Arthur Okamura (July 2009), Joe Holt (July 2009), I dedicate this article to Miyeko Kebo (April 10, 1917-February 7, 2011. She was 93 years old!)

About a year ago my mother called, urgency burnishing a discernable edge to her voice, to tell me that Bachan, my grandmother, had stopped eating. It was expected that she would rapidly deteriorate in the coming weeks, maybe days. Come home, she said, it was time to say goodbye. Within a day, I found Bachan in an armchair in her bedroom at my aunt’s house in Fresno. As I held her fragile hands between my own, I was especially sensitive to feeling her bones swimming beneath the skin, its surface freckled with age and blue with veins, still delicately vital. We were alone in her bedroom, yet I struggled mightily to contain my emotions, seeking privacy even from her intimate audience. It was August, and the dry, blasting heat of the desert bore onto the blacktop roads, the dusty grasses between the house and the curb. Her chair faced out a curtained window onto the driveway, where I imagine she could watch the comings and goings of the house. Looking around her room, I recognized all of the familiar articles that I had memorized from the time that I was a child, although she had moved residencies at least three times since her husband had died. A faded color portrait of her with her husband, Johnson, in a white polyester jacket and a brown patterned dress shirt sprouting lapels of a ridiculous wingspan; she in large plastic framed glasses, her graying hair a singular crest of curl undulating over her head, a gleaming tooth from an easy smile.

Most prominent in her room was the family butsudan, the solemn, lacquered shrine devoted to ancestor worship. Non-Asians aren’t as familiar with having something within the household that needs regular upkeep like a butsudan- its caretakers feed it a tiny mound of cooked rice, a glass of water, a piece of fruit or a sweet bean manju to satiate the hunger of ghosts, and as a small reminder that we are indebted to our forebearers for the life we have. Butsudans are a bit like books to me- with two sets of shuttered doors, one paneled, one solid, that opened to more tiers where candles and photographs of the deceased are placed. Before the butsudan sit its accessories: a pert, gilded cushion sat atop a carved pedestal, a resonating bowl for awakening distracted ancestors, Bachan’s crystal ojizu with its rich purple and white tassel. In this fashion, she visited with the departed everyday and remained connected to the worlds of the living and dead. As we talked in gentle voices, I hoped my love would be conveyed more through my touch than through my words. I sat in fear that this was the last chance to thank her for the immense, infatigable love she surrounded me with throughout my entire life. We fluttered around the subject of life’s great rewards and all the good times. As I stood to leave, she patted me again reassuringly, clear-eyed and chirped, “You’ll see me again!”

It wasn’t until later, on my train ride back to Oakland that I pondered one of the enigmas of being raised Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, and the weight of Bachan’s comment. We are taught that with death, the unenlightened are reborn into this world, again destined to seek nirvana. Most of us don’t contemplate the reincarnation wheel with much regularity let alone consider when we’re going to bump into the recently deceased next, and whether they might be disguised as a roundworm , a morning glory vine, or even a ghostly human. What I failed to remember on that journey home was the fact that it was early August, and I was unwittingly speeding directly into Obon season.

The Obon festival has been held annually in Japan since 657 A.D. and even today, between July and August 15th, millions of Japanese living in metropolitan cities flock to their hometowns to celebrate . “Obon” is an abbreviation of “urabon”, the Japanese transliteration of the Sanskrit word Ullambana which literally means "to hang upside down”, implying the unbearable suffering born when you’re hanging upside down, or forced to bear the discontent and unfulfilled desires of your earthly life. The legend of obon proportedly is as follows: Mokuren Sonja, a disciple of the Sâkyamuni Buddha, gifted with supernatural powers bestowed upon his priestly devotion, visits his mother who has passed to the spirit world, only to discover that she has fallen onto the path of hungry ghosts and is in great suffering. To release her from her wanderings, he brings her food and makes offerings at his local temple, then bursts into spontaneous dance when she and seven generations of ancestors are released from their earthly desires. Obon then became a ritual of both filial piety and to offer gifts of food to the deceased, coinciding with the end of summer and the beginning of the harvest season. Obon was established as a major festival in Japan in the 7th century, but it wasn’t until the onset of the Meiji period (1868-1912) and shift to the solar calendar that Obon officially fell on July 15 and in some places, August 15.

Thus, at the peak of summer’s intensity, when the skies boil with humidity and a witching shrill of dying cicadas, the spirits of our ancestors descend back to earth to visit kin. To pay respect and homage to who they once were, offerings of rice, cakes, fruits and vegetables—usually the most splendid and choicest, symbolizing the fruition of the family’s efforts— are laid at the butsudan and occasionally at the front door of the household. In order to properly guide the spirits of one’s ancestors, lanterns or mukaebi, small bonfires, are lit on the night of Obon, filling the night with the soft pulse of light suffused through paper. Additionally, in the Hiroshima area where both my maternal and fraternal great grandparents immigrated from, elaborate hexagonal paper lanterns, both multi-colored and white, are placed at the ancestral graves. The white lanterns are for those who passed away during Aug. 16 of the previous year till Aug. 15 of the current year. Although an exact evolution of Obon cannot be definitely traced, the festival has become synonymous with ritual folk dancing performed at night by the light of lanterns. Bon Odori (dance) is itself an offering of joy and celebration, a magical twilit evening when one can literally dance in tandem with the dead.

It was likely in a fit of nostalgia for ancestors left in distant villages in Japan that Obon became one of the predominant Japanese traditions that survived the centuries old lag between United States and the home country. The first Bon Odori in U.S. Territory was performed in Hawaii in 1910 (which technically wasn’t an actual U.S. state, but was the earliest immigrant community of Japanese migrant workers. Twenty years later, the Jodo Shinshu priest Reverend Yoshio Iwanaga introduced the Bon Odori to temples in California, Oregon, Washington and Canada. The first organized Bon Odori in the continental United States was held in the auditorium of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco in 1931. Bon Odori is still performed outdoors, the dancers clad in summer yukata, moving in concentric circles of flickering fans and sweeping hands around a raised platform called a yagura. Although I grew up attending the Obon festival annually in West Fresno, I never participated in the odori itself, and was more content just to prowl the stalls for dollar plates of somen salad, deep-fried Okinawan donut holes on a skewer, teriyaki sticks, paper cones of shave ice, or to spend quarters playing carnival games. Death and the observance of the past were the furthest things possible from my mind. For all of my hours throwing rings at rows of old coke bottles at the Fresno Obon as a child, it wasn’t until I moved north to Oakland for college, that I took my first flailing steps towards learning the folk dances of Obon odori.

It is early evening in July, a year after my trip to visit Bachan, and I am standing in a stately white Victorian in Alameda, California with a cluster of other Nikkei, clutching fans, tenugui, and kachikachi. A Victorian is the least likely building to ever house a Buddhist temple, but despite appearances, the Alameda Buddhist Temple has housed itself in this turn of the century clapboard since 1916. Tonight, we are here to practice for Obon. Amongst the middle aged mothers with young children who wheel about in the middle of our dance circles, there are teenagers in shorts and tees (one girl wears a YBA or Young Buddhist Association t-shirt that shows a lean athlete reaching for nirvana under the words, JUST DO IT), and a couple of older folks like myself. We never tear our eyes away from Sensei Eileen, who leads us through the repetitive step point, step point, back step, back step clap! which occasionally leads to run-ins with the dancer directly in front of you. Warbling from an ancient boombox at the front of the room pipes the age-old drums, flutes and synths of the “Tanka Bushi”, “Tokyo Odori”, the “Baseball Odori” and this year’s new dance, a hybrid samba number that incorporates some suspiciously Nikkei Brazilian cha-cha shakes. (Why do I dance Obon now? What draws me to it?) At the end of the rehearsal, the reverend blesses us and we all gassho before hustling round uchiwa fans and other dance props into minivans and scooting off till next time.

A cursory look at the Hokubei Mainichi newspaper in mid-July will give the reader a listing of half a dozen Obon festivals scheduled in Northern California alone: Palo Alto, San Jose, Mountain View, Oakland, San Francisco, Walnut Creek. If you were to add the Central Valley and Southern California Buddhist temples, you could count close to three dozen Obon celebrations to choose from on any given year. Beyond California’s borders, Obon is celebrated in Hawai’i, Seattle, Chicago, as well as in Sao Paulo, Lima, and Manila. Today I am in Berkeley, and since I never quite remember how to bind myself properly into my yukata, I arrive early at my friend Kimi’s house to have her help me tuck the yukata tightly, followed by three under sashes tied tight as a boa! around my waist before the wide obi is wrapped and tugged into a neat bow around the back. My yukata for the past ten years has been an mustard green patterned with black summer grasses and purple tombo dragonflies, accented with a knockout purple and metallic gold obi. However, as I near 40 years of age, I am considering retiring this flashy attire for a more somber pattern and color of yukata more suitable for a woman out of her youth. The professional dancers who circle in the center of our concentric rings of amateurs wear uniform indigo and white yukata of a decidedly modern style. It is the girls who provide the candy-colored pyrotechnics of the evening, wearing fuschia tipped yukata cascading with grape, tangerine and jade profusions of chrysanthemums, koi, irises and even fireworks on their hems and sleeves. The dancing begins at seven, and many people arrive early for the teriyaki dinners and to get dressed with the assistance of several obasans who truss you into your yukata mercilessly. As the day wanes, gem-like lanterns strung along the block are lit, glowing in the crepuscular light. Berkeley cordons off the entire block in front of the temple for Obon Odori, giving the dancers and spectators ample room. Up on the yagura, a microphone squeals. The reverend welcomes the crowds to Obon and calls us to remember those who have passed in the recent year. We bow our heads, breathe, and somewhere the music starts. We shuffle forward, always in a circle, returning to where we began.

We are taught that Obon is a time to appreciate all that our ancestors have done for us and to recognize the continuation of the influence of their lives upon our own lives. Obon is a time of self-reflection; not only from the happiness of getting what you want and desire, but the joy of awareness, a reminder to love and care for others, especially our parents. It also encourages the practice of dana, selfless giving, to all beings, and to reflect the universal experience that in living life, we must know loss. However, in knowing true loss, we begin to understand the meaning of love. Bachan didn’t, in fact, expire quickly as we had feared. In fact, at age 91, she’s still tottering about with the aid of a wheelchair and the occasional donut to satisfy an insatiable sweet tooth. When last I saw her, at a banquet dinner in Fresno celebrating her birthday, she seemed genuinely surprised at the cake placed before her, ablaze in candles too many to signify anything beyond a life well journeyed. With candles amassing in coronas of gold reflected in her eyes, she clasped her hands in sheer delight, exclaiming, “Is this for me?” before gathering every ounce of energy left in her and blowing with all the breath that she could possibly muster. In an instant, the room went black.

2011-05-31T23:40:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, I am in the stages of writing a script for the soon to be permanent exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum. This exhibit will focus on the World War II Japanese American experience and the lessons that can be shared with the world through this specific ethnic community and the terrible cost of sacrificing one's civil liberties under the vitriol of racism and economic greed.

Let me be honest- this is a really challenging assignment. In many ways I feel that it is a story I have been preparing for forty years to face and to tell. Building exhibits and curatorial work in itself is a bit mysterious to begin with, but in this case. this exhibit building is something more. It is a deeply nuanced transformation of the Museum itself as it moves from memorializing the past to teaching and embracing the future. For me, it is a process of massive outreach and careful listening, while simultaneously sorting and brutal editing.

Just this past weekend, as I once again got into The Thinker pose and re-read my drafts, it occurred to me that what this is all about is Process. Sigh, yes Process. It reminded me of one of the stories my former boss, Malcolm Margolin, of Heyday Books would recount to me and audiences all over California, when we talked of cultural revival and generational change.

The story goes something like this:

"In the high Sierra, there is a tradition of rebuilding roundhouses. These roundhouses are underground houses or semi-underground houses, they're dance houses, they're for ceremony, they're for storytelling.

And one of them is at Trusser, east of Jackson, and it was built in the early ‘70s. The roof fell in in 1990, it was rebuilt and it is still being used, and it's kind of a center for culture and for cultural renewal.

