Subtitle: Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment
Author: Toyo Suyemoto
Editor: Susan B. Richardson
Subject: Asian American Studies / Literature
Paper ISBN 0-8135-4072-0
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-4071-2
Pages: 224 pages. 50 b&w illustrations
Publication Date: August, 2007

"This illuminating and moving memoir adds to the literature of internment by providing invaluable insight into how the raw facts of governmental decisions are perceived and experienced by the subjects of those decisions. Most importantly, Toyo Suyemoto shows us how it is possible, under conditions of duress and degradation, to retain one's dignity, compassion, and imagination."-Traise Yamamoto, associate professor of English, University of California, Riverside

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as "Japanese America's poet laureate." But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945.

A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans.

Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

Susan B. Richardson is a retired professor of English. She taught at Otterbein College and Denison University