“Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories
10.13125/americacritica/4546
Il saggio si concentra su una rilettura di due dei più famosi racconti brevi scritti dall’autrice nippoamericana Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) e “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951). Se da un lato entrambi i racconti sono caratterizzati da un uso costante della tecnica della indirection, rintracciandone all’interno le allusioni a un evento cruciale della storia dei nippoamericani quale il trasferimento coatto di questi ultimi durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, è possibile riconoscere nei racconti un più profondo livello di significazione in grado di offrire ulteriore testimonianza del tumulto emozionale legato all’esperienza dell’internamento. Il saggio offre inoltre una comparazione tra “Seventeen Syllables”, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” e il loro adattamento televisivo prodotto da PBS e intitolato Hot Summer Winds (Omori 1991), al fine di comprendere in che modo i riferimenti impliciti all’internamento dei nippoamericani presenti nei due racconti brevi sono consapevolmente mitigati o addirittura deliberatamente rimossi nella versione filmica.
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Nicolangelo Becce
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Japanese American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori
“Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories
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Nicolangelo Becce
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10.13125/americacritica/4546
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2532-6724
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Japanese American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori
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urn:nbn:it:unica-27778
“Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories
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                                                                              doi: https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4546




“Watching the world about them rock and sway”.
Hidden upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s short stories
Nicolangelo Becce1
1 Roma   Tre University, Italy
E-mail: nicolangelo.becce@uniroma3.it

Received: 20/01/2021. Accepted: 20/03/2021.

Cómo citar: Becce, Nicolangelo. 2021. «“Watching the world about them rock and sway. Hidden upheavals in
Hisaye Yamamoto’s short stories.”» América Crítica 5 (1): 19-31. https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4546


Abstract—The essay focuses on a re-reading of two of the most celebrated short stories written by Japanese
American author Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951).
While both short stories are characterized by a sustained use of indirection, by tracing in them allusions to
that crucial event in the history of Japanese Americans which is their forced relocation during World War
II, it is possible to add a deeper layer of meaning that can further testify to the emotional turmoil of the
internment experience. In addition, the essay offers a comparison between “Seventeen Syllables”, “Yoneko’s
Earthquake”, and their movie adaptation produced by PBS and titled Hot Summer Winds (Omori 1991), in
order to understand how the implicit references to the internment of the Japanese Americans found in the
short stories are consciously mitigated or even deliberately removed in the television film. — Japanese
American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, World War II, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori.

Resumen—Il saggio si concentra su una rilettura di due dei più famosi racconti brevi scritti dall’autrice
nippoamericana Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) e “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951).
Se da un lato entrambi i racconti sono caratterizzati da un uso costante della tecnica della indirection,
rintracciandone all’interno le allusioni a un evento cruciale della storia dei nippoamericani quale il
trasferimento coatto di questi ultimi durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, è possibile riconoscere nei racconti
un più profondo livello di significazione in grado di offrire ulteriore testimonianza del tumulto emozionale
legato all’esperienza dell’internamento. Il saggio offre inoltre una comparazione tra “Seventeen Syllables”,
“Yoneko’s Earthquake” e il loro adattamento televisivo prodotto da PBS e intitolato Hot Summer Winds
(Omori 1991), al fine di comprendere in che modo i riferimenti impliciti all’internamento dei nippoamericani
presenti nei due racconti brevi sono consapevolmente mitigati o addirittura deliberatamente rimossi nella
versione filmica. — Japanese American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, Seconda Guerra
Mondiale, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori.


     There’s more about Chinese Checkers in the Ency-              been very different without the camps. (Hisaye
     clopaedia Britannica than there is about the intern-          Yamamoto 1994)2
     ment of Japanese Americans. (Charles Kubokawa
     1978)1                                                         few months after the Pearl Harbor attack which
      [A] lot of literature came out of that experience, I
                                                              A      prompted the United States to enter World War
                                                              II, the entire Japanese American community living on
      would say. . . . [O]ur literature probably would have

1 Tateishi (2020: 3).                                         2 Omori and Omori (1994).
20                                                              América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