I was once talking to the people that built it, and I was talking about how it was built. And what they said was that they could have built it better. They could have used creosote on the posts when they dug the post into the ground, there was nothing in the old rules that said you couldn't use creosote. They didn't have to tie the rafter with grapevine, they could have used metal, there was nothing in the old rules that said you couldn't use metal.

But there was a rule that they had to follow, and that is, you had to build the roundhouse so that it would fall apart every twenty years, so each generation would have the experience of rebuilding it."

I think this is what is happening, both on a personal and on a communal level- and it is terrifying and beautiful all at once. Again, to paraphrase Mal, in the way in which we are approaching this idea of redesigning the world of the future, the world of the Museum, we must remember to redesigning it from strength, from understanding, deeply meditating upon what works, deeply understanding what the soul of belonging to that process of becoming American, and then designing our vision, the new exhibition to house our stories from that. THAT is the roundhouse we are reaching for, the one that we will all be able to dance in.

Hisaye Yamamoto "Humble Giant of American Literature"

2011-02-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

This article originally ran in the Los Angeles Japanese American paper, the Rafu Shimpo, on Friday, February 11, 2011. My gratitude to JK Yamamoto (Hisaye's nephew and long-time community journalist) for so generously including me in this.

Another outstanding tribute to Hisaye was published in the Los Angeles times here.

Hisaye Yamamoto "Humble Giant of American Literature"- Rafu Shimpo

The passing of short-story writer and essayist Hisaye Yamamoto is being mourned by her friends and fans across the country and beyond. The author of “Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories” died in Los Angeles on Jan. 30 at the age of 89.

Filmmaker Emiko Omori, who combined Yamamoto’s short stories “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in the 1991 film “Hot Summer Winds”:

“Hisaye was my first babysitter, and throughout the following years I was not good at keeping in touch. But she was always in my heart. She allowed me to make a movie from two of her wonderful short stories. She agreed to be in a documentary, ‘Rabbit in the Moon,’ that my sister, Chizu, and I made about our internment experiences. She loved to play Scrabble and she always won. She had a beautiful way with words. I miss you, dear Hisaye—my inspiration, my mentor.”

Chizu Omori, co-producer of the 1999 documentary “Rabbit in the Moon” and columnist for the Nichi Bei Weekly:

“I feel I have lost a great mentor and a very good friend in the passing of Hisaye Yamamoto. I first met her before World War II when I was a kid. We went through the camp experience living in the same block, and she was someone I could always talk to during that stressful experience.

“After the war, we never did live in the same town but kept up a correspondence that went on until she could no longer write. She was one of the first Japanese American women who gained a national presence with her short stories and writings, and she was a master storyteller of the Japanese American experience. She was an inspiration for many of us.”

Janice Mirikitani, former poet laureate of San Francisco and founding president of the Glide Foundation, which empowers poor and marginalized communities:

“Hisaye was my shero. She is the writer who gave me the courage to reveal my stories, to unleash my voice as a poet and activist. I remember her stories of madness, love, suffering and comedic moments, and compassion in camp. Her sense of humor and sensitivity, her amazing insight into human beings of all ethnicities helped create stories that were the ground for our connecting to the human condition beyond borders and boundaries.

“She made me proud to be Japanese American and a woman.”

Cynthia Kadohata, author of the award-winning children’s books “Kira-Kira” and “Weedflower”:

“For me, Hisaye was like a star in the sky—she made me dream about what was possible.”

Professor King-Kok Cheung of UCLA, author of “Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa” and editor of “Seventeen Syllables,” a collection of literary critiques of Yamamoto’s work:

“No contemporary writer has touched my heart, mind, and spirit as much as Hisaye Yamamoto. Whether writing about aborted creativity (‘Seventeen Syllables’), doomed romance (‘Epithalamium’), the dubious norms for sanity and insanity (‘The Legend of Miss Sasagawara’ and ‘Eucalyptus’), the havoc wrought by addictive gambling (‘The Brown House’ and ‘Las Vegas Charley’), or the debilitating effect of racism (‘Wilshire Bus’ and ‘A Fire in Fontana’), she did so with abiding compassion, keen eyes, wry humor, and prose that is at once disarming and harrowing.”

Minoru Kanda of Ajiakei-Amerikajin Bungaku Kenkyu Kai, which promotes the study of Asian American literature in Japan, and Japan representative of Asian Improv Records, an Asian American jazz label:

“We had a discussion about Hisaye-san’s works, ‘A Fire in Fontana’ as well as ‘Eucalyptus,’ just a few days ago. There is a larger number of Japanese people who read and respect Hisaye Yamamoto’s stories. Her works are so important not only for the U.S. readers but also for us Japanese.”

Kent A. Ono, a professor of media and cinema studies and Asian American studies at University of Illinois:

“When I first began writing my dissertation, it was Hisaye Yamamoto’s courageous words that brought the soul of Japanese America to me through writing. They gave me perspective, insight, feeling, and depth. She continues to be my ethical and moral guide. What she did with language astounds me daily.”

Playwright Philip Gotanda (“Sisters Matsumoto,” “Ballad of Yachiyo”) and actor-producer Diane Takei:

“Hisaye Yamamoto was truly one of the pioneers of Asian American literature. Because of her work and her presence, we along with many others had a strong literary foundation upon which to build. The world will miss Hisaye Yamamoto.”

Naomi Hirahara, author of the Mas Arai mystery series and former English editor of The Rafu Shimpo:

“Hisaye Yamamoto has been an inspiration to me ever since I was introduced to her work in my early twenties. She was a former journalist, a Christian, small in stature and a resident of the greater Pasadena area (Eagle Rock)—I felt personally connected to her in many ways. But her writing, as powerful and direct as a bullet, her prose so descriptive and unwavering, I knew that she was a true literary master.

“The Japanese American community and all Americans are so lucky that Hisaye toiled and wrote her stories about the time before camp, during camp and after. When I worked at The Rafu Shimpo, I was fortunate to have some telephone dealings with her regarding her submissions to our Holiday Issue and she remained as she always did in person—self-effacing and no nonsense.

“She had little consciousness of her literary importance, which sometimes surprised me because her work among Japanese American writers in particular was held in such high esteem. I knew that she was one of the first Japanese Americans to be published by the Paris Review, but the first anthology of her short stories was not published in the U.S., but in Japan.

“Hisaye—I still feel—doesn’t have the fame that she deserves in this country, but I hope that many of us will continue to spread the word of her writing and that more collections will be published posthumously. An important part of Hisaye will live on in her short stories. I am absolutely sure of that.”

Stan Yogi, co-author of “Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California” and co-editor of “Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley” and “Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography”:

“For more than half a century, Hisaye Yamamoto quietly chronicled American life in her exquisitely crafted and powerful stories and essays. She described herself as a housewife, not a writer. But anyone who reads her work will recognize the talents and skills of a true literary master.

“With insight, compassion, wit, and grace, she wrote about sensitive Issei women whose dreams are thwarted and Nisei children who do not fully understand their parents’ aspirations. The empathetic vision of her fiction and memoirs encompassed alcoholics seeking redemption through love and religion, and African Americans targeted by racism.

“When young admirers sought her inspiration and advice about writing, she encouraged their efforts but downplayed her own significance as a writer, instead praising the talents of other authors.

“But Hisaye Yamamoto’s body of work is lasting proof of her literary gifts, which luckily she shared for most of her life. We have lost a pioneer and humble giant of American literature … who also happened to be a housewife.”

Patricia Wakida, associate curator of history at the Japanese American National Museum and former director of special projects at Heyday Books:

“Like so many of her admirers, I only knew and loved Hisaye Yamamoto from afar, and through her writing. Hisaye’s prophetic voice, tempered by a tremendous wit and intelligence, spoke so much of the unspoken in the Japanese American experience, both pre-war and during the WWII incarceration.

“The discovery of ‘Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories’ was a personal epiphany. Reading that book sent me tumbling into the lives of Nisei girls and women who were so dark and complex, so gilded with these intense, emotional threads, that they left me locked in those stories for decades. It was as if I were privy to the innermost secrets of these women, and by the end of each story, rather than neatly bringing their conflicts to an easy resolution, were left open and mysterious.

“It wasn’t until later that I learned about the defiant and courageous way she went about making her mark in this world, in particular through the vehicles she chose to affiliate with and publish, which only increased my admiration.

“Fearless and eloquent, Hisaye Yamamoto was one of the great writers of her time and has left us with a tremendous legacy to remember her by.”

Elaine Kim, Asian American studies professor at UC Berkeley and co-editor of “Making Waves: Writing by and About Asian American Women” and “Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women”:

“She was so—so JA! By that I mean she had that very tranquil-seeming surface and she didn’t say much, but her writing revealed the spunky, quirky, keenly observant, spicy spirit that was burning beneath.

“Her stories were like that, too. There’d be a cheerful, kind of glibly clueless child narrator dropping hints of dangerous secrets lurking somewhere out of sight while she prattled on—adultery, abortion, suicide, madness—and everything that makes those things happen in human life, including love and desire and also patriarchy and racism.

“Ever modest, ever insisting that she didn’t have much to say or offer, I remember her on a panel once when she must have been in her 60s. She was in front of a huge audience that was paying adoring tribute to her and her work. Casually dressed in a white T-shirt and a black vest and khaki slacks, she spoke evenly in low tones, not letting on that she was moved or affected in the slightest by all that adulation.

“But I was sitting next to her, and I felt her elation and noticed the sparkle in her eyes. They loved her so much, and I think she was very happy. She was a great writer and a great person. We will really miss her.”

The Road to Camp is Paved with 120,000 Stories

2011-01-10T20:44:00.001-08:00

It has come to my attention that several times a year, people approach me, asking for a list of recommended reading on the subject of America's concentration camps of World War II, and seeing that its the end of the year/beginning of the year (still. a week later counts of end of the year) I'm feeling a list coming on:

1.) for the first-time I've heard about camp, all ages appropriate reader
By far, the most engaging, excrutiatingly real, first-person perspective on the camp experience is Mine Okubo's "Citizen 13660". Mine Okubo was reportedly the first camp internee that authored/illustrated a book of her personal experience during the war, and its a stunning visual diary of the most intimate events she was witness to. From the banal to the disgusting, Okubo's minute pen misses nothing. Her lines are as stark and clean as her simple commentary that accompany each drawing.

2.) for the historian, who wants to get to the bottom of things
My knowledge of the camp records and evidence that the entire forced removal of Japanese Americans was not, in fact as the government stated a "military necessity" has been accumulated by reading nearly 100 books, many of them meticulously researched in phases over the past 25 years. But if there were one book that encouraged us to look at the black and white government documentation of the camps and question what had really happened, I think I'd have to turn to Michi Weglyn's "Years of Infamy". In close second is "Personal Justice Denied", authored by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a report compiled after the overturning of several landmark cases of Japanese Americans who took their cases to the Supreme Court which in turn began the long, complex journey to the apology from the US government and redress.

3.) for those who have never heard about the Japanese Am draft resisters
John Okada's "No-No Boy". Its more about the psychological effects of the war on a JA family in Seattle after the war, than the facts surrounding the draft resisters, but its message is clear: the incarceration of the Japanese Americans turned JAs onto each other.

4.) for those who have never heard about the Japanese American 442nd/100th regimental combat team who fought in Europe, and the MIS who served as secret military interpreters and intelligence in the Pacific
Lyn Crost's "Honor by Fire: Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific".

5.) for the short story reader
Read Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories." Some of the pieces cover pre-war scenarios, but the ones that include her life in camp are simply brilliant and devastating.

6.) for the poetry reader
Violet de Cristoforo's "May Sky: There Will Be Another Tomorrow", a brilliant compilation of haiku written by first=generation (Issei) in camps, that were translated and given historical context written by de Cristoforo.

7.) for the artist
This is another tie. Either Karin Higa's "View from Within" which was a groundbreaking book/catalog that accompanied a touring exhibition of original paintings, drawings and sculpture made in the camps by numerous artists, -or- Kimi Kodani Hill's "Topaz Moon", which follows the life and the work of a single artist, Chiura Obata.

Ironically, my list is heavy handed with women authors. Well, hooray for me.

What Does the Inside of Your Head Look Like?

