Rain shower from mountain
quietly soaking barbed
wire fence
War forced us from California
No ripples this day on desert lake
Even the croaking of frogs comes from
outside the barbed wire fence
this is our life
Born in Hawaii, but educated in Japan during her elementary years, Violet Kazue de Cristoforo moved to California as an adolescent. During World War II, she, her husband and children were interned in Jerome Arkansas and then later at Tule Lake camp in California. She is best known as a haiku poet. Her Poetic Reflections of the Tule Internment Camp was released in 1984, and in 1996 May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow, a collection of haiku poetry was published. De Cristoforo worked for over 50 years compiling and translating haikus created in detention camps. She worked on the campaign that led to reparation and an apology from the U.S. government for the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Utah State University digital collections
California Digital Library
The art of gaman : arts and crafts from the Japanese American internment camps, 1942-1946 / Delphine Hirasuna ; designed by Kit Hinrichs ; photography by Terry Heffernan Berkeley, Calif. : Ten Speed Press, c2005 NK839.3.J32 H57 2005
Artist Estelle Ishigo, the European American wife of a Japanese American, was among the American citizens forced out of California during World War II. Ishigo and her husband, Arthur, were first sent to Pomona Assembly Center and later to Heart Mountain Relocation Center, in a remote area of Wyoming.
Lone Heart Mountain, Sept.1942 Boys with Kite, Sept. 1944
It was very hard to know what to put in that duffel bag, to decide what to take, there was no way of knowing what might happen – what we really might need – “one hundred pounds of baggage” -- read the order.
Our furniture was stacked in the corner for men from the government warehouse to take away. Home was gone.
Hollow echos, impersonal and cold, answered our footsteps, slowly, with heavy heart we lifted our bundles, left the door to walk away to that ordered meeting place. read more
“State of the City” by Taro Katayama Trek. 1(1) December 1942, p. 2-11
Christmas week, 1942, finds the city of Topaz nearing the middle of its fourth month of existence as a functioning social entity. The estate to which in that period of time the Central Utah Relocation Project has attained is the focus of the present article’s inquiry. read more
Only what we could carry : the Japanese American internment experience
Farewell to Manzanar; a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II
Imprisoned Apart: the World War II correspondence of an Issei couple by 