the West Coast was forcibly relocated in internment           out by Cheung (1994: 6), “[t]he experience of incar-
camps in remote areas of the United States. This massive,     ceration looms large in postwar writing, notably in the
racially-based uprooting, which represented one of the        works of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Lawson Inada, John
most serious violations of civil rights against an ethnic     Okada, Mine Okubo, Monica Sone, Yoshiko Uchida,
group in the history of the United States, involved around    Mitsuye Yamada, and Wakako Yamauchi.” Hisaye Ya-
120,000 people—two thirds of them being American              mamoto, one of the first Japanese American writers to
citizens—between 1942 and 1946, yet it was promptly           obtain immediate success right after the end of the war,
forgotten by the general population and the central gov-      described the internment experience in these terms:
ernment alike at the end of the war. Only after the Civil
Rights Movement in the 1960s did the Japanese Ameri-               Perhaps, hearing names like Dachau, Buchen-
                                                                   wald, Auschwitz or Maidenek, we know that [the
can community start to actively protest against the deep
                                                                   Japanese American] concentration camp experi-
injustice it was subjected to during World War II; how-            ence was comparatively benevolent. However, we
ever, as pointed out by Creef (2004), at the end of the            also know that it, too, should never have happened.
1980s the internment of the Japanese Americans was still           Any extensive literary treatment of the Japanese
a largely obscure event in terms of national conscious-            in this country would be incomplete without some
ness:                                                              acknowledgment of the camp experience. [. . . ] It
                                                                   is an episode in our collective life which wounded
     Critics like John Welchman have argued [in 1989]              us more painfully than we realize. I didn’t know
     that perhaps the two most “controversial and re-              myself what a lump it was in my subconscious until
     pressed chapters in modern American history [in-              a few years ago when I watched one of the earlier
     clude] the everyday life of blacks in the mid-19th            television documentaries on the subject, narrated
     century pre-abolitionist South, and the internment            by the mellow voice of Walter Cronkite. To my sur-
     camps that held Americans of Japanese ancestry                prise, I found the tears trickling down my cheeks
     during World War II.”3 That so little is known about          and my voice squeaking out of control, as I tried to
     these two historical events—outside the world of              explain to my amazed husband and children why I
     specialized scholarship—speaks to our national                was weeping. (Yamamoto, 1994 [1976]: 69-70)
     propensity to render invisible that which is histori-
     cally too painful to look at and to silence that which   This essay re-reads two of the most canonical and an-
     still invokes our national shame. (17)                   thologized short stories written by Hisaye Yamamoto,
                                                              “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”
The end of the 1980s is a very important moment in terms      (1951), highlighting their covert connection with the
of historical recognition of the injustices undergone by      Japanese American internment experience. While the
the Japanese American people: after a long political bat-     two stories are both set before World War II and the relo-
tle, the Japanese Americans finally obtained an official      cation of the Japanese Americans, I will argue that they
redress from the US Government, with the Civil Liberties      contain allusions to the traumatic event of the internment,
Act signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. John           which add a deeper layer of meaning to the two short
Tateishi, former president of the Japanese American Citi-     stories. In addition, the essay compares these short sto-
zens League (JACL) and leading figure in the campaign         ries by Yamamoto with their PBS movie adaptation by
for the approval of the Civil Liberties Act, describes        Emiko Omori titled Hot Summer Winds (Omori 1991),
the outcome of the decade-long protest by the Japanese        in order to understand the decisions made in adapting
American community as a “miracle” (IX-X), especially          them for the small screen with a special focus on how the
since, as pointed out by Daniels (1988: 201),                 references to the internment experience that can be found
     whatever significance the relocation, as it is usually   in “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” are
     called, might have for American history in general,      altered and reshaped (or rather erased) in the television
     it remains the central event of Japanese American        film.
     history. “Before the war,” “after camp”—these and
     similar phrases punctuate the life history of almost     T HE JAPANESE A MERICAN INTERNMENT                          IN
     every mainland Japanese American family.                 H ISAYE YAMAMOTO ’ S SHORT STORIES
The centrality of the internment experience was also               I guess I write (aside from compulsion) to reaffirm
deeply felt among Japanese American writers: as pointed            certain basic truths which seem to get lost in the
                                                                   shuffle from generation to generation, so that we
3 Originally included in Welchman (1989: 152).                     seem destined to go on making the same mistakes
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                                21

      over and over again. If the reader is entertained,               of the internment. Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of
      wonderful. If he learns something, that’s a bonus.               Miss Sasagawara” (1950) is the only short story in the
      (Hisaye Yamamoto)4                                               collection which is completely set in an internment camp.
                                                                       In the story, the eponymous character, a beautiful woman
Hisaye Yamamoto (1921-2011), a Nisei (i.e. second
                                                                       with mental issues, is objectified by the community of
generation Japanese American) writer, was one of the
                                                                       people living in the camp who can’t help but start ru-
victims of the forced relocation ordered by the US gov-
                                                                       mors about her. The development of unfounded rumors
ernment with the Executive Order 9066 signed by Pres-
                                                                       on Miss Sasagawara inevitably stems from prejudicial
ident Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942,
                                                                       assumptions about the woman, which ironically reflects
and she was consequently interned at a camp in Poston,
                                                                       the same perverse mechanism that brought to the spread
Arizona. She kept writing during the internment, and
                                                                       of prejudices against the Japanese American people and
her short stories quickly achieved wide popularity, four
                                                                       that ultimately led to their internment as enemies of the
of them being listed after the war as “Distinctive Short
                                                                       nation. Loosely based on the life of Hisaye Yamamoto’s
Stories” in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories:
                                                                       father, “Las Vegas Charley” (1961) is another short story
“The High-Heeled Shoes” in 1948, “The Brown House”
                                                                       in which the internment has an important role. The story
and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in 1951, and “Epithalamium”
                                                                       describes the life of the main character, a first-generation
in 1960. In addition, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” was also
                                                                       Japanese American man, which seems to represent the
chosen as one of the Best American Short Stories in
                                                                       archetypal experience of every issei (i.e. first-generation
1952, and in 1986 Yamamoto became the recipient of
                                                                       Japanese American) man in the United States, including
the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement
                                                                       the feeling of helplessness associated with the inabil-
from the Before Columbus Foundation. (See Cheung
                                                                       ity to build a new life after having lost everything as a
2001: xi) In 1991, as part of PBS’s American Playhouse
                                                                       direct consequence of the internment. “Florentine Gar-
series, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”
                                                                       dens”, written in 1995, is a fictional account of Hisaye
were adapted for a television film directed by Emiko
                                                                       Yamamoto’s visit to the burial place of her brother Johnny
Omori and titled Hot Summer Winds. In the meantime,
                                                                       in the U.S. military cemetery in Florence, Italy:
Yamamoto’s short stories have been featured numerous
times in popular anthologies such as AIIIEEEEE! An An-                      Kimiko is invaded afresh by a wrenching sense of
thology of Asian-American Writers (Chin et al. 1974),                       loss, as though news of her brother’s death forty-six
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (Gilbert                        years before has only just reached her. Now all the
and Gubar 1996), The Heath Anthology of American Lit-                       fantasies must be put away. No, he did not walk
erature (7th Ed.) (Lauter 2013), and many others.                           away from the war and hide out with some farm
    Collected editions of Yamamoto’s short stories were                     family (he would have been a good worker) for
also published several times between 1985 and 2001.5                        the duration, nor did he marry the daughter, have a
                                                                            family and decide to stay on. Why not? It is within
The most recent edition (Yamamoto 2001) includes 19
                                                                            the realm of possibility, easier to imagine than the
short stories, written between 1942 and 1995. In this                       other, certainly more acceptable.
collection, four stories are directly related to the intern-                But here is Tommy’s name, engraved on the white
ment experience, starting from “Death Rides the Rails to                    marble cross. (163)
Poston” (1942), a mystery serial originally published in
the Poston Chronicle while Yamamoto was still interned                 While not directly related to World War II and the in-
in the relocation camp, which is about an improvised                   ternment experience, four other short stories included
Japanese American detective who investigates a murder                  in the 2001 collection Seventeen Syllables and Other
happened on a train that is deporting Japanese Americans               Stories mention the tragic events related to the reloca-
to the relocation camp of Poston. Whereas the victim                   tion camps, as in the case of “Wilshire Bus” (1950), a
is considered responsible for spying on other Japanese                 story set in Los Angeles after the war in which the main
Americans on behalf of the FBI, the murderer confesses                 character, a Japanese American woman, is painfully re-
to having killed the man because of her fear of what                   minded of the racism she experienced during the war
would happen to her family and herself as a consequence                when a drunk man hurls racist insults at a Chinese couple
                                                                       on a bus; “Epithalamium” (1960), in which the main
4 Hsu and Palubinskas (1972: 113).
5 See Izzo (2006), for a bibliographic overview of the several edi-
                                                                       character, another Japanese American woman, directly
tions of short stories collections published by Yamamoto (129) and a   mentions her past experience as an internee at the Topaz
compelling analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short stories.                camp in Utah; “Underground Lady” (1986), in which
22                                                                América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