2011-01-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

Its January 4th, and with the realization that the new year has begun and I have so very very much in my mind that I need (nay, am paid to) synthesize and articulate to the broad public, ie publicize, it seemed an appropriate exercise to take a short inventory of some of the wooly stuff I'm thinking about right now:

- I cannot begin to talk about the history of the US, American democracy and the culture and sociopolitical world we live in today without bringing up the generations of racism that has suffocated and enfeebled the growth of species.

- We ate fennel and chicken soup tonight with dollops of smokey butternut squash and yam puree on the side. I have been very mindful of my body over the past six, seven years without much of a proactive plan or understanding of how to read my body's changes and demands, but I do know that really good home cooked food is bliss.

- My mother is rapidly aging, and I've been watching some of these stages very slowly over the past few years as well. Perhaps its in tempo with my aging too, but the transition from being oblivious to a sensitive and sympathetic care-taker is finally hitting me. Its one thing to be responsible for a delightful child at the bloom of their youth; and another to ready oneself to catch your mother as her strength ebbs, and she stumbles now and then.

- Since last night, my very magical pet snake has been snuggled into the blankets of the bed and actually slept all night with me and my fiance. Now I imagine this is more likely filed under 'horrific' for the good number of people who stumble across this entry, but it I'm telling you that it makes me crazy happy with delight. She has never, ever, in her 17 years of existence, done this before.

- Really, if I had to make a choice, i would choose art/color/line/paper/ink over writing and reading.

- One cannot have too many awesome calendars. I am an unabashed hoarder of innovative calendars, and love them for their practicality, for the mystery of numbers, the orbit of the sun, an orderly squaring of corners that make a day, and the way that they act a little like kinetic art.

- I'm a little afraid that I'm in over my head.

- Simultaneously, I'm hopelessly in love.

- How do you teach everything you know to another person, to a wholly other mind? How do you bring all the things you don't know, pose those ideas as questions, and incite deep learning? Describe an experience you've had with deep learning.

- I am hopeful about things turning the corner, not just soon, but tomorrow.

white christmas in camp

2010-12-16T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Born and raised in Los Angeles, I was a city boy who never saw snow in the winter, but you always heard about Christmas’ based on books. New England was where it snowed and all that good stuff. Well anyway, my first year in camp it starts to snow during Christmas. The block fathers built a simulated chimney in the mess hall with a stage and Santa Claus came from the outside through the mess hall window through the chimney into the mess hall where we are celebrating Christmas just like we used to read about. You know, snow and a real Santa Claus and that was the first year Irving Berlin’s white Christmas came out. And man, to me that was my first experience of a real Christmas. Even though we were locked up that didn’t have any bearing on how happy I felt. The only gift we received was some stuff that was sent by a Christian church outside. I got a bar of Palmolive soap. It was hard to get so this was a great present. Most of us got nothing else."

- Robert Uragami, who at the age of fifteen was incarcerated in a concentration camp in Amache, Colorado. He was a student at Amache High School in 1942, the first winter he spent in camp.

Introduction to Linoleum workshop in Berkeley!

2010-12-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Linoleum

Instructor/hostess: Patricia Wakida

Date: Saturday and Sunday, February 5-6, 2011

Time: 10-3 p.m. both days with a lunch break

Place: Heyday Books, located at 1633 University Ave.Berkeley, CA 94703. It is walkable from North Berkeley BART!

Just in time for Valentine’s Day….this two-day introduction to linoleum block printing will teach the basic steps for linoleum block design, use of the carving tools, and hand-inking and printing. One of the unique aspects of this particular course is that we will use very little to no electric assistance- this is all hand work!

Day 1: transferring image or drawing onto the block, using carving tools without gouging, pulling proofs.

Day 2: completing the block and experimenting with printing methods.

Materials to bring:
1. An idea of the image 4" x 6". Do sketches at the 4 x 6 size so we can transfer them to the blocks (allow a border). If possible, bring a right reading, old-fashioned Xerox (not a laser print!) copy of your image to class to transfer onto the block. Remember that block printing reverses your image so that it prints right reading. This is especially important (and challenging) for carving text!

2. If you have woodcut or linocut tools of your own please bring them.

3. Papers (anything larger than 4" x 6") from your own collection if you'd like to experiment with those, although I will bring a supply of papers to print on.

4. Pencils and erasers, sharpie pens (fine and fat), xacto knife. These are all optional.

Workshop fee: $30 per person plus the $7 materials fee. Materials fee: $7 (includes one 4 x 6 linoleum block, ink, and paper). I'll lend folks my linocarving tools, inking brayers and various tools for hand-printing. Additional blocks can be purchased from me the day of the workshop at $3 apiece.

Your hostess: I'm a hard-core bibliophile and book artist with a background in trade publishing. My relations to books are kept tangible and toothsome by running wasabi press, making illustrated letterpress books, broadsides, posters and cards on a Chandler and Price press stashed away in a tiny garage studio in Los Angeles. My book arts education began with an apprenticeship in Japanese papermaking in Mino, Gifu- prefecture, Japan in 1996, followed by an apprenticeship at the Arts and Crafts Press under linoleum block artist and letterpress printer, Yoshiko Yamamoto, in Berkeley, California. I've also worked as a teaching assistant in the book arts program at Mills College, the San Francisco Center for the Book, and ASUC Art Studio. Just last year I tore myself away from my beloved Oakland (home for 23 years!) to take the position of Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum.
Me web site: www.wasabipress.com

To reserve a space:
Send a check or Paypal fee to Patricia Wakida
wasabipress@yahoo.com

Murao is Missing

2010-10-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that nisei Shig Murao was arrested at City Lights for selling HOWL to an undercover cop, taken to the SF police department for fingerprints and a mug shot, and actually stood trial with Ferlinghetti in court, the makers of the new film HOWL deemed him an unnecessary character. Erased.

Story here by JK Yamamoto, originally published in Nikkei West newspaper.

I finally went to see the movie with Sam for a late showing in Pasadena, and though the first few minutes brought indignant tears of rage to my eyes, I began to feel it dissolve away when the realization of how feeble the film was actually hit me. Without a doubt, it is a slap in the face to witness the deliberate act of writing people of color out of the mainstream history and culture. Because the main character of the film was the poem "Howl" and not really Ginsberg himself, many important people in Ginsberg's life were excised out, or relegated to the role of cardboard mugs of handsome men and women in their clunky 50s eyewear and cardigans. However, I do still bear a grudge that because the film focused on the controversy of the poem, its publication and the trial that ensued (while cutting back and forth to shots of Ginsberg's inaugural reading at Six Gallery back on October 7, 1955 and fiery Molochy naked city animation by Eric Drooker) I still argue that Shig deserved to be included in this tale.

Perhaps its an easy thing for me to dismiss the film HOWL as a major disappointment, given that the court scenes had zero tension (all of the witnesses who saw now artistic or literary value to the poem were depicted as self-satisfied, uptight morons stuck in their ye olde Chaucer ways); and the script lacked any context in which the poem was written and conceived in, other than Ginsberg's personal search for identity. (No mention of the World War II and how it birthed the corporate military machine and a generation of complacent squares all marching towards their prefab suburban life of consumerism). In other words, what was it that this book of poems was pushing against?

Yet I can't help but wonder, at what point in the screenplay that it was agreed that Murao was a disposable character? How was the inclusion of Shig as a co-defendant (as was historically accurate) hindering the script? What gains were made by steamlining a piece of the story that might have brought a much needed twist of irony and complexity to the film?

Every artist has the right to create a work as they see fit. Yeah yeah, go on ahead and write your own damned book.

autumn inventory headrush shout

2010-10-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

Went on a printmaking frenzy in September, and as a result, there's a lot more to look at on my Etsy store.

Joanna Chiyo Nakamura Droeger- Nisei inventor of the "mud pie" dessert

2010-09-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Karen Tei Yamashita is always full of the most interesting Nisei history, and when she told me that a Nisei woman ran a famous cafe in North Beach in the 60s and invented the mud pid dessert, I just had to find out who it was. Unfortunately, I discovered who this charming woman was too late, as she passed away in November, 2004. However, I believe her husband is still living and might be worth tracking down for Shig related memories.

But what a thrill, to find this utterly unique Nisei in the thick of the North Beach bohemian scene. The story just gets lusher and more fantastic by the day.

From the San Francisco Chronicle obituary:

Joanna Chiyo Nakamura Droeger, who is said to have invented Mud Pie at her once-famous San Francisco restaurant that was popular with writers and other notables, died Thursday at age 76.

She died at home in Cupertino from natural causes following prolonged health problems, said her son, Michael Droeger of San Francisco.

Part of San Francisco's bohemian artists community, Ms. Droeger and her husband, John Droeger, were married in 1957 and the same year opened the Brighton Express restaurant adjacent to the Old Spaghetti Factory.

The restaurant soon relocated on Pacific Street and became a hangout for writers and performers, both famous and soon-to-be-famous. Among the regulars were authors Christopher Isherwood and Herbert Gold and budding impresario Bill Graham "at a time when all he owned was a motorcycle," said John Droeger, now of Patagonia, Ariz.

Semiregulars and guests included William Saroyan, Janis Joplin, Lenny Bruce, the Smothers Brothers, Imogene Cunningham, Gus Hall and Woody Allen in company with Herb Caen.

Joanna Droeger was "jolly, laughing, funny, accepting," recalled Gold. "Where she walked, she dragged good vibes along with her."

A Chronicle "Night Life" column by Grover Sales paid tribute in 1962:

"Among North Beach restaurateurs, Joanna is regarded as a gifted and highly creative cook; in ready agreement are the inhabitants of the Brighton Express, an eatery in the old International Settlement on Pacific near Kearny that is truly beyond category.

"Owned and most feverishly operated by egg-shaped Joanna and her 6-foot-6 husband John Droeger, the Brighton Express serves as dining room, orphanage and social clinic for a strictly non-tourist clientele of entertainers, artists, writers and unclassifiables who subsist on Joanna's Daily Special, topped off with one of her unbelievable hand-crafted desserts -- usually a rhapsodic coffee ice cream and fudge delicacy misleadingly titled 'Mud Pie.' "

Her son Michael traced the origin of the dessert in a biographical sketch:

"Perhaps my mother's biggest claim to fame is as the inventor of the dessert Mud Pie in 1957," he wrote. "Her original concoction of an Oreo cookie crust, coffee ice cream and homemade fudge topping has been often imitated."

She got the idea from "an article my mother read about the then-newly married Barbra Streisand and Elliot Gould," he said. "They apparently kept a freezer under their bed so they could eat coffee ice cream without leaving the bedroom. My mother thought that that was such a decadent and wonderful thing that she went about looking to create a coffee ice cream dessert.

"The name came quite innocently enough when someone saw her making the pies (pressing the ice cream into the crust by hand) and asked what she was doing. 'Oh, just making mud pies,' she replied. The name stuck."

Born in Los Angeles as a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, Ms. Droeger spent her early years with her older sister living in a convent. She was interned with other Japanese Americans during World War II at four detention camps: Tanforan, Tule Lake, Topaz and Amache. She began her final year of high school in a camp and graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco.

In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by a daughter, Gillian Droeger of San Francisco; and two sisters, Natalie Katayanagi of Richmond and Diane Sasaki of Detroit.

She refused to have a formal funeral, her son said, so a "festive service honoring her memory" will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sundayat the Kimochi Center, 1840 Sutter St., San Francisco.

The family requests that donations in her memory be given to Project Open Hand, 730 Polk St., San Francisco, CA 94109.

San Francisco Loteria "Cockcycle"

2010-09-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

Recently, the San Francisco Center for the Book asked me to be one of 15 artists to illustrate and carve a 12" x 12" linoleum block on the theme of the Mexican game loteria. This is actually a riff off of a (surprise) Los Angeles project headed up by Aardvark Press. In this impressive and ambitious printing project, a group of truly gifted Los Angeles artists were asked to create loteria "cards", each corresponding to a number and theme in the loteria game, and that also reflected LA in some way.

The San Francisco version was designed pretty much the same way- 15 artists, choosing a number and a theme based on loteria, with imagery that somehow references San Francisco. Not being a San Franciscan (I'm an Oaklander, ahem) I had to get into a yoga position and really dig deep for this one. However, once I had a theme in my grasp (I chose #1, El Gallo, the rooster) it all came together. San Francisco. Hot chicks with tattoos on bikes, riding in the fog. Get it?

the little hook at the border of Oregon and Washington

2010-07-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

Scenes from the month-long residency at the Espy Literary Foundation in Oysterville. I finished an entire rough draft of the book- ten chapters, nearly 37,000 words. Yow.

