When Michael Freiling was a high-schooler in San Francisco, his teacher made the obviously absurd claim that Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned during World War II. Just because of who they were. Right here in America, the land of the free.
“This couldn’t possibly have happened,” the young Freiling decided. “If it had, I would have heard about it before now.”
Of course, the outrage turned out to be true, and Freiling’s father told him: “We shouldn’t be on any moral high horse. We had our own concentration camps, here in the U.S.”
One such camp was in North Portland, and it is the source of an anthology of poetry written by Japanese American prisoners there in August 1942. “They Never Asked” ($29.95,Oregon State University Press) was translated and edited by Vancouver residents Freiling and his wife, Satsuki Takikawa, along with their friend Shelley Baker-Gard, coordinator of the Haiku Society of Oregon.
“They Never Asked” is a finalist for a Washington State Book Award. Winners will be announced Sept. 24.
The poetry in “They Never Asked” is not quite haiku. It’s a close relative called senryu, which sticks (in the original Japanese) to the same concise 5-7-5 syllabic pattern as haiku, but comes with an important thematic difference. Unlike haiku, which usually draws inspiration from nature, senryu gets at people, their behavior and their feelings — often the toughest of feelings.
“They have a bit of bite,” Freiling said.
The amateur poets whose bitter feelings wound up in “They Never Asked” were stuck in an unjust and intolerable situation, Freiling said. Yet their cultural background was a stoical one that didn’t encourage personal complaint and airing of grievances, he added.
What it did encourage was poetry, a proud Japanese cultural tradition. All Japanese kids practice writing poetry in school, Freiling said. Poetry was a natural way for imprisoned Japanese Americans to try for some kind of catharsis.
if the worst happens
resolve to persevere —
whispered to my wife
—Jonan
“They needed some way to vent their feelings in a safe space,” Freiling said. They wound up gathering periodically to share original poetry about their predicament.
“It was a sort of group therapy,” Freiling said.
The prisoners’ poetry was almost always recited from memory, or even improvised on the spot, rather than read from paper. Prisoners were forbidden from possessing any written Japanese because it could contain impenetrable secret plans and communications, as far as American authorities were concerned, Freiling said.
Sometimes there were pre-planned, scheduled topics for the session, like “connections,” “habits,” “confusion and doubt.” Other times, Freiling said, the format was more like an “open mic.”
Bravely transcribing all these oral recitations, against the rules, was a man named Masaki Kinoshita, a leader of the Portland Japanese American community. It’s Kinoshita’s notebooks that were handed down through his family in Portland and eventually found their way to haiku group organizer Shelly Baker-Gard in 2017. When Freiling, a poetry lover who was bilingual and had lived in Japan, first dropped into one of her haiku meetings in 2018, Baker-Gard realized he might be the key to translating the notebooks.
Freiling and Satsuki Takikawa — whom he’d met in Japan in 1977 — worked together to translate the poems. Takikawa, a Japanese native and educator, made the initial, raw translations and then Freiling adapted them into smoother, poetic English, he said. Baker-Gard and a panel of readers reviewed their work and made suggestions.
Equally compact as haiku, senryu sometimes comes with cultural references that would be understood by Japanese Americans of the 1940s and are explained in the book’s handy footnotes. There’s no better example than this one:
in the picture
mother’s hairdo
like the “2-0-3” hill —
—Jonan
That hill was the historic site of a costly battle between Japan and Russia in 1904. Comparing a woman’s hairdo to a such an infamous spot was both a clever joke and a deeply dark one, Freiling said. Twists of dark humor animate many of the poems in the book.
their free movie —
such generosity
escapes me!
—Jonan
Expo Center
Today’s Portland Expo Center — the site of circuses, boat shows, professional conferences and more — started out as a livestock exhibition and auction hall in the early 1920s. In the early 1940s, it was repurposed to house Japanese Americans temporarily as they awaited transfer to genuine incarceration camps in Idaho, California and Wyoming.
“The previous tenants had been cattle. With all the souvenirs that cattle leave behind,” Freiling said. “They were there for about a year.”
Japanese Americans lived in constant state of tension, drudgery, fear and anger, Freiling said. Heat was sweltering and flies overwhelming. Prisoners were subject to random searches. Guard towers and barbed wire surrounded the place.
“The pain comes right out in these poems,” Freiling said.
my efforts stop
no use fighting
this rotten fate
—Jonan
Some of the poems are exceptionally bitter. Others are comedic or ironic or even joyful. A few celebrate new babies born at the Portland Assembly Center.
“Babies being born means love was being made,” Freiling said. “It’s so striking. Life goes on.”
There’s nothing new about human cruelty to other humans, Freiling said. What’s most notable about the story behind “They Never Asked” is that it demonstrates endurance despite cruelty.
“What’s most intriguing to me is, this is a survival manual,” he said. “Instructions for how to tolerate the intolerable.”