the eponymous character, a white woman with mental              artist, Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), that the woman won
issues, eerily evokes the World War II slogan “Remem-           at a haiku competition. Mr. Hayashi, who on that day
ber Pearl Harbor” during a conversation with a Japanese         has involved everyone around him, including Rosie, in
American woman; “A Fire in Fontana” (1985), based on            harvesting tomatoes for the local market, is upset that
Hisaye Yamamoto’s years as a journalist for the black           his wife is neglecting her work duties, and he decides
newspaper the Los Angeles Tribune, one of the few job           to destroy once and for all her double life as a poet by
opportunities she managed to find as a Japanese Amer-           sending the man from the newspaper away and burning
ican woman after the end of the war. In relation to this        the prize she has just received:
short story, Yamamoto (2001) explains that, “in the two
                                                                      Next [Mr. Hayashi] emerged, [. . . ] something
to three years of my employment, I came to realize that               in his arms (it was the picture, she realized), and,
our internment was a trifle compared to the two hundred               going over to the bathhouse woodpile, he threw
years or so of enslavement and prejudice that others in               the picture on the ground and picked up the axe.
this country were heir to.” (129)                                     Smashing the picture, glass and all (she heard the
    Given the importance of the relocation experience for             explosion faintly), he reached over for the kerosene
Japanese Americans in general and more specifically for               that was used to encourage the bath fire and poured
                                                                      it over the wreckage. I am dreaming, Rosie said to
Hisaye Yamamoto, it is not surprising that almost half of
                                                                      herself, I am dreaming, but her father, having made
her most famous short stories, anthologized in 2001 in                sure that his act of cremation was irrevocable, was
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, refer explicitly to            even then returning to the fields.
the internment of the Japanese Americans during World                 Rosie ran past him and toward the house. What had
War II. It is perhaps no accident, in light of the collective         become of her mother? She burst into the parlor
cultural amnesia about the whole episode of the Japanese              and found her mother at the back window watching
American internment, that Yamamoto’s most critically                  the dying fire. They watched together until there
praised and widely anthologized stories, “Seventeen Syl-              remained only a feeble smoke under the blazing
                                                                      sun. (18)
lables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”, are among those that
ostensibly make no reference to the war years and the re-       Cheung (2001) connects the dramatic obliteration of the
location of Japanese Americans. And yet, as I will argue,       Hiroshige painting to the burning and destruction, in the
even in these two celebrated stories it is possible to trace    aftermath of Pearl Harbor, of any kind of objects that
many covert allusions to the predicament of Japanese            Japanese American people thought could be dangerous
Americans during World War II, especially if one takes          because somehow related to Japan:
into account the writer’s constant reliance on indirection
                                                                      The cremation scene reminds me of the many
and on hidden stories beneath the surface of the overt                poignant accounts about Issei who burned every-
plot.                                                                 thing associated with their country of origin after
    “Seventeen Syllables” is a coming-of-age story set                Pearl Harbor, so as to avoid being suspected by
in California before the war and told from the point of               the War Relocation Authority. Yamamoto herself
view of Rosie, a second-generation Japanese American                  must have witnessed actual incidents whereby fam-
teenager. While the girl is experiencing tumultuous emo-              ily heirlooms and literary manuscripts were turned
tions related to her crush for Jesus, a Mexican Ameri-                into ashes, and the experience might have added
                                                                      to the graphic and heart-rending quality of her de-
can farm hand, her mother, Tome Hayashi, is both regu-
                                                                      scription. (xxiii).6
larly working as a farmer and living a fictional life under
the name of Ume Hanazono, a haiku poet. Following               A very similar account is offered by Yamamoto herself
her artistic tendencies, she spends her limited free time       in her short story “Las Vegas Charley”, where the main
writing poems and submitting them to local newspapers,          6 It is true that, during an interview with Hisaye Yamamoto published
while her husband, Mr. Hayashi, who on the other hand           in 1994, when Cheung explicitly asked the author whether she vol-
is completely uninterested in poetry, is exclusively fo-        untarily referred to Pearl Harbor and the war in the cremation scene
cused on farming the land and harvesting tomatoes for           from “Seventeen Syllables”, Yamamoto answered negatively, stating
                                                                that she “didn’t connect the destruction of the family treasures after
the local market. One of the most dramatic moments              Pearl Harbor with the burning of the Hiroshige, which was purely
in Yamamoto’s short story is when Mrs. Hayashi re-              imaginary” (Cheung 1994: 80); nonetheless, and as clearly pointed
ceives an unexpected visit from a man, sent by the local        out by Cheung herself in 2001, the episode described in “Seventeen
Japanese newspaper the Mainichi Shimbun, who gives              Syllables” still represents a powerful scene capable of reminding
                                                                readers of a terribly traumatic moment in the history of Japanese
her as a prize a painting by a famous Japanese ukiyo-e          Americans in the US.
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                       23