Reading at the Historic Oysterville Schoolhouse

2010-06-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

Considering the Oyster

2010-06-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

Since June 1st, I have had the terrific honor of being an artist-in-residency at the esteemed Espy Literary Foundation, located in pictureque Oysterville, Washington. I applied for this award some two odd years ago, was told a year later that they Foundation was suffering financial difficulties and promptly forgot all about it.

Now that my life has been radically changed with the new job, new city, new engagement, I hadn't really been putting the necessary "umph" back into the Shigeyoshi Murao book that it really deserved, and deep in my dark dark soul- I knew it. So when the Espy Foundation President, Polly Freidlander, called in early May while I was at work...I could scarcely make out her words and comprehend that I was being offered a month away to write. I managed to eke out that novelist Shawn Wong was on the literary committee this year and had in fact, selected my application amongst a host of many others as something worth investing in. Cripes!

So with the incredible grace of my boss(es) at JANM I was able to pack a tiny bag, exactly two books (I chose Louis Fiset's newly released book on Camp Harmony and James McNaughton's Army published book on Nisei Linguists) and some wet weather gear and headed to the peninsula.

One week into the residency, I can say that chapter one is in fairly solid shape, and chapter two (pre-war Seattle leading up from the immigration of Murao's parents from Chinran, Japan to Seattle all the way up to the outbreak of war in 1941) is finally emerging. There are eleven chapters outlined all together, some more distant clouds on the horizon than others. But I'm pretty thrilled that I can actually SEE the book now- its bold strokes and feathering highlights and textures.

In between marathon reading/writing sessions, if there is ever a break in the rain of course, I am on my bicycle exploring the cranberry bogs, the rhododendron forests wet with young ferns and the husks of emptied oysters. Along the path I've already met a black bear ambling straight down the road, a two day old fawn nursing on her mother, and an entire flotilla of beavers leaving filagreed silvery currents in their wake.

Until I can get my claws on a usb cord to download photos, I'm borrowing these excellent shots by local photographer, John Granen.

For a charming little description of historic Oysterville and illustrations of the gingerbread houses painted wedgewood blue and firetruck red that line the main street feast here. The houses on this particular street each have a historic, handpainted sign telling you who the original owner was and when the house was built. Cuuuute! Clambakes and crossword puzzles in my pedal pushers.

ABOUT THE ESPY FOUNDATION:
Created in 1998, the Espy Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Oysterville, Washington and dedicated to advancing and encouraging the literary and visual arts. The Foundation was named for Oysterville native Willard R. Espy, a wordsmith and memoirist, whose prolific career celebrated language, word play, light verse, and what Henry James once called the “visible past”: the events in the history of a time and place that can be recovered and preserved by the reach of a long memory and a gifted imagination. Serving the needs of emerging as well as established writers and artists, the Foundation’s main focus is our residency program.

Since the Program’s inaugural year in 1999, residencies have become the centerpiece of the Foundation’s service to writers and artists. The Foundation’s goal is to provide an environment in which residents can pursue their work without interruption. Writers and artists live and work in the serenely beautiful village of Oysterville–a national historic district–located near the northern tip of the Long Beach Peninsula, on the southwest coast of Washington State.

Return of the Asian American Modernist Geniuses

2010-06-08T19:04:00.000-07:00

Not one, but TWO fantastic exhibitions are opening this June/July in the San Francisco Bay Area, and unlucky me, I'm living in Los Angeles. At least I still lived in Oakland and was able to catch multiple programs at the Asian/American/Modern exhibition at the DeYoung Museum, which tragically, was unable to tour.

Dewitt Chang is an art critic, someone whose writing I'm most familiar with from his regular reviews in the East Bay Express, one of my most beloved local rags. He is curating what sounds like a vibrant and exciting exhibition of paintings called GOLD STANDARD: Nine Asian American Modernist Artists from the 1970s, at the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, opening on June 10th.

A few weeks later, an exhibition curated by the celebrated artist Carlos Villa entitled REHISTORICIZING THE TIME AROUND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN THE BAY AREA is will open at the Luggage Gallery on Market Street. The goal of REHISTORICIZING is to complete the digital and written gathering of exclusively “first voice” biographical material of 23 Women Artists and Artists of Color active in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1950’s to the late 1960’s, when their histories were undervalued because of public and personal hegemonic social and aesthetic scrutiny. The archive will be housed at the Anne Bremer Memorial Library, San Francisco Art Institute.

Mr. Villa did the world an amazing service by not only curating the work and getting it up in a terrifically accessible space, he also conducted a series of priceless interviews with many of the artists in the exhibit, contextualizing them with his own experience as an artist of color in the 1950s-1960s and the spirit of authenticity and the world of bohemia that existed at that time.

My personal connection to this subject is the galaxy of curators, writers, cultural fanatics and artists themselves who have gently guided me through memory and history to the lives and accomplishments of these artists of color who persevered to create astonishing bodies of work. This includes working with Karin Higa, Kristine Kim, and Emily Anderson of the Japanese American National Museum (where I now work as a curator of history) on biographies of nisei artists Hisako Hibi, Hideo Date, and Henry Sugimoto. I've collaborated with Kimi Kodani Hill on her book chronicling her grandfather, Chiura Obata, and with historian Mark Dean Johnson on a catalog of Labor Art of California and most recently, a book on Prison/Culture as seen through contemporary artists and poets both in and outside the prison system.

I urge everyone who ever gave a damn about living truthfully to visit both galleries and telling me all about it here.

how do I know thee?

2010-03-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

We're in our 9th week of living in Los Angeles, and it seems like an appropriate time to review what our user's poll on the likes/dislikes. Shall we?

LIKE:

Being greeted by mariachi his and hers every single morning

Pastrami sandwiches from Langer's, Daikokuya ramen, that evil stickyrice banana Thai dessert from Bhan Kanom Thai Corp., the night farmer's market in So. Pasadena, carnitas plate from Northgate Market in Norwalk, daily surprise in the JANM volunteer break room (aka grandma's latest baked goods)

Little Tokyo public library

Chinatown dragon gate actually breathes out puffs of mist

Metro Gold Line

Grandma's magical avocado tree

Hammer Museum bookstore

We're literally surrounded by every freeway in the city, but its peaceful here in Boyle Heights. At least from this vantage point, when I have to jump on a freeway that part is self-explanatory.

Variety of tropical, delicious flowering trees not yet identified.

Romper kitties

DISLIKE:

Driving. LA freeways. Being 20 minutes late to Mary Gaitskill's reading at the Hammer even though we left an hour early from Little Tokyo.

Hollywood, and the stranglehold it has on the city. The fawning over television and film shoots people go through is enough to make me want to blow my brains out.

Primo target for megaton strikes (OK that one my fiance came up with, but I'll concede to it)

Distance, even on bike or train or foot. One simply cannot get from point A to point B without a lot of time to spare. Its a real drag.

Lack of a really vibrant letterpress community.

As of yet, no equivalent to Oaklandish, Laughing Squid, or other community unifiers that help me navigate this big city.

No bike paths!

dark lights, splendid histories

2010-03-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

In the passing silence of January and February, I can at least report that I've been busy behind the green scrim, and if you were to jerk back the curtain and see what's happening backstage- I'd say you'd be pretty amazed yourself.

First of all, the impossible has actually been realized as possible: I have left my beloved city of Oakland and moved nearly 300 lbs of books and an additional 1000 lbs of lead type, linoleum block archives and my c&p pilot press to the balmy climes of Los Angeles. Yes, my dear readers- I closed my eyes and walked right off the deep end into the abyss, all for the temptation that comes with a thrilling new job. So many possibilities, I mused...as I packed the eight bookshelves and a snake.

On February 2nd, I became the new curator of history at the Japanese American National Museum, located in Lil' Tokyo, First and Alameda. All is well here, despite a sense of befuddlement and lack of routine- one loses oneself with disturbing ease in Los Angeles clamor. Luckily, I found a place just off of a train line close to Little Tokyo (a neighborhood known as Boyle Heights, once a melting pot of Jews, Japanese, Mexicans and Blacks. Now 98% Mexican, but hey! we have the best selection of paleteria and taco trucks). There's a lot of wandering discovery, sans car, thanks to this Gold Line train. It goes all the way to Pasadena, and stops through Chinatown, Union Station, Little Tokyo, through the eastern neighborhoods of LA.

The Japanese American National Museum, not to my surprise, is all so familiar. And familial. There is an army of grandparents (something in the order of 250 volunteer docents who work here at least once a week. Many have been doing this forever (20 years and counting?) surrounding us with coffeecakes and questions about our health and children and which camp our parents were in. Sort of dizzying, but mostly pleasant and dare I say, a comfort? These docents also inform a good deal of the programming and exhibitions since they constitute a fair chunk of our audience, though they are rapidly aging and every week brings a report of someone else in recovery or at home for an ailment. Busloads of children also come daily, for their first exposure to the JA story and camps....

My main duty as Curator of History in the coming months and years will be exhibitions; in particular I am in charge of re-envisioning our core exhibition on the history of Japanese Americans and rebuilding it, from our collections of 80,000 + artifacts and documents. For those of you who haven't visited the Japanese American National Museum, I assure you that there is nothing quite like it in the country. I encourage each of you to come and experience both the temporary and permanent exhibits, which are both profound with pathos and beautiful for their design and content. The museum is right in the middle of Lil' Tokyo, full of yumyums and awesome old Japanese hardware stores full of saws and tomato seedlings. There is a Kinokuniya bookstore and a restaurant dedicated to japanese curries.

So in coming weeks I hope to get the press and studio back into working order, esp since I have another special announcement I'd like to illustrate and print. More soon, my darklings, more soon.

brown bagger

2010-03-06T21:14:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post these brown bag prints, used to hold homemade candies that Sam concocted. Almond brittle, peanut brittle, almond roca, & dark chocolate/dried apricot/nut bark.

Slightly Behind and to the Left

2010-02-06T16:28:00.001-08:00

My first big project of 2010 was to do fifty customized book jackets for my dear friend, writer extraordinare Claire Light. Her first collection of stories, "Slightly Behind and to the Left" has just been released by Aqueduct Press, a daring small press dedicated to publishing challenging, feminist science fiction. Although Claire was thrilled with the creation of the book, she wanted a little more autonomy and something "special" to celebrate the covers, and thus, came up with the idea of making limited edition book jackets to wrapped around the book.

The concept for the cover image was to depict a seventeen year old Japanese American farmer boy in the strawberry fields of his home, circa 1940. The trick was to evoke alien abduction, the title of the main story in the book.

Here is the initial sketches for the cover image:

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Which then led to the inking stage:

Once Claire signed off on the finished drawing, I did a little bit of Photoshop cleaning using my new Wacom drawing tablet (digital! gasp!), laid out the cover design text, and had polymerplates made by my goodly friends at Logos Design. From there, I had to rely upon the gracious generosity of my friend Maia de Raat of DandyLion Press to utilize her Vandercook Press at the last minute, since the job didn't fit well onto my C&P pilot.

And then we were on! It took about five hours total to crank out the whole run. But I think they are great....printed on recycled brown paper bags for that extra tactile, vintage agrarian look.

Claire is celebrating with a gonzo birthday party/book release event:

SLIGHTLY BEHIND AND TO THE LEFT book launch party!
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: Socha Cafe
Street: 3235 Mission Street

Our collaborative letterpress project was also recently featured on Logos' blog! Check it out right here.

Year of the Tiger nengajo!

2009-12-21T18:27:00.000-08:00

I introduced Sam and Angie to the gocco last night in Berkeley, to stunning results. We printed cards and most importantly the 2010 Year of the Tiger new year's postcards. I just need to carve out the kanji for tiger on an eraser and stamp each of them and then they are ready to be addressed and set free in the mail.

The big deal is...this is the first time ever that I didn't do the nengajo illustrations myself. Sam took the lead on working on a tiger graphic and we just rolled with it. How's that for wasabi teambuilding? Sam has been doing the lion's share of digital design work on the past three projects we've done together and it has been awesome. awesome. awesome.

