Kenneth Yasuda

Kenneth Yasuda was born in Auburn, California, on June 23, 1914. The son of Placer County farmer Kenjiro Yasuda, Kenneth grew up on his family's 60-acre plum orchard on the outskirts of Newcastle, California. Growing up in rural Placer County, Yasuda showed an early interest in literature. The young Yasuda befriended famed mystery writer Clark Ashton Smith, who resided in Auburn, during his youth. It is likely that Smith inspired Yasuda to pursue a literary career, as Yasuda later acknowledged Smith in many of his future books.

After graduating from Auburn High School in 1932, Yasuda attended Placer Junior College. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Washington in Seattle. At Berkeley, he met his future wife Constance Murayama. At UW, he became interested in poetry. He studied literature and poetry under scholar Lawrence Zillman, and also travelled to Japan, where he studied with haiku expert Kyoshi Takahama. Yasuda published several poems in Japanese American newspapers, specifically the Shin Sekai Asahi Shinbun and the Nichi Bei Shinbun . He completed his bachelor's in English from the University of Washington in 1942.

Following the enactment of Executive Order 9066 , Yasuda reunited with his family at Tule Lake concentration camp in northern California. Initially, Yasuda worked as an English teacher at the camp's high school before quitting to devote attention to his literary career. While at Tule Lake, Yasuda became a regular contributor to the Tulean Dispatch 's monthly magazine. His poems for the magazine often took inspiration from the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Butler Yeats. For example, his poem "At Tule Lake" focused on isolation and the beauty of the landscapes surrounding the camp. Yasuda also penned several essays on literary criticism for the Dispatch , such as his two-part essay "Haiku and Painting" for the February and March 1943 issues. The essay analyzed haiku as a form of literary painting, where careful word choice could inspire dazzling visual images.

Yasuda also remained connected to the camp literary scene through his girlfriend Constance and Constance's mother, Sada Murayama. Sada, an older Nisei woman from San Francisco, played an important role in organizing the Tule Lake theater. An outspoken patriot, Sada Murayama penned the poem "Loyalty" for the Tulean Dispatch's anniversary issue, where she extolled camp inmates to appreciate their country.

In summer 1943, several months after the War Relocation Authority implemented the [[Loyalty questionnaire|loyalty questionnaire], Yasuda and the Murayamas transferred to Jerome concentration camp. Constance Murayama received permission to attend Smith College, where she received a master's in English.

At Jerome, Yasuda continued work on poetry. He became acquainted with artist Henry Sugimoto , and wrote a poem based on seeing one of his paintings titled "Longing." During a talk held at nearby Rohwer camp, Yasuda met famed Southern poet John Gould Fletcher. The first Southern poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, Fletcher was a member of the Imagist movement of the early 20th century along with Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. Yasuda developed a bond with Fletcher over poetry, and the two corresponded and remained close friends until Fletcher's tragic suicide in 1950.

In June 1944, following the closure of the Jerome camp, Yasuda was transferred to Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. There, he began work on his first poetry collection. Fletcher mentored Yasuda and counseled him on how to publish his poems. Yasuda published his first collection of poems, Halcyon Interlude, with Dorrance Press in 1945. The book included several of his poems from Tule Lake, Jerome, and Heart Mountain, many of which were inspired by the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. While the book failed to garner any attention, it provided Yasuda with valuable practice for working with publishers. It also led him to focus more on haiku as his preferred poetry format.

By June 1945, Yasuda left Heart Mountain and returned to Seattle. In Seattle, Yasuda continued work on his haiku anthology. After failing to procure a contract with another publisher, Yasuda consulted Fletcher and his advisor at University of Washington, George Savage, for advice. Savage contacted Alfred Knopf, who offered Yasuda a contract. In January 1947, A Pepper Pod was released by Knopf. Consisting of original translations of Japanese poets Bashō and Buson—Yasuda adopted the pen name "Shōson" in their honor— along with a foreword by Fletcher, A Pepper Pod was Yasuda's first successful publication. It also featured several original poems by Yasuda. One, titled "At Denson, Arkansas," alluded to his time at Jerome concentration camp:

'Gainst the inky sky

The lightning paints the great oak

As it flashes by.

Despite lacking any pointed reference to the camps, it was among the first poems to reference the camps in a mainstream literary publication.

A Pepper Pod received mixed reviews from literary critics. Reviews for the book appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , and The Chicago Daily Tribune .

Building off the success of A Pepper Pod, Yasuda enrolled in courses at Columbia University, where he studied with literary scholar and poetry expert Mark Van Doren. His wife, Constance, taught English at Adelphi College in Long Island at the same time. The Yasudas soon left for Japan, where he enrolled at the University of Tokyo to pursue a doctorate in literature, becoming the first Japanese American to do so. In Tokyo, he supported himself by working as a translator for the Allied Occupation.

In Japan, Yasuda continued to publish on Japanese literature. He produced several poetry anthologies, including Poem Card, Minase Sangin Hyakunin, and Lacquer Box. In 1956, he completed his dissertation at the University of Tokyo on the nature of haiku. It was soon published as The Japanese Haiku by Charles E. Tuttle Press.

Yasuda's connection with Tuttle later brought him contact with John Okada's No-No Boy. While working as a book reviewer for The Japan Times, Yasuda was offered the chance to review No-No Boy in 1957. Yasuda offered praise to the book, citing that it advanced Japanese Americans by establishing a literary tradition similar to African Americans. It was one of the few contemporary reviews of No-No Boy upon its publication and one of two (besides Bill Hosokawa 's review of the book) written by a Japanese American.

After completing his doctorate at University of Tokyo, Yasuda started working for the Asia Foundation in 1957. Three years later, in 1960, Yasuda accepted a teaching position in the Japanese language department at University of Hawai'i, Manoa. That same year, he published a collection of translations of the ancient Japanese text The Manyoshu in the book The Land of the Reed Plains . The book, also published by Tuttle Press, featured original illustrations by Sanko Inoue. He also worked on several projects with the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i, including a translation of Kojiro Yuichiro's work Forms in Japan in 1966.

In 1966, Yasuda moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to join the faculty of Japanese at the University of Indiana. There, he shifted his attention to theater criticism, where he wrote several Noh plays. His study of Noh culminated in the publication of Masterworks of the Nō Theater in 1989. Boasting a foreword by Earl Miner, Masterworks of the Nō Theater included a play by Yasuda on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Portraying King in the "warrior" archetype, Yasuda's play presented his most engaging work on the issue of racism.

Kenneth Yasuda died on January 26, 2002.

Chang, Gordon H., ed. Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942-1945 . Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 1997.

van Harmelen, Jonathan. "Kenneth Yasuda: The Nisei poet who foresaw the success of No-No Boy." The International Examiner, Nov. 7, 2022.

Yasuda, Kenneth. Halcyon Interlude. Dorrance: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1945.

———. A Pepper Pod. Knopf: New York City, New York, 1947.

———. Poem Card: The Hyakunin-isshu in English. Tokyo: The Kamakurabunko, 1948.

———. Lacquer box. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1952.

———. Minase Sangin Hyakuin: A Poem of One Hundred Links Composed by Three Poets at Minase. Tokyo: Kogakusha, 1956.

———. The Japanese Haiku, Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples . Tuttle: Tokyo, Japan, 1957.

———. Land of the Reed Plains. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1960.

———. Masterworks of the Nō Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.