character, Kazuyuki Sakamoto, and his two sons, Isamu         same time hide their multicultural identity. In a similar
and Noriyuki, are forced to deal with the terrible backlash   way, in “Seventeen Syllables” Mr. Hayashi destroys the
of the Pearl Harbor attack on the Japanese American           literary aspirations of Ume Hanazono, the artistic identity
community:                                                    of Mrs. Hayashi, by violently smashing and burning the
                                                              Hiroshige painting as a relic of a past that has become
     after only a little more than a year together, had
     come the incredible war, and the trio, along with        totally irrelevant—even dangerous—in their new toiling
     all the other Japanese on the West Coast, had been       life as farmers in the United States. This would eventually
     notified that they would be sent to concentration        lead to the dramatic ending of the story, in which Rosie’s
     camps. How uneasy they had been in those days            mother willingly brings back to life her past by telling
     with government men coming in unannounced on             her daughter about the tragic story of why she moved to
     three occasions to inspect the small wooden house        the United States to marry her father. The woman had left
     for evidence of sabotage. In their panic they had
                                                              her native country as a picture bride, after having given
     burned all their Japanese magazines and records,
     hidden the hotoke-sama, buried the judo outfits and      birth to a stillborn baby as a consequence of an illicit
     the happi coats the boys had brought with them           affair with a well-to-do man in Japan. This unexpected
     from Japan. They had had to turn in their little         confession by Rosie’s mother brings to light, through
     Kodak (it had never been retrieved), lest they be        the innocent eyes of a Japanese American teenager, the
     tempted to photograph American military instal-          intergenerational communication problems between is-
     lations and transmit them secretly to Japan. (Ya-        sei mothers and nisei daughters, while connecting the
     mamoto 2001: 78-79)                                      death of Rosie’s unborn half-brother—who would have
As a matter of fact, the act of destroying, burning, or       been seventeen by then—with the death of the poet Ume
burying objects related to Japan was something that thou-     Hanazono (who, on the other hand, would not be able
sands of Japanese American people felt they needed to do      to write seventeen-syllable long haiku anymore.) Both
between the end of 1941 and the first months of 1942 in       tragedies contrast with Rosie’s inner emotions for Jesus,
order to try to defend themselves against any possible ac-    indirectly recalled both by her mother (“Promise me you
cusations of being disloyal to the nation. Historian Erika    will never marry!”, Yamamoto 2001: 19) and by the girl’s
Lee (2019) offers this illustrative example of what must      own thoughts:
have happened to thousands of many Japanese Americans
living on the West Coast during World War II. Describ-             Rosie stared at her mother’s face. Jesus, Jesus, she
                                                                   called silently, not certain whether she was invoking
ing the hardships that a victim of the internment, Betty
                                                                   the help of the son of the Carrascos or of God, until
Morita, and her family had to endure at that time, Lee             there returned sweetly the memory of Jesus’ hand,
narrates what people had to do “to hide or destroy any             how it had touched her and where. (19)
possessions that would link them to Japan”:
     Betty’s father, older brother, and grandfather began     In addition, and as pointed out by Yogi (1994 [1989]),
     tearing the house upside down searching for any-         “Jesus, soon to be a senior in high school and her guide to
     thing that might be considered evidence that the         budding sexuality, is probably seventeen years old,” (72)
     family was disloyal. The dynamite that they and          thus giving the number included in the title of the short
     many other farmers used to disintegrate tree stumps      story another crucial symbolic meaning. The reiterated
     was considered taboo. Luckily, there was none            presence of the number seventeen in Hisaye Yamamoto’s
     on the farm, but Betty’s grandfather announced
     to the family that “we gotta get rid of everything
                                                              short story points directly to the moving end of the story,
     Japanese.” He built a fire outside the house and         in which the lives of both Rosie and her mother are irre-
     burned all of the Japanese dolls that the children       versibly changed by the highly charged emotional events
     had received for Girl’s Day and Boy’s Day, as well       that they experience.
     as records of Japanese children’s songs and other            Compared to “Seventeen Syllables,” in the case of
     personal items. “I just stood there and I just cried     Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Yoneko’s Earthquake” it is possible
     because I’d see those dolls that we used to display,”    to find even stronger connections with the internment
     Betty recalled. “And I said, I said, ‘Why, why do
                                                              experience, since the earthquake described in the short
     you have to do this?’ And he said he has to.” (200)
                                                              story destroys the family relations within the Hosoume
This account gives an idea of the painful experiences that    family in the same way in which the internment shat-
many Japanese Americans went through in order to de-          tered the lives of the Japanese American community on
stroy any connection with their past traditions and at the    the West Coast of the United States. The story is again
24                                                                América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