2010 extinction calendar

2009-12-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

Unbelievable but true....the calendar (edition of 50) is already totally sold out. My first year of real success with Etsy sales (Paypal, yes) which involved fulfilling orders from Santa Fe, New Mexico where Sam and I were assisting in fulltime art classes for two weeks.

Just before we left from Santa Fe we were covered in elbow grease, cranking the calendars out in the makeshift studio space in Oakland. *sweat*!

Here's some glimpses of the production of the calendar in process, printing took place over five hectic days in Oakland.

MUSEUM OF LOST ANIMALS
a calendar dedicated to extinction

The past five hundred million years of the earth's history have been rife with the extinction of countless species and entire ecosystems. Evidence suggests that with every appearance of human habitation, animal extinctions rise dramatically. A dreadful syncopation links the sudden and devastating loss of 74 to 86 percent of species, especially very large mammals such as Woolly Mammoths, Giant Ground Sloths, and Giant Short-faced Bears, with ancient human migration throughout North and South America and Australia, nearly 20,000 years ago.

Some believe that we are witnessing the onset of a sixth major extinction event. This one differs historically in three ways: the rapidity with which species are being lost; the diversity of taxa being affected; and the cause—modern human activities.

Artwork and lino carvings by Patricia Wakida
Calendar design by Sam Arbizo
Letterpress and inkjet printed in Oakland, California

Noodle the dog was seriously depressed about hanging around the printing studio all day. He had romantic notions of all day hikes in the hills, and now...this. Sigh.

My friend Jimmy braved the chill and a headcold to cut some pieces of wood for mounting linoleum onto not only once, but twice. He was duly rewarded with brownies and tangerines.

little linoleum postcard prints

2009-09-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

made in my casita in Taos. Kitchen table press, indeed.

mushroomed, mossy typewriter

2009-09-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Say, a Remington built of balsa wood, its parts glued together like a boyhood model; delicate, graceful, submissive, as ready to soar as an ace. Better, a carved typewriter, hewn from single block of sacred cypress; decorated with mineral pigments, berry juice, and mud; its keys living mushrooms, its ribbon the long iridescent tongue of a lizard. An animal typewriter, silent until touched, then filling the page with growls and squeals and squawks, yowls and bleats and snorts, brayings and chatterings and dry rattlings from the underbrush.” — Tom Robbins

eye-popping goodness in Taos

2009-09-05T14:18:00.001-07:00

Big Happy Guitar

Konnichi-huahua
Santa Fe RR
Snakes on a wall
The neighbors in the alfalfa fields
Hot rod
Mr. Fuzzy Pants Skeins

wood & voodoo

2009-09-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

My great new friend, Joel, has invited me to use the C&P platen, his drawers of type and all the furniture, letting and slugs I need. Luckily, I'm more focused on carving these days and haven't actually jumped onto the big press just yet, but its so beautiful, and such great fun out at his shop that I wanted to share. These are my Taos friends.

Henrietta the chicken and Cole.

Lucky Seven the spotted pony and Georgie his girlfriend.

Lilith and Whiskey in the shop.

The letterpress shop is a magical place- even Lily agrees that she just loves it there. I'm gonna teach her how to set her name and print some posters up for her. Plus, they have grapes! And sunflowers! And broad skies facing the craggy, majestic Sangre de Cristo mountains, with soggy creeks to wade in and watch the Russian olives and cattails turn to fall.

Vintage videorecorders. That's all I heard.

2009-09-05T13:57:00.001-07:00

f

Since I've been so terrible at posting, I might as well throw in this series of drawing to finished printed poster, which was commissioned for the T-10 Video Festival in Oakland, before I left for New Mexico in late July. Two colors (plum and good-n-plenty pink) on salvaged cream colored papers from the Center for Creative ReUse. Many thanks to Sam for setting all of the wood and metal type and for help on the Vandercooks. Who knew he'd be a total natural at this?

the typewriter series

2009-09-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

I started carving images of typewriters, a sort of autobiographical take on things if you look at it in the proper light, here at my summer residency in Taos, New Mexico. As I am working diligently on a first (shitty) draft of the Shigeyoshi Murao biography here, it seemed apt that the writing would somehow leach into the illustration work.

But then, my dear friend and writer, Susan Ito, wrote to tell me that she was interested in putting together chapbooks (one for fiction, one for essays) and that got me all hot and bothered too. Continuing on the theme of manual typewriters, I've come up with two more. The image of the paper cranes has a rather dull title right now "Fiction" (please help inspire me to the land of more appropriate names).

If all goes well, we can work on putting these chapbooks together for release by this winter, don'tcha think?

Arthur Okamura passes in Bolinas

2009-08-10T12:37:00.000-07:00

Another remarkable Nisei has passed on. I conducted two interviews with Arthur last summer as part of my research on Shigeyoshi Murao. While Arthur did not know Shig beyond a nodding acquaintance, he was just bursting with a vitality and playfulness about the world, the risks we take in living, and in seeing beauty. One of my favorite memories of Arthur was encountering him a wild party in honor of the wandering poet, Nanao Sakaki (who also passed recently). Butoh dancers clanged pots, people chanted and waved basil, and Arthur showed us how to make ten people walk through a crisp dollar bill. I will always recall the gorgeous backdrop banner he painted for the annual "Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival" and his appearance in the film, "Farewell to Manzanar" as 'artist'.

A full oral history of Arthur Okamura resides with the City of Bolinas public library (I believe), and he was recently included in the retrospective exhibition on Asian/American/Modern Art at the DeYoung Museum. It grieves me to see him gone- his talent and his generosity were immense, making an indelible mark on both the art world and the book community.

postage stamp portrait of Arthur Okamura by Stu Art, photo by Bill Braasch

Arthur Okamura, Bolinas artist and teacher, dies at 77

Paul Liberatore

Posted: 07/11/2009 12:33:59 PM PDT

Arthur Okamura, a renowned painter and art teacher who enlivened the social and cultural life of Bolinas for 50 years, died unexpectedly on Friday of an apparent heart attack while walking his dog near his home. He was 77.

Mr. Okamura, a prolific painter who also worked in screen printing and drawing, rose to prominence with the San Francisco Renaissance movement in the 1950s.

An abstract expressionist, his work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Okamura taught at the California College of the Arts in Oakland for 31 years, retiring in 1997 as professor emeritus.

"He was a master teacher," said Ron Garrigues of Bolinas, a fellow artist and friend. "He knew more about painting than anyone I've ever met."

Three days before he died, Mr. Okamura taught his weekly art class at the New School at Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas.

Involved in Commonweal since its inception in 1976, he served on its board of directors for more than a decade, and had several exhibits of his work in the Commonweal gallery.

"Arthur was an absolute central figure in the Bolinas community for 50 years," said Michael Lerner, Commonweal's co-founder and president. "He was universally respected and admired. He was an extraordinary artist and a beloved man."

Born in Long Beach, Ca., in 1932, Mr. Okamura was 10 years old when he was interned with his Japanese American family during World War II in relocation camps in Southern California and Colorado.

After the war, the Okamura family settled in Chicago. After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Okamura studied painting on a fellowship in Mallorca, where he became friends with writer Robert Creeley, one of the originators of the "Black Mountain School" of poetry in the '50s.

The Wheel of Analytic Meditation (Sems kyi dpyod pa rnams par sbyong ba so sor brtag pa' i dpyad sgom 'khor lo) and Instructions on Vision in the Middle Way(dBu ma'i lta khrid zab mo) by Lama Mipham. Published by Dharma Pubishing, 1973. Cover and frontispiece illustration by Arthur Okamura

In his career, Mr. Okamura illustrated books of poetry by Creeley, Robert Bly and other writers. Known for his playful nature, he wrote and illustrated "The Paper Propeller, the Spinning Quarter, the Jumping Frog and 38 Other Amazing Tricks You Can Do with Stuff Lying Around the House."

In 1971, he created the pastel drawings for "The People," a television movie directed by West Marin's John Korty.

"Arthur was so multifaceted," Lerner said. "If he came to a party, he would spend his time making things and doing tricks of all kinds. He would create rings out of dollar bills or balance forks on toothpicks. He was constantly inventing and creating. It was at the heart of his being."

Mr. Okamura was represented by the Braunstein/Quay Gallery in San Francisco and had numerous solo and group exhibits since his first show in Chicago in 1953. Known for his tireless creativity, he had completed a series of 30 new paintings in the past six months, friends said.

"He was very well respected and totally dedicated to his art," said Ruth Braunstein, Mr. Okamura's dealer. "After he retired from teaching, he kept on working and was always looking for new ideas. He worked right up to the last moment."

Mr. Okamura is survived by his wife, Kitty Okamura, sons Jonathan Okamura of Petaluma and Ethan Okamura of Bolinas; daughters Beth Okamura of London, England, Jane Okamura of San Rafael and Stephanie Coupe of Oakland. He also leaves his former wife, Elizabeth Tuomi of Bolinas, and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Commonweal, 451 Mesa Rd., Bolinas, 94924. A celebration of Mr. Okamura's life is being planned for later in the summer.

tis wedding season

2009-06-07T20:34:00.001-07:00

Thusly, the presses are humming again.

Two-color print job for Mara and Doug (the delightful design was done by Sarah Pulver), printed first week of June at the San Francisco Center for the Book, on the beloved SP219 Vandercook press. Long job mixing inks and hand trimming the invites for the three bleeds, both worth it. They are really lovely.

Elopement announcements for the adorable Dave and Yasmine, printed way back in March at the Mills College print shop, again on the SP219 Vandercook. I favor these presses for their adjustable beds, even when I'm not printing linoleum.

Yasmine and Dave's announcements involved handset metal type.

The return address on gold envelopes. Classy.

apple of my eye

2009-05-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Our view from the poet and cat's house.

Mr. Meow, himself, lending a claw.

Round the corner from the apartment, the street was blocked off, lit and ultra chink-i-fied for a Chinatown scene shoot. The inch thick glittering confetti did, in fact, take my breath away.

Ghost bikes near the Brooklyn Bridge entrance. I'm seeing these all over these days.

Sam and Brian Castro and I feasted on pastrami sandwiches and chocolate egg cremes here.

gerry shizuko kebo wakida birthday book

2009-05-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

Mom is 70 years old this year (April 18th), and in celebration, I had my brother steal her baby book. Sam and I then scanned images and printed them out at Kinko's, and affixed them to rounded boards painted with black sumi ink, with a sand-colored cardstock accordion spine (this is technically called a Flag Book). Her very first birthday portrait got placement on the cover:

Here's the book scrunched up, featuring a pretty dorky family portrait on the back. No Douglas! This was the pre-Buglas era.
Mom in a gingham bikini with a chunk of lard named PW, followed by her own grub impression when she herself was a few months old.

The birthday culminated in a surprise brunch (I can't believe we actually pulled it off, but she was in fact, very surprised) at sister Debbi's house, with 12 or so of her closest friends. The brunch was catered by Doug with all the stops pulled out.

snapshots from whirlwind book tour

2009-05-22T21:44:00.000-07:00

A few blurry moments on Los Angeles leg of the book tour. First event, at BookSoup on Sunset Boulevard, featuring three Aussie authors.

Steven Raftner, Brian Castro, David Francis. Steven walked from Beverly Hills to the store, much to everyone's shock. His fictional history is about the one Australian passenger on the Titanic. He's a trooper. Courtney Love also crashed the reading, parading back and forth with an armful of titles while sporting a lacy pink dress.

To reach the reading for Brian, Andrew Allport, and Colin Dickey at Betalevel, we had to walk two very dark alleys, then head downstairs into the basement of an actual factual Chinese restaurant. Betalevel was a literary speakeasy and my favorite venue so far, cuz we got to drink very good dirty martinis while talking about literature with USC grad students.

Our final event in Southern California was really quite gorgeous. South Pasadena Public Library is lucky enough to have the magnanimous Steve Fjeldsted on staff as a librarian and event programmer. He brought Brian in and arranged for an opening musical performance on a traditional Chinese zither, had the event sponsored by the Pasadena Chinese American Club, and also arranged for Brian to stay at the nearby Bissell Bed and Breakfast. It was a golden night, enhanced by many familiar Kaya friends (hi Sesshu! hi Naomi! hi Cheryl! hi Sam's mom and aunt!) and this amazing guy on meds in the back who air guitared HEAVILY to the traditional folk music and yelling inappropriate things like "HOT!" after each song.

