MITSUYE YAMADA

Mitsuye Yamada, the daughter of Japanese immigrants to the United States, was born in Japan in 1923, during her mother’s return visit to her native land. Yamada was raised in Seattle, but in 1942 she and her family were incarcerated and then relocated to a camp in Idaho, when Executive Order 9066 (signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that year) gave military authorities the right to remove any and all persons from “military areas.” In 1954 she became an American citizen. A professor of English at Cypress Junior College in San Luis Obispo, California, until she retired in 1989, Yamada is the author of poems and stories.

Yamada’s poem concerns the compliant response to Executive Order 9066, which brought about the incarceration and relocation of the entire Japanese and Japanese American population on the Pacific coast — about 120,000 people. More than two-thirds of the people moved were native-born citizens of the United States. (The 158,000 Japanese residents of the Territory of Hawaii were not affected.) There was virtually no protest at the time, but in recent years the order has been widely regarded as an outrageous infringement on liberty, and some younger Japanese Americans cannot fathom why their parents and grandparents complied with it. This poem first appeared in Camp Notes and Other Poems in 1976.

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To the Lady

The one in San Francisco who asked:

Why did the Japanese Americans let

the government put them in

those camps without protest?

5 Come to think of it I

should’ve run off to Canada

should’ve hijacked a plane to Algeria

should’ve pulled myself up from my

bra straps

10 and kicked’m in the groin

should’ve bombed a bank

should’ve tried self-immolation

should’ve holed myself up in a

woodframe house

15 and let you watch me

burn up on the six o’clock news

should’ve run howling down the street

naked and assaulted you at breakfast

by AP wirephoto

20 should’ve screamed bloody murder

like Kitty Genovese°

Then

YOU would’ve

come to my aid in shining armor

25 laid yourself across the railroad track

marched on Washington

tattooed a Star of David on your arm

written six million enraged

letters to Congress

30 But we didn’t draw the line

anywhere

law and order Executive Order 9066

social order moral order internal order

YOU let’m

35 I let’m

All are punished.