set in pre-war California, and the point of view is once        scription of the accident can further motivate the affair
more that of a teenage girl, Yoneko, who experiences a          between Mrs. Hosoume and Marpo, at the same time
series of tumultuous events that indelibly change her life.     it represents a powerful reminder of the feeling of im-
Another point in common with “Seventeen Syllables”              potence experienced by issei Japanese Americans in the
is that also in this case the readers follow a Japanese         aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the internment experience.
American family of farmers composed of Mr. and Mrs.             As pointed out by Richard Reeves (2015), “[t]he Issei,
Hosoume, Yoneko, and her younger brother Seigo. In              whose average age was fifty-nine [at the time of the in-
addition, a Filipino farm hand, Marpo, lives on the farm        ternment], thought there was a chance the government
and works for the Hosoume family, and readers soon re-          was planning to execute them all” (74—75) and, after the
alize that Yoneko probably has a crush on him. Suddenly,        closing of the internment camps between 1945 and 1946,
a catastrophic event deeply affects the Hosoume family:         “Issei had aged before their time, seriously damaged by
the earthquake mentioned in the title causes an accident        camp life.” (265).7 As a result of the earthquake, not
which permanently disables Mr. Hosoume, while Mrs.              only does Mr. Hosoume become permanently an invalid
Hosoume, Yoneko, and Seigo are saved by Marpo, who              and sexually impotent, but he also loses his patriarchal
will end up taking on Mr Hosoume’s patriarchal role by          role in the family, thus being unable to adapt and face
looking after the farm on his behalf and also having an         the changes due to the earthquake. It can be argued,
affair with Yoneko’s mother:                                    then, that the earthquake described in Yamamoto’s short
                                                                story represents a powerful metaphor of the relocation of
     Mr. Hosoume came home later that evening in a              Japanese Americans during World War II. As in the case
     stranger’s car, with another stranger driving the fam-     of the helplessness and uncertainty experienced by the
     ily Reo. Pallid, trembling, his eyes wildly staring,
                                                                issei after the internment, the Long Beach Earthquake8
     he could have been mistaken for a drunkard, except
     that he was famous as a teetotaler. It seemed that he      described in Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story leads to
     had been on the way home when the first jolt came,         an utter redefinition of the family relations within the
     that the old green Reo had been kissed by a broken         Hosoume family, with Marpo taking care of the farm and
     live wire dangling from a suddenly leaning pole.           de facto occupying the role of the head of the household,
     Mr. Hosoume, knowing that the end had come by              while Mr. Hosoume is left to his own health problems.
     electrocution, had begun to writhe and kick and            The author uses a teenager’s limited point of view to de-
     this had been his salvation. His hands had flown
                                                                scribe the events, and while it is impossible to overlook
     from the wheel, the car had swerved into a ditch,
     freeing itself from the sputtering wire. Later it was
                                                                the subtext of the short story, with the hidden dynamics
     found that he was left permanently inhibited about         related to the interactions among the adults (as in the
     driving automobiles and permanently incapable of
     considering electricity with calmness. He spent the        7 Reeves describes a very bleak scenario for first-generation Japanese
     larger part of his later life weakly, wandering about      Americans at the end of the internment: “By the summer, when Impe-
                                                                rial Japan surrendered, there were just over forty thousand evacuees
     the house or fields and lying down frequently to rest
                                                                left in the other camps and fifteen thousand or so in Tule Lake. The
     because of splitting headaches and sudden dizzy            majority of them were elderly. Many of them had been convinced
     spells. (Yamamoto 2001: 50)                                against all evidence that Japan was winning the war and that the em-
                                                                pire would reward them for their loyalty to the emperor. The rumor
Yogi (1994 [1989]) offers a revealing close reading of          was that the victorious Japanese would give each family $10,000 plus
the car accident involving Mr. Hosoume during the earth-        $7,000 more for each child as recompense for their years in the camps.
quake. He focuses on the sexual imagery included in             The end of that era finally came on March 20, 1946, when Tule Lake
                                                                was closed. The last prisoners there were given $25 and a train ticket
the description of the accident, with Mr. Hosoume being         back to wherever they had been first picked up. There were more
“kissed” by an electricity wire, while also pointing out        suicide attempts by old bachelors; one seventy-seven-year-old hanged
that the car accident is metaphorically related to the earth-   himself the day before he was to leave with the last group. As in
quake through the writhing and kicking of the “sputtering       other camps, some had to be carried or pushed onto the trains. One
                                                                old man ran back toward the camp as fast as he could, throwing his
wire” and the subsequent trembling of Mr. Hosoume. As           $25 on the tracks.” (Reeves 2015: 265)
a result, according to Yogi, “[t]hrough these images of         8 The Los Angeles Times recently referred to the Long Beach Earth-
shaking, Yamamoto not only bonds Mr. Hosoume with               quake, which took place in Southern California on March 10, 1933,
the alterations caused by the earthquake, she underscores       as “the deadliest in Southern California history, [which] focused at-
                                                                tention like never before on the seismic dangers the region faces.”
his impotence through the orgasmic associations the im-         (Lin II 2016). According to Hough and Graves (2020), the 1933 Long
ages suggest.” (Cheung 1994: 152). While the sexual             Beach Earthquake was a major seismic event that caused about 120
impotence of Mr. Hosoume as insinuated by the de-               fatalities.
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                                 25