The inimitable, adorable Jane Marla Robbins in Santa Monica. We brunched on the beach with her dog, Camilla and talked about chapbooks and publishing, boyfriends and music. This is NOT Camilla the dog. This is a statue of a dog.

Before I could leave, I had to stop and say hi hi to performance artist/writer/actress/bicyclist Kristina Sheryl Wong, who graciously allowed me to stay at her apartment, catsitting Oliver while she was out conquering the world during Asian Pacific Heritage Month. Kristina likes West LA Japanese snacks, and so do I. We talked about boyfriends, publishing, Silverlake, Minnesota, and how things change even in three weeks, which is about how long I was on the road, doing book work.

smudging the surface- the chapbook fest

2009-05-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell, the Festival was a super good time. I attended a full day of ridiculously delicious historical lectures on chapbooks (I was especially smitten with Michael Ryan, Director of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University, in a tidy bowtie and with his epic perspective on the traveling bookman of yore).

A second literary panel featured the impressive scholarship of the young curator Kevin Young and the legendary poet and director of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, Anne Waldman, who informed me that there is a HOWL movie in post-production! And just who, pray tell, will be cast to play Shig Murao?!

Day two of the festival was an opportunity to mosey down to the New York Center for Book Arts and partake in an most excellent bookbinding class, taught by the very talented and generous Susan Mills.

Take a good look at this rad homemade, collapsable binding cradle she gave each workshop participant, fashioned from good old fashioned cardboard. I actually met Susan for the first time in the spring at the 2nd annual Codex Book Fair

A few more shots of the Book Arts Center, before I move on to the Asian American Writers Workshop!

Platens. This is the exact same model of letterpress that I first trained on with the Arts & Crafts Press.

Bless your cotton socks, Jane Mead Timken. What is that whimsical, tuxedo stripey font?

An army of Vandercooks

postcard from the chapbook festival

2009-05-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Back from the whirlwind Kaya tour and Chapbook Festival, and discovered this terrific review, featuring much of my presentation at the Asian American Writers Workshop!

Three Day, NYC Blowout in Honor of Thy Chapbook

2009-04-12T13:34:00.000-07:00

caption: not an Asian American publication, nor a poetry platform, but a design primer that will blow your eyeballs out. Will Bradley's American Chapbook ran only a half dozen or so issues, but are a mandatory part of any fine printer/print designer's education. MUST READ. Photographed at the San Francisco Public Library Special Collections.

Continuing this marathon blogging update, I am also pleased to report that I will be sullying the streets of Manhattan late April through early May for a couple of literary reasons, keeping clear of papercuts....

Firstly, I have been invited to participate in this incredible conglomeration of poets and print fanatics for the Festival! of the Chapbook! I can hardly contain my glee and pee when I just say those words outloud. Have bonefolder, will travel.

A Celebration of the Chapbook festival calls attention to the rich history of the chapbook and highlights its essential place in poetry publishing today as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival will forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy and celebrate the importance of chapbooks to America's cultural heritage and future.

AHEM!

Saturday April 25, 2009

I am giving a workshop/lecture at the Asian American Writers Workshop on Asian American chapbook poets and publishers over the decades, and hope to incorporate as much hands-on goodness as possible. I'll be bringing four stone's weight in ye olde chapbooks from various archives, which I hope the group will be able to thumb carefully and critique. Given that I am one part historical, one part book arts, and two parts publishing--I have too many ideas as to how this can all unfold, but fortunately I'm limited to one hour only.

The rest of this astonishing event, which will include vast panels of people talking about the history of chapbooks, modern chapbookery, and publishing chapbooks both for the poet and the publishing house, is listed here.

Then, as if my luck hasn't totally shriveled up, dessicated to a husk just yet I get to stay for another week to escort Australian novelist Brian Castro on his first U.S. book tour ever, as part of my job as publicity and outreach for Kaya Press. Brian's award winning novel, SHANGHAI DANCING, will be released this spring, and as a way to introduce him to American readers, he is embarking on a giddy four-city tour, with yours truly as his own personal lapel straightener and sitter at card table selling copies of the book!

Where Will I Reside

2009-04-12T09:41:00.001-07:00

Great news, folks (aside from the fact that I'm finally off my duff and updating the blog for the first time in like, a dog's age):

Over the past year, I took a gander and applied willy nilly to a number of artist residency programs in and around the United States, with the bloated fantasy of me perched on a wooded hillside, ensconced in a cabin stocked with a woodburning stove, striking matches for candles to illuminate the desk as I scratch out the Shig biography on parchment, snacking out of a gingham lined picnic basket....

Well all in all, I've sent out something like ten applications and have so far received three rejections, one wait list notification, and lo and behold, TWO acceptances! That means that I get to live out these feeble plans of mine to find my inner quill pen and knock this manuscript out somewhere not here at home.

July-September 2009, I'll first be an artist in residence high in the desertscapes of New Mexico at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, where I've also stalked out a local letterpress printer and essentially barged my way into a temporary letterpress apprenticeship in addition to the writerly time

October 2009 Not an official artist residency, but I'm stinking up the guest room of my dear friend Beth in the wildlife choked plains and mountains of Yellowstone National Park

And finally, word just came in the post last week that I have been offered a chance to lollygag with the best intelligent, artsy minds at the Vermont Studio Center, located in Johnson, Vermont.

Three states I've never been privy to; three chances to fulfill the "get the book done, already" urges that are dinning at increasing decibels in my head. I'm waiting to hear one way or another on two or three more applications...so who knows where I'll call home next. The sad part is that after four nourishing years in this gorgeous apartment on 28th street that I've hung my hat and sheltered my snake, I'm packing and giving the place up. This place near Highland has treated me exceedingly well and I won't blush when I say that I owe this sun-dappled home of mine a great deal of effusive gratitude.

Print Run redux

2009-04-12T09:33:00.001-07:00

Some snaps from the exhibition up at 21 Grand!

I know that it would be at least 1000 times more interesting for me to have posted photos from the actual factual opening reception, but duh, I forgot to actually use the camera my brother lent to me for this purpose.

And oh jeez, my friend and work colleague at Kaya Press, Claire Light wrote a review of the show as well (see posting below on my own fledgling career as a person with too much to say about other people's work on the wall).

Slanted

2009-04-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

Several of you have asked how on earth I stay afloat in these trying economic times, and if you've been privy to this performance in real time, you know that my response is usually a long stammering string of part-time, piece meal jobs that are actually really wonderful. Wonderful as in creatively stimulating, art supportive, and pretty freaking diverse.

My latest gig was hatched after having a drink with my ex's sister's new roommate in San Francisco a few months ago. Lucky, lucky me, I get to attend gallery openings in and around the San Francisco Bay Area and review them, thereby oppressing the masses with MY opinions and preferences and overall colored biases.

I did my first round of exhibition reviews for the chic ArtSlant this April. For real, these shows are fresh: go check them out.

[print] run: an exhibition for wasabi press

2009-04-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

I will be showing over two dozen linoprints from over the past several years, including many zodiac animals, nine images from "Edges of Bounty" and a whole mess of posters from my collaborations with Moe!kestra, Slydini, 20 Minute Loop and other bands.

Holy cats. Money raised from sales of the artwork will go directly and I mean Dee-Rectly to my fund to send me to the Vermont Studio Center residency in April 2010. So come, make a scene on the streets of Oakland, and check out the krazy art for free this upcoming Art Murmur on April 3, 2009.

I heart 21 Grand

2009-03-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

Right after I got home from a quick weekend in Vancouver, I jumped onto my platen downstairs and on a rainy rainy night, pushed out 350 odd red fancy envelopes for Oakland gallery and music venue, 21 Grand's annual donor drive.

Among the admirers of 21 Grand on the image is a horned and cloven footed imp and a Grover/gibbon primate guy. Everyone loves 21 Grand. Even the children.

mute socialite poster!

2009-03-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

My latest poster commission from Moe! Staiano- a linoleum/wood and metal type poster for Mute Socialite. Since their cd is entitled "More Popular than Presidents and Generals", I took a gander and drew up my two most important president/general combos and came up with U.S. President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt fused with General Douglas MacArthur. Kind of like a playing card. Sorta like siamese twins of World War II.

Terrible lock up! This is not how it was when I finally printed. See the wiggling "W"?

kettlestich mania

2009-03-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad, negligent blogger. The glad news is that work has been put-putting steadily out of wasabi press. The sad news is that I ate all of the strawberries.

Handsewn journals with collaged covers and endpapers, made over the weekend.

Happy Moo Year!

2009-02-01T19:44:00.001-08:00

I, Literary Historian

2009-01-24T10:52:00.000-08:00

From the Hokubei Mainichi. Thank you, again and again, JK Yamamoto.

"End of an Error" Moe!sters

2009-01-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

I realize I haven't added any gist to this mill in nearly a month, but rest assured dear stealth readers, I have not been a sloth!

A new year, a new Moe! Staiano poster commission (I think this is the fourth Moe! linocut letterpress poster I've done so far). This upcoming show at Oakland's Uptown promises to usher George W. Bush outta town in style, with a debut composition performed by Moe!kestra entitled "The End of an Error".

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Uptown

1928 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland

9 p.m.

$5 donation in the hat!

Best part was that he paid me entirely in $2 bills, stuffed into a envelope with a rubberband, drug style, PLUS I got a delicious vinyl Mute Socialite 45, half licorice, half orangcicle out of the job. Thank you, Moe!

Feliz Navidad

2009-01-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Custom illustrated and printed chocolate boxes! This was a super limited edition of 12, but totally worth it. In each box were handmade lavender white chocolates, truffles, dark chocolate with crushed hazelnuts, and delicate chocolate cookies with a mousse filling. Heartbreakingly delicious.

Happy Birthday, Shigeyoshi and Shizuko

2008-12-08T15:16:00.000-08:00

from the February 5, 1934 Seattle Post-Intelligence, "School Claims Twin Record with 11 Pairs" Shig and Shiz are at the very bottom, ten years old (bless their cotton socks!)

day of infamy

2008-12-08T15:12:00.000-08:00

My 84 and a half year old friend (and former JA internee), Kiku, called last night to talk to me about my use of the word "internment camp" instead of "concentration camp" in my lecture at the library. I can see the argument either way, but have yet to be totally convinced to the use of concentration camp. Anyone up to swaying me either direction?

The library display I curated of Japanese American resources at the Olin Library, Mills College, is up now. I need to go by one more time to fuss with the signage, but by in large, I am happy with what I pulled together with the help of librarian Nancy McKay.

Shig! lecture at the San Francisco Main Public Library

2008-12-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

"No, I'm not a Chinese-American. I'm an American Eskimo." Hastily departed matron from Duluth: "How interesting!" Furious deadbeat, after having been turned out of City Lights Bookstore for bothering everybody by spare-changing, "Who that fat Chinaman think he is anyway?"

This large, thick, imposing person of the small feet, the spiky black beard like a fence around his aloofness, he of the aplomb, this is Shigeyoshi Murao, known far and wide as "Shig". He is manager and part-owner, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the bookstore; he has been there from the beginning."

— from Common Soldiers by Janet Richards

the 2009 calendars are here!

2008-12-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

At long long last, I have crawled out from under my annual private letterpress hibernation and emerged with the 2009 "Edges of Bounty" letterpress linoleum calendar. The entire project is based on a miraculous book entitled "Edges of Bounty" that was published earlier this year by Heyday Books, written by William Emery, featuring the magnificent photographs of Scott Squire.

It is a California Central Valley, food themed calendar with thirteen original linoleum blocks, printed on delectable Canson papers in delectable hues. All quotations throughout the calendar are borrowed liberally from William's essays, set in Bell MT typeface, which were printed from polymer plates. Calendars are $45 each; $3 per calendar for shipping. 8" x 12.5" trim size, limited edition of 100 calendars.

Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!

I will be tabling at a few holiday fairs over the next few weeks, selling calendars in person:

21 Grand/Art Murmur in Downtown Oakland:

Friday December 5th, 7-10 p.m.

San Francisco Center for the Book Holiday Fair

Friday (6-8) and Saturday (12-5), December 12th

Root Division Holiday Fair

Saturday, December 12th, 7-10 p.m.