case of the abortion and the metaphorical disappearance                   remote areas in which the internment camps were built,
of the body of the dog killed by Mr. Hosoume while                        then it is easy to imagine that the “enforced alfresco
driving to the hospital),9 at the same time it is also impos-             existence” and the “camping trip” can indeed be con-
sible to gloss over the disruptive event of the earthquake                sidered as ironic allusions to the internment camps. By
as a fictional equivalent to the internment experience of                 comparison, in order to have a better idea of the kind
Japanese Americans. The way in which Yoneko reacts                        of disinformation widespread during the war years and
to the earthquake represents both a masterful represen-                   targeted by Yamamoto in her short story, it is worth men-
tation of the naïveté of someone who is overreacting to                   tioning that, for example, on April 6, 1942, Life magazine
her first experience with an earthquake, and a much more                  featured an article about the relocation of the first groups
sober description of how Japanese Americans must have                     of Japanese Americans in the internment camp of Man-
felt when they were forcibly moved to the internment                      zanar, California. The article, titled “Coast Japs Are
camps: “Yoneko was in constant terror during this expe-                   Interned in Mountain Camp,” talks about people “settled
rience. Immediately on learning what all the commotion                    comfortably” and “prepared to wait out the war in willing
was about, she began praying to God to end this vio-                      and not unprofitable internment.” While pointing out that,
lence [. . . ] Yoneko began to suspect that God was either                among the Japanese Americans, “four-fifths were citi-
powerless, callous, downright cruel, or nonexistent.” (Ya-                zens of the U.S.,” the article adds that “[t]he Army hopes
mamoto 2001: 51). If the young girl’s negative attitude                   this great and unprecedented migration will continue to
toward the earthquake represents the emotions felt by the                 be [. . . ] spontaneous and cheerful,” with soldiers who
Japanese Americans when they became victims of the                        were “friendly and affable, and the Japs comment[ing]
forced relocation, it seems that Yamamoto, in describing                  afterwards on the courteous treatment they had received.”
how the other characters in the short story try to find pos-              (Anonymous 1942: 15)
itive aspects in the earthquake, is directly mocking those                    Going back to Yamamoto’s “Yoneko’s Earthquake,”
who were misleadingly trying to depict the internment as                  while the limited point of view used by the author forces
a positive event for the Japanese American community:                     readers to actively uncover the hidden meanings behind
                                                                          the surface plot, at the same time one of the advantages in
      The others soon oriented themselves to the catas-                   using Yoneko’s naïve point of view is to expose the role
      trophe with philosophy, saying how fortunate they
                                                                          of racism in the story, starting from the overtly racist com-
      were to live in the country where the peril was
      less than in the city and going so far as to regard                 ments made by Mr. Hosoume against Marpo. In fact, if
      the period as a sort of vacation from work, with                    Yoneko promptly acknowledges the versatility of Marpo
      their enforced alfresco existence a sort of camping                 and the impossibility to ascribe him to any stereotype, Mr.
      trip. They tried to bring Yoneko to partake of this                 Hosoume links Marpo’s industriousness to a supposed
      pleasant outlook, but she, shivering with each new                  superiority of the Japanese American people as a way to
      quiver, looked on them as dreamers who refused to                   directly undermine the young man’s accomplishments:
      see things as they really were. (51)
                                                                               there seemed to be nothing Marpo could not do.
Of course, if by “city” one considers the big cities on                        Mr. Hosoume said Marpo was the best hired man
the West Coast with their own Japantowns where many                            he had ever had, and he said this often, because it
Japanese Americans used to live, and by “country” the                          was an irrefutable fact among Japanese in general
                                                                               that Filipinos in general were an indolent lot. Mr.
9 In this scene, Mr. Hosoume, who at that point can barely drive               Hosoume ascribed Marpo’s industry to his having
because of the accident he had during the earthquake, is taking both           grown up in Hawaii, where there is known to be
wife and children to the hospital in order to give Mrs. Hosoume the            considerable Japanese influence. (Yamamoto 2001:
possibility to have the abortion: “Mr. Hosoume, who now avoided                48-49)
driving as much as possible, handled the cumbersome Reo as though
it were a nervous stallion, sitting on the edge of the seat and hugging   After the earthquake, another racist comment against Fil-
the steering wheel. He drove very fast and about halfway to the
city struck a beautiful collie which had dashed out barking from
                                                                          ipino Americans pronounced by Mr. Hosoume signals
someone’s yard. The car jerked with the impact, but Mr. Hosoume           the start of an argument between himself and his wife
drove right on and Yoneko, wanting suddenly to vomit, looked back         that reveals the hidden turmoil in Yoneko’s parents’ rela-
and saw the collie lying very still at the side of the road.” (Yamamoto   tionship. The scene, which leads to Mr. Hosoume hitting
2001: 54) Later on, after Mrs. Hosoume had the abortion, “[o]n
the way home they passed the place of the encounter with the collie,
                                                                          his wife, thus disclosing to the readers the unfolding of a
and Yoneko looked up and down the stretch of road but the dog was         family crisis, starts when Yoneko is caught by her father
nowhere to be seen.” (54)                                                 in the act of painting her nails, and continues with Mr.
26                                                               América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

Hosoume overreacting by using again a racial stereotype:            everyone had sat down again and the man had sug-
“‘You look like a Filipino,’ Mr. Hosoume said sternly, for          gested, “Let us pray.” [Yoneko’s] cousins and the
it was another irrefutable fact among Japanese in general           rest had promptly curled their arms on the desks to
that Filipinos in general were a gaudy lot.” (Yamamoto              make nests for their heads, and Yoneko had done
                                                                    the same. But not Seigo. Because when the room
2001: 52) While Yoneko does not seem to react directly
                                                                    had become so still that one was aware of the breath-
against his father’s racist comments, it is also true that          ing, the creaking, and the chittering in the trees
previously she played with racial prejudices against Fil-           outside, Seigo, sitting with her, had suddenly flung
ipino Americans by asking Marpo, “is it true that you eat           his arm around her neck and said with concern “Sis,
dogs?” and with Marpo causing her “no end of amuse-                 what are you crying for? Don’t cry.” Even the man
ment” by replying to her, “Don’t be funny, honey!”. (48)            had laughed and Yoneko had been terribly ashamed
Later in the story, when Marpo suddenly leaves the farm,            that Seigo should thus disclose them to be interlop-
                                                                    ers. She had pinched him fiercely and he had begun
Yoneko seems to have learned how to use racism to her
                                                                    to cry, so she had had to drag him outside, which
own advantage in order to deceptively feel better and               was a fortunate move, because he had immediately
hide her pain from herself:                                         wet his pants. But he had been only three then, so
                                                                    it was not very fair to expect dignity of him. (47)
     Privately, Yoneko was wounded more than she
     would admit even to herself that Marpo should have
     subjected her to such an abrupt desertion. When-
                                                               In this early scene, Seigo is described as a caring and
     ever her indignation became too great to endure           sweet little brother who is unable to fake his identity as a
     gracefully, she would console herself by telling          Christian, while Yoneko is already trying to experience
     Seigo that, after all, Marpo was a mere Filipino, an      the boundaries of her own identity by playing with the
     eater of wild dogs. (54-55)                               idea of pretending to be someone she is not. Unfortu-
                                                               nately, by the end of the story, Seigo dies, at the age of
All these racist episodes included in “Yoneko’s Earth-
                                                               five, after a suspicious stomachache that the doctor can
quake” have the effect of showing readers how an eleven-
                                                               neither diagnose nor treat. While the text does not give
year old girl would quickly internalize, in a deeply racial-
                                                               readers a clear description of the illness which causes
ized context, how discrimination against another ethnic
                                                               Seigo to pass away, it does emphasize how, before his
group works (more specifically, another Asian American
                                                               untimely death, the boy is the victim of language jokes
ethnic group), with the whole short story representing an
                                                               invented by Yoneko, who plays with his Japanese identity
attempt at describing how hard it can be for a young nisei
                                                               and taunts him with racial slurs:
Japanese American girl to understand her own identity in
the United States, and with the earthquake operating as             Seigo [. . . ] suddenly died in the night. He and
an unexpected disruptive event capable of exposing also             Yoneko had spent the hot morning in the nearest or-
the identity issues of all the other characters of the short        ange grove, she driving him to distraction by repeat-
story.                                                              ing certain words he could not bear to hear: she had
    Apart from the identity upheavals that the charac-              called him Serge, a name she had read somewhere,
                                                                    instead of Seigo; and she had chanted off the name
ters undergo in the story, soon after the earthquake the
                                                                    of the tires they were rolling around like hoops
Hosoume family experiences other important changes,                 as Goodrich Silver-TO-town, Goodrich Silver-TO-
starting from the sudden departure of Marpo, which                  town, instead of Goodrich Silvertown. This had
is directly related to the unexpected pregnancy of Mrs.             enraged him, and he had chased her around the
Hosoume. As already mentioned before, Mr. Hosoume                   trees most of the morning. Finally she had taunted
promptly provides his wife with the opportunity to get              him from several trees away by singing “You’re a
an abortion, an event that is only implicitly suggested             Yellow-streaked Coward,” which was one of several
                                                                    small songs she had composed. Seigo had suddenly
in the story but never openly described. Still, Marpo’s
                                                                    grinned and shouted, “Sure!” and walked off leav-
departure and the death of the unborn child are not the             ing her, as he intended, with a sense of emptiness.
only losses suffered by the Hosoume family, because                 (55)
another character, Seigo, suddenly dies toward the end
of the short story. Yoneko’s younger brother is mostly         As part of a short story that continuously refers to intereth-
a secondary character in the story; however, during the        nic racism, this apparently secondary scene evokes the
initial scene in which the two siblings go to their cousins’   identity issues faced by young Japanese American males
Baptist church for the first time, Seigo causes them to be     during their internment experience. Second-generation
recognized as intruders:                                       Japanese Americans, who were US citizens but at the
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                          27

same time were interned as allegedly disloyal to the na-      American community. What the three main events that
tion, soon after being interned in the relocation camps       refer to the internment in the short stories have in com-
were given the possibility to enlist for the US Army          mon is the fact that they are traumatic and irreversible
and fight against the Axis powers. Although many nisei        events, forcing the respective characters involved in them
Japanese Americans understandably felt betrayed by their      to renegotiate their own identities while being subjected
country and decided not to join the army (the so-called       to irreparable losses. Through the reiteration of events
“no-no boys”), many others decided to prove their patri-      of irreparable loss which characterizes both short stories,
otism even though their families were still imprisoned        Yamamoto is highlighting the irreversibility of the intern-
in internment camps; as a result, thousands served the        ment experience for Japanese American people, who had
country as either interpreters and code-breakers on the       their lives completely devastated and could never really
Pacific Front or as infantrymen in Europe in what would       recover from that event and forget about what happened
become the most decorated regiment in the history of          to them. The definitive traumas depicted in these two
the United States, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.          short stories, along with the more overt references to the
Also Hisaye Yamamoto was directly affected by the draft       war and the internment in other short stories written by
of Nisei Japanese Americans, since her younger brother        Yamamoto, stand in clear opposition against any attempt
Johnny joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and            at dismissing the dreadful magnitude of the internment
was killed in combat in Italy at the age of 19. While the     of the Japanese Americans, an attempt constantly made
earthquake in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” may be read as a          not only by misleading voices like the one found in the
reference to Pearl Harbor and the internment of Japanese      illustrative article from Life mentioned above, but also
Americans, Seigo’s identity issues and subsequent death       ever since the promulgation of the Executive Order 9066,
foreshadow the sacrifice of many Nisei sons and brothers      which never really mentions the words “detention” or
who died in combat as the ultimate sacrifice to prove         “imprisonment” and that implicitly suggests that the in-
the loyalty to the United States of America of the whole      ternment was merely meant as a measure to protect and
Japanese American community.                                  keep safe the Japanese American people during the war.10
    As in the case of “Seventeen Syllables,” also
“Yoneko’s Earthquake” ends in a very sad and moving           Hot Summer WindsAND THE IMPLAUSIBILITY
tone. After Seigo’s death, Yoneko decides to refuse alto-     OF A REASSURING NARRATIVE CLOSURE
gether to think about her dead brother: “Yoneko herself             A long picture scroll
did not think about Seigo at all. Whenever the thought              Humorous and pathetic
of Seigo crossed her mind, she instantly began compos-              Both, this past of mine.
ing a new song, and this worked very well” (56); her                (Ume Hanamoto, Hot Summer Winds)
mother, instead, ends up finding solace in Christianity. In
the final exchange between mother and daughter, which         As already mentioned before, in 1991 Emiko Omori di-
parallels the dialog between Tome Hayashi and Rosie           rected, as part of PBS’s American Playhouse series, the
in “Seventeen Syllables,” Mrs. Hosoume’s words are            TV adaptation titled Hot Summer Winds. The movie was
particularly significant since they remind readers that she   praised by Robert M. Payne in 1993 in his article “Adapt-
has suffered more than just the loss of Seigo: “Never kill    ing (to) the Margins: Hot Summer Winds and the Stories
a person, Yoneko, because if you do, God will take from       of Hisaye Yamamoto” as a pioneer enterprise in terms
you someone you love.” In this ambiguous sentence, in         of self-representation of Asian Americans in the motion
fact, Mrs. Hosoume is simultaneously referring to the         picture field:
loss of three people, since not only did she lose Seigo,            Emiko Omori’s television film Hot Summer Winds
but she also lost Marpo and the unborn baby that she had            marks a significant step for Asian American cinema.
had with him.                                                       A drama about a Japanese American woman, writ-
    To summarize, even if Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seven-                 ten and directed by a Japanese American woman,
teen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” are set in
                                                              10 According to Okamura (1982), “although Japanese Americans
the pre-World War II United States, they nonetheless of-      were herded into barbed wire compounds surrounded by guard towers
fer covert references to the internment of the Japanese       and armed sentries, the government continually insisted that only an
Americans during the war, which ultimately help readers       “evacuation” or “relocation” was involved. The linguistic deception
better understand the emotional toil as well as the deep      fostered by the United States government, and institutionalized by
                                                              numerous scholars thereafter, bears a striking resemblance to the
injustice of the relocation experience for the Japanese       propaganda techniques of the Third Reich.” (95)
28                                                                          América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