Or just get in touch- I can swaddle up these muffins in no time and deliver them piping hot to your very own door!

2009 Edges of Bounty calendar

2008-11-28T21:39:00.000-08:00

Living at the Center for the Book letterpress printing the 2009 Edges of Bounty calendar. Here are some previews of my studio time.

edges of bounty 2008 calendar

2008-10-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

A very quick posting today, as I just arrived home from a transformative artists' hangout at Mono Lake last night (more on that soon) and am off to Minneapolis, MN to visit Coffee House Press this morning.

I've finally settled on a subject for my 2008 calendar- with their permission, I'm adapting the stellar photography (Scott Squire) and gorgeous prose (William Emery) from a project they spent several years creating (a year traveling around the Central Valley, a year to finish writing, editing and going through production), and which is now in published book form by Heyday Books, as well as on the web through www. edgesofbounty. com. Jeepers, I'm really not explaining the Edges of Bounty project adequately, so forgive me until I get back into the saddle this weekend.

Here are a few sketches, still to be adapted into 5 x 7 linoblocks.

evolve

2008-09-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

Little Lino (12" x 12") just in time for the Roadworks Steamroller prints this Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at the San Francisco Center for the Book. A real record- I started drawing yesterday afternoon and made my first marks on the lino late last night and finished before 11 p.m. the next day. whew!

I mentioned to Minette that it looks suspiciously like a tattoo design, replete with unfurling ribbon banner. Seeing that I am going through a pretty major transition in my life right now, it seems fitting that I went through the process of carving the tattoo out of the fleshy tan linoleum without actually getting the tattoo staccato-ed onto my body.

mimi, miyeko, bachan, mom

2008-09-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

I made this book in 1997, in honor of my maternal grandmother, Miyeko Okamura Kebo, who celebrated her 80th birthday that year (she is still alive, although extremely frail and feeble, living in Fresno with my Aunt Janis. But give her a break! She's 91 years old.) I am named after this grandmother, and this book was one of the very first I ever assembled, designed, printed and bound. In it is a collection of letters and truly extraordinary photographs of my Bachan that I solicited from family friends and relatives in her honor, and since I only made five copies at the time, I finally got down and scanned the book for wider distribution. You may note that my piece (the final letter in the book) is abnormally historical in nature. See? I was buck-toothed and hopelessly covered in archival dust eleven years ago.

One errata: the title poem is written by Kathy Kebo. Her name was accidentally left off the page in my original design (which was done with tremendous support from Bruce Smith of the Arts & Crafts Press).

**RATS! Stupid stupid Blogger is acting jinky and for some reason, most of the images are lying on their sides. Sigh. Bear with me while I try to remedy this malfunctioning post.

portraits of Quincy

2008-09-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

I received a blog request for color photos of Quince!

Some quick backstory though, since you asked. Quincy came about via a high school biology teacher and closet herpetologist (hey, Mr. Herrick!) and was a graduation gift to me from my one and only brother, Doug. That was in 1992, the year I graduated from Mills College. Quince was but a little chopstick of orange delight then, so tiny that I could hold her in the palm of my hand and had to feed her baby doll pinkie newborn mice. Photos of Quincy at that stage must exist somewhere- I'm going to have to dig into my archives to find them though, so patience, dear readers.

She is named after the "coroner of the stars" Quincy, M.D., that crazy 70s television drama starring Jack Klugman, which has an excellent theme song, by the way. Rumor has it that the tv show "Quincy" was actually modeled after the real-life Japanese coroner, Thomas Noguchi. Noguchi has penned several memoirs about his life in the forensic sciences, and also appeared as himself in the classic high school shocker, "Faces of Death"!

Lost snake $100 reward

2008-09-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, in the heat of other personal drama, I discovered through our neighbors that Quincy the snake had somehow escaped from the house. (Fallen out the window? Took the stairs? Dumb waiter?) My kind neighbors put up an actual ad on Craigslist.

Once it sunk in that my snake was loose in the neighborhood of East 28th Street, I realized to my horror that chances of ever finding her again were pretty much close to nil. That went over well, as you can imagine. After prodigious weeping and tearing of hair on chest, I managed to pull myself together enough to distribute flyers (the first draft was totally incomprehensible, full of blowsy sentiments and history of the snake, outrageous reward offers, etc.) and bother the neighbors, door to door. I quickly remembered that it is universally understood that Everybody Hates Snakes, a creepy feeling shared by all cultures: Chinese, Black, Vietnamese, White, Latino, Creole...So each emotional plea on my part was met with animosity and barely contained disgust ("Sure, I'll keep my eyes peeled and look around the backyard" followed by subtle nostril flaring and eye bulges).

I finally went knocking on the door of the doctor who lives in a huge Victorian mansion with acreage surrounding his property directly behind us, and when he proved to be absent, left him a flyer, then poked around his backyard with BR with no success. Woodpiles, bushes, dead leaves, cat poop. No snake. So we started the walk back to the doctor's front gate, which is long since he has a formidable sized front yard. Still leaking tears and hiccuping sobs, I kept scanning the ground for gory snake remains and as my eyes passed over to the right side of the gravel path, not but a few inches from where my foot trod, there was....a dappled pink/orange snake, hesitantly inching forward in full exposed sunlight (very unsnake like behavior! But then again, Quincy is not knowing of birds and raccoons and cats and stray dogs. bleh) It was a MIRACLE OF BUDDHA. One lucky snake. And one lucky, lucky, blessed snake mom.

Contours in the Air

2008-09-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

She is very beautiful, quiet, energetic, and unaffected and believes almost religiously in work. She is five feet two inches tall and has very black hair. Besides her painting and design work she likes to grow things and cultivates mad little gardens at school and she had rather dance than eat.

— letter written by Albert Lanier introducing Ruth to her future in-laws, 1948

Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier were extraordinarily talented, young, and beautiful artists who met while studying together at the renown Black Mountain College in 1946. Through the guidance and instruction of major art figures such as painter Josef Albers, dancer Merce Cunningham, and architect Buckminister Fuller, Black Mountain College gave the two lovers the self-confidence and courage to pursue careers as artists and to brave the untested waters of a mixed race marriage, just a few years following the end of WWII, which had cast a perceptible pallor over the entire population Japanese Americans like Ruth Asawa and her family.

To understand her origins as an artist and her motivation to continue to create things of "unrefined beauty" well into her 80s, one must observe Ruth Asawa's early experiences as a child of immigrant farmers, with a strict and conservative Japanese culture cocooning her, as did the subsequent years spent in an American interment camp through the duration of the war. It is not typical for artists to begin their careers in incarceration, but despite the hardship, Asawa not only absorbed lessons from her time in camp (she first learned weaving as a volunteer camoflage net maker, and picked up the sumi brush during art classes in camp), she flourished. She was only 16 when she and her family were forcibly removed from their homes in Norwalk, California, and interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreprable harm. For Asawa, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life.

(photos by Laurence Cuneo and Hazel Larsen from www.ruthasawa.com)

we have to shake the tree...we will make it fall

2008-08-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

transfered image from the drafting papers onto bristol board and inked all the live long day...its got its rough spots but in pretty good shape. could still use a little working I'm sure. I added the quote just for placement, since I won't be actually designing the t-shirt and am not exactly sure how they will handle this.

good morning gocco

2008-08-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Its been at least a year since I've pulled out my Japanese gocco printer, what with the cost of supplies out the roof and well, my experience with gocco in general has been somewhat spotty. The results are always a tad unpredictable in terms of evenness of printing and multi-screen registration is a real b*tch.

But all snarling aside, I had the perfect project to crank out on gocco, so after an energetic morning round of paper cutting, I got to it.

Drying the prints on the sun drenched kitchen table.

Gocco inks and screens taking a breather on the New Yorker magazine.

Very limited edition of cards in honor of the arrival and safe homecoming of Marcas Liam Taylor, the littlest bear of all.

illustrator for hire: part 2

2008-08-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

For an upcoming POWER: People Organized to Win Employment Rights t-shirt. I did several sketches for them...guess which image they liked the best, the one I'm working on refining now? The quote is the only thing they gave me for direction on this freelance project. But cool! My first t-shirt design (I mean, not some jinky print I did myself at home with fabric inks and gocco or some smeared up linoblock).

illustrator for hire: part 1

2008-08-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

Illlustration project for the UCSF Parent/Infant program. This is only one of the (hopefully) multiple images I will be creating for their website and other marketing uses, and despite my common sense, I decided to go ahead and carve a linoblock out of this image, even though the illustration below (plain old graphite on paper) is cleaner in some ways. There is just something about my favorite medium (and sharp knives) that I just can't resist.

I've learned a lot through this project already- not being a mother myself, I am challenged with the unique and quite funny challenges of drawing people coddling babies, without looking menacing or distant. Things that might seem totally innocuous to those of us who are still awkward when a relative or good friend pitches their newborn into your arms saying, "can you hold her for just a sec..." and launches off before you can really protest know exactly what I'm talking about. Floppy, doughy, big headed...but really ultimately adorable. I don't have a babe in arms just yet, but I can carve one out of clay.

birthday in pt. reyes

2008-08-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

We started the trip on Thursday by trekking out to Tomales Bay with Doug, Buddyray, Kimi and Anthony to the Tomales Bay Oyster Farm for serious birthday grinding. Despite claims that he doesn't really like oysters (ok so he still maintains that he doesn't like raw oysters), Buddyray tucks away a small kingdom's worth of grilled bivalves. He is followed closely behind by Anthony, who has already pledged allegiance to the oyster feast.

Buddyray warming his paws by the grill, groaning with oysters and sardines wrapped in shiso.

Anthony contemplates his victim before slurping the oyster raw (with cocktail sauce, of course).

We, the intrepid backpackers. Anthony and Kimi are suited up with the external frame packs she used to climb Mt. Whitney back in the 70s.

The next morning, we discovered a pair of mice had sabotaged our box and shredded all napkins, cloth towels, tea bags, and other soft fuzzy combustibles into oblivion! If you think I was mad then, this was before the rodent jerk jumped full throttle out of my foodbag, helter skelter into the bushes! Followed by his kamikaze wife! I screamed, readers. Yes indeed, I screamed. It was a good thing my snake wasn't tucked into my coiffure that day.

These two were nearly blown away at Sculptured Beach.

There was a mighty wind that arose in the afternoon as we set up tents, and again at night. On the second night, we were surprised by numerous night visitors (human). First Angie and Luke appeared out of the shadows long after nightfall, and then some crazy German cyclist pedaled up asking if we had seen his camping party. He had biked all the way from Menlo Park and looked sorely in need of a blanket and some s'mores.

Going home meant loading up our sherpa.

Wait, we need to climb 300 odd stairs down to the edge of the earth where we can scream mundane phrases at each other in the deafening wind, and threaten to push each other off the cliff to the fate of seagulls!

Butt that's not the tail end of our story. Driving home on Lucas Valley Road, we encountered nearly a hundred cyclists along the road, on what must have been a breathtakingly beautiful race.

"It is no longer a question of whether or not we should set aside some more of the yet remaining native California landscape as 'breathing space'....If we do not, we will leave our children a legacy of concrete treadmills leading nowhere except to other congested places like those they will be trying to get away from."

- Former Congressman Clem Miller, author of the Point Reyes National Seashore bill presented to the 87th Congress, January, 1961.

One day's harvest

2008-07-12T16:32:00.001-07:00

From our gorgeous lil' organic garden down the street, Bella Vista. Here's BR watering and picking green beans with our friend Naima.

cling vs. freestone

2008-07-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

Yes indeedy, being the Central Valley agriculturally raised kids that we are, my brother and I (bonafide former 4-Hers) actually do know how to can, preserve, and dry our bounties. I missed the actual harvesting party out in Brentwood and goshiso lunch at Lucy Arai's house, but was around later that night to pit the apricots, peel peaches and watch Doug sterilize and cook the fruit down. Our rad mom STILL to this day teaches food preservation and nutrition to local kids in the Clovis/Fresno area and remains crazy active with 4-H, both nationally and on the Fresno Fair level.

Spaaaaace Baaaaaaalls

2008-07-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

What do you do the day after a big holiday involving colored fire, bbq pork, hot tubs, jazz standards, baby nieces in a new house, and new/old samurai flicks? You go to West Oakland to play miniature golf created by art collective Space 1026, that's what.

mockturtle linoblock

2008-07-05T16:33:00.000-07:00

originally commissioned for a Mute Socialite poster, but its a little bit homeless at the moment since I couldn't do the job in time for the cd release party (bleh.) nods to the woodblock master, Barry Moser.

recently, from the sketch book

2008-07-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

BookWorks at the San Francisco Public Library

2008-07-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

The books are in the cases, lit and in full glory over at the San Francisco Main Public Library....111 outrageously beautiful and wierd books handmade by book artists from around the world. This is my third, count 'em, THIRD time organizing the show, and I don't know if I get better at it as much as I get seasoned. For anyone who has an appetite for remarkable range of books in their myriad possible forms, sculptural, traditional or otherwise, I highly recommend checking it out- I think it just might explode your notions of what a book can be.

BookWorks exhibition is on the 6th floor Skylight Gallery of the SF Main and will be up until September 26th. Just a hop across the street from Civic Center BART.

For some photos of the cases (courtesy of ace photographer Kate Godfrey), go right here:

what we ate (part II, the revenge)

2008-06-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

Isn't he the cutest boy in the world? Here he is, enjoying a bagel sandwich at Tiny's Coffee Shop, where Garret's artwork is up for display. The corn soup (corn!) was mighty tasty too.

James, dangling his bait in Seattle. The rains did not abate, so we ate pho in the afternoon, tempura udon and sushi at night.

By the time we hit Vancouver to visit and chill out with SuYin, things finally dried up and we ate al fresco by cozying up to a venison and banana pepper pizza.

But at night, SuYin took us to a local izekaya called "GUU Otokomae" where we ate like kings.

Behold, the stuffed tomato with rice and hijiki, rolled in panko and fried like a croquette, served with tomato sauce.

Wot a dish! Unagi on top of chirashi zushi.

There were several memorable dishes in-between that aren't making an appearance, so I shall name them only but name. A duck salad, a sashimi salad, a tofu salad, and two heavenly grilled onigiri (one miso, one shoyu).

Lastly, we stuffed our holes with a black sesame ice cream, a mango "chichai little happiness pudding" and tempura banana served with the best coconut ice cream ever known to mankind.

On the walk home to Suyin's fat condo on The Edge, Bill contemplated whether or not to have the jalapeno cheese dog from the street vendor, but decided instead that he'd drink several small local stout beers before officially calling it a wrap. Thank you to all of our friends who let us stink up their homes for a night or two, including Wayne and Smokey, who weren't recorded for posterity, since the camera batteries went kaput in Klamath Falls. Thank you, sweet ones, thank you.

and what we ate

2008-06-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

Guacamole in the rain. Note the tupperware brimming with the asparagus, mushroom pasta dish that we stretched out over 2 1/2 days in the crook of his arm.

Our good buddies, Garret and Melissa in Portland. They sheltered us from the pouring rain, gave us showers and clean sheets and served us great grilled chicken and an awesome cheesecake with icecream (Garret is a cake decorator at a local bakery, in addition to being a terrific illustrator, photographer and my "art-ner"). They also introduced us to the highly addictive tv show "Cash Cab" and burned about 1,000 awesome early rock, roots, and punk albums for us to listen to.

Breakfast was so good we almost cried. Apple maple sausages! Three kinds of toast! Homemade homefries!

But sin of sins, we weren't done with Portland just yet. We had gotten wind of the world-famous Voodoo Donuts and weren't going to let that just slide. Your eyes are not deceiving you- that is a bonafide maplebar with a slice of bacon atop and several man-sized bites taken out of it. Cradled next to it is the chocolate raspberry blood filled voodoo man (pretzel stick through his heart), a triple chocolate pentration donut with cocoa puffs adorning its hole, and peeking behind the waxed paper, an Oreo crumble donut. Lordy.

To reassure everyone, following this roadtrip, BR and I are now on strict "Zone" diets and are running around the lake daily.

cloudbursting

2008-06-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

Quail & Quince

2008-06-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

Key block carved and the first rough print pulled using the ye-olde-fashioned inking and hand braying onto tracing paper method. A few days later, I jumped on a Vandercook and did a few test runs there, working out alignment issues, refining the carving, cutting down paper, and putting down the first three colors.

Good lordy, let's hope that the registration actually works out. There was a magical accidental moment due to slightly sloppy ink application, I got a split font effect for the mustardy brown yellow block, which came out surprisingly wunnerful.

And finally, with all five colors and blocks printed, we have the quail quince print complete.

Ten itchy miles from Las Trampas to Chabot

2008-05-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, the OG hikers group were reunited after many years of non hikes together: Rosemary, Kimi, Minette, Florence, and me. The challenge: a ten mile, ranger-led hike on the Ramage Peak EBMUD trail. Rather than recount it, I'll steal liberally from a follow-up email from our fearless leader, Kimi:

"All five of us gave it a thumbs up! Highly recommended. However, it is not a hike to take without either a good map, or someone leading the way, or both. You need an EBMUD pass. The two car shuttle worked great. Lots of grass— Patty had a full scale allergy attack (ed note: and later suffered ten excrutiatingly itchy insects on my shoulder and arm, innocently suffered over our lunch break). One drawback was hearing the bullets popping from the shooting range in Chabot, an odd sound to hear int hemiddle of nowhere. Its 10 1/2 miles, a lot of up and down, but there is enough shaded trail that its tempting to consider hiking this trail in late spring/early summer.

By odd coincidence, on this very remote trail we were one of three groups of 15 to 20 people on the trail the same day. One was the Orinda Hiking Club. The other was INCH, who barely stopped to say one sentence to us. Their motto is: Less talking, more walking, "Some people like to hike to enjoy the beauty of nature...some people hike to achieve inner serenity...some people hike for the physical and mental challenge...we hike because we love to suffer!" They were doing a 20 miler up and back, and the previous week they had done a 32 mile hike in the East Bay hills. Crazy."

Quiddity

2008-05-10T00:24:00.000-07:00

Just a few digs away from completing this linoblock for the Four Oceans "Food Alphabet" print exchange project. Being the insane, impractical type, I naturally chose the letter "Q".

In memory, Toyoji Tomita

2008-04-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I am grieved to make this post a memorial to the talented avant-garde trombonist, Toyoji Tomita, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack this morning.

I met Toyoji through an odd, round-about connection. I had first befriended his mother of all people, Nisei writer Mary Tomita ("Dear Miye: Letters from Japan, 1939-1946"), and felt an uncanny connection with her from the moment I first stumbled across her book. "Dear Miye" is a memoir in the form of one-sided correspondences between Mary (who was accidentally stranded for most of the duration of WWII in Japan, while her family was interned in the US.) and her best friend, Miye, who, like the Tomita family, was forced out of their homes and farms in California's Central Valley, and sent into one of ten American internment camps. "Dear Miye" had a tremendous impact on me, as so many things about Mary's life somehow paralleled and resonated deeply within me. Thus, I was overjoyed to learn that she was still very much alive and living not but 5 miles away from me, in Oakland. We met and stayed loosely in touch for a few more years (one incident I remember poignantly was being invited over for lunch at her house with several other prominent Asian American women activists in attendance, including the renowned Yuri Kochiyama).

On one such occasion, I learned that Mary had a son. Toyoji Tomita, who was not only helping to arrange for his mother's book to become the libretto for an opera, but who had founded the Mills College Dijeridoo Ensemble (!!) and was an active member of the Bay Area new music community, the very same circle of musicians that my boyfriend belonged to. It didn't take long for us to meet- often during cigarette breaks outside the warehouses or theaters where Toyoji and Bill would both be performing. At one particular concert for SF Sound, Toyoji and I stood out on the curb and I mentioned that I knew his mother. He nodded between drags and acknowledged that he knew who I was too. Later, there were longer talks about his music, literature, his mother, and the kind of research and writing I was engaged in. Always the burnished warmth of his eyes behind his glasses, the mouth of a lifelong brass player, enabling a smile.

I did not know Toyoji very well, and our conversations were brief. But our paths crossed right at the juncture of art and life and ancestry, and it is one of the reasons why I grieve today. Having seen him on stage on numerous occasions and knowing the wild and sonorous kind of improvisational music that he favored, I can only imagine how much depth there was to his soul and intellect. The world of sound, in its boundless palette, is that much greyer today with the loss of Toyoji Tomita's song.

An article on Toyoji Tomita appeared in Asian Week in 2004:

link here

William Eisenlord's City Lights photos, ca. 1959

2008-03-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

An amazing Shig discovery today (in a chain of really really great research discoveries lately, ranging from Selden Kirby-Smith's poetry, to Joanne Kyger's Japan journals pinpointing the day that Shig arrived in Kyoto, and yes yes there's more.) The Smithsonian Archive of American Art has just digitized the collection of San Francisco photographer William Eisenlord's photos of City Lights Bookstore from 1953-1959. Apparently there was an exhibition of Eisenlord and fellow photographer Ed Nyberg's work at the San Francisco Museum of Art, January 30, 1976 entitled " Poets of the City", where these photographs were displayed to the public. Sadly, Mr. Eisenlord appears to have passed on in 1976, otherwise I would have reveled in the chance to interview him on his early impressions of the store and its guardian, Shig Murao.

and on the book front...

2008-03-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

Also just last night, I printed 100 + covers for Jared Stanley's upcoming book of poetry, The Outer Bay (published by Traffiker Press).

Plus printed 50 dvd covers for Buddyray's long-awaited dvd performance of 'ltfhtp'. Muscles!

sprung equinox

2008-03-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was a froth of garlands and nosegays: wisteria hanging like pendulums sweet with bees from the bowers, cherries and apples, sugar-spun perfection, soaproot lilies and the pink chandelier rhibes decking the Oakland hills.

Hikes up the west ridge of the East Bay Hills, we hung out with dogs, dogs, dogs.

Check out these tiny four-legged hosers we met at our easter picnic in Mosswood Park with Filipino food, a big ass ham, and my little niece, Lily Jane (Lily was born one year ago on Easter, for the record, but Easter is two weeks early. Her real first birthday is April 8th).

hon-mono (the real deal)

2008-03-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

Fantastic Bolinas artist, Arthur Okamura, gave me the greatest of all gifts when I went out to interview him for the Shig project. Upon learning that my moniker is "wasabi", Arthur led me to the pond in his yard, and there, tucked beneath the shadows were several potted wasabi plants. Live! Throbbing! Verdant!

Now it turns out that wasabi plants are notoriously difficult to raise- they demand cold water constantly flowing over their roots, and short of my building a simulated mountain stream from Gifu cascading down our backstairs, I was a bit flummoxed about how to properly care for my new ward.

As it turns out, we've had quite a rainy winter so far, and without doing much beyond keeping it in the indirect sun and that there is always water available, the wasabi is thriving. When I first got it, it had only three leaves, which actually fell off (though they were replaced by three more).

The lil' wasabi is now sprouting many more leaves, and the rhizome is even sending up a new set of leaves elsewhere in the pot!

Albert and Laura Saijo in Volcano, HI

2008-01-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

Akemashite Omedeto 2008

2008-01-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

Thou Knowest Thy Bliss

2007-12-31T17:44:00.001-08:00

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

Lily Jane Jigmeister!

2007-12-31T17:29:00.000-08:00

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

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

New Year Nengajo

2007-12-31T17:23:00.000-08:00

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

Mission Peak

2007-12-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

Tramping upwards from the Ohlone College parkinglot in Fremont.

Ruddy windchapped faces.

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

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

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

Do as you are told

2007-11-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Mulled cider and cookies and platen presses.

The Rat Race is On!

2007-11-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

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

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

Cheese out!

Jack O'Lanterns of Berkeley

2007-11-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

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

NaNoWriMo

2007-11-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

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

But back to the novel-

May Sky: Violet de Cristoforo (1917-2007)

2007-10-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes what she expressed was simply that life went on:

Myriad insects

in the evening

my children are growing

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

Misty moon

as it was

on my wedding night

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

Foolishly -- simply existing

summer days

Castle Rock is there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My heart perceives nothing

day to day

summer at its peak in highland

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

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

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

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

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Me n' Mas in Merced

2007-10-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outskirts of the Moment

2007-09-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

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

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

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