      based on the writings of a Japanese American                        from the point of view of both a young Yoneko and an
      woman, has finally found the opportunity to reach                   adult one, with the former being visible on screen while
      a wide viewing public. Because of its singularity,                  the latter is retrospectively remembering past events and
      Hot Summer Winds claims an accessible space of                      commenting on them through the use of voiceover. In
      integrity and dignity for the Asian American image
                                                                          addition, some scenes (especially the ones related to the
      in a medium which has done much to marginalize
      that image. (Yamamoto, 1994 [1976]: 203)                            affair between Mrs. Hosoume and Marpo) are unequiv-
                                                                          ocally told from the point of view of Mrs. Hosoume,12
Since the movie is an on-screen adaptation of both                        while in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” the eponymous charac-
“Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables”, quite                    ter does not really understand the relationship between
predictably, even though the two stories share a lot of                   her mother and the Filipino farm hand. The result is that,
commonalities, the movie director made some changes                       in the movie, all the events that happen to the Hosoume
to both storylines in order to develop a unified narrative.               family are transparently described on screen, including
The main characters in the movie are Mr. Hosoume (Sab                     those that are only implicitly suggested in the story, since
Shimono), Mrs. Hosoume (Natsuko Ohama), Yoneko                            Yoneko never really understands the tumultuous world of
(Tricia Joe), and Seigo (Rand Takeuchi), while Marpo                      the adults. As pointed out by Payne (1993):
(Pepe Serna) is a farm hand of Mexican origins. Mrs.
Hosoume is a poet who writes haiku under the pen name                           Yamamoto’s narrative lacunae are associable to in-
                                                                                visibly oppressive power relations among the char-
of Ume Hanamoto, and, as in the case of Tome Hayashi
                                                                                acters in her stories: the absence of important nar-
in “Seventeen Syllables,” the prize that the woman wins                         rative information marks the missing alternative
from a local newspaper is burned by her enraged hus-                            voice of the underling. Just as they suggest the
band. From that point on, the story continues follow-                           amorphous space of an alternate literary discourse,
ing relatively closely the events described in “Yoneko’s                        the rupturous gaps in Yamamoto’s stories suggest
Earthquake”: Mr. Hosoume leaves the farm and is in-                             the contours of a perceptually radical history denied
volved in an accident during an earthquake; in the mean-                        by patriarchy, hierarchy, and racism. By drawing
time, Marpo stays at the farm with Mrs. Hosoume, helps                          the reader to the silences within the open-ended nar-
                                                                                rative, Yamamoto’s stories quietly question what
the woman taking care of the farm after the earthquake,
                                                                                remains to be said beyond the narrative, and beyond
and the two end up having an affair; however, when Mr.                          the construct of American culture as fundamentally
Hosoume returns to the farm, the Mexican farm hand                              immutable and Eurocentric. (208)
decides to leave. Before long, Mrs. Hosoume discovers
that she is pregnant, and Mr. Hosoume arranges an abor-                   In the case of Hot Summer Winds, not only does it seem
tion for her. The movie ends with a final reconciliation                  that there is only one unambiguous way to interpret the
between Mr. Hosoume and his wife, sealed with the gift                    events described, but there is no way of connecting the
of a pen to Mrs. Hosoume by her husband which signals                     story of the Hosoume family to the internment experi-
his willingness to allow her to write poetry again.                       ence. Indeed, Emiko Omori’s movie repeatedly suggests
    One of the most evident changes in the movie is the                   that the traumatic events in the plot are far from unique,
point of view from which the events are narrated, since
                                                                          difficulties, but also because of the self-absorption of the nisei, who
the story is no longer filtered by a teenage girl who hardly
                                                                          are intent upon conquering other worlds. Yamamoto demonstrates the
understands the complicated world of the adults as in the                 impossibility of anyone’s ever fully understanding the motivations
case of Hisaye Yamamoto’s characters Rosie Hayashi and                    and experiences of others, but she is not pessimistic. What the issei
Yoneko Hosoume.11 Instead, the story seems to be told                     have lived through is in danger of being lost to their children, but if
                                                                          the nisei make a conscious effort to learn from what the issei have
11 Kim (1982) explains the importance of issei-nisei relationships        experienced, the nisei may also learn to understand themselves.” (158)
in Yamamoto’s short stories as well as the reasons for the author’s       12 In relation to the scene in the movie in which Mrs. Hosoume imag-
choice to often employ the limited point of view of second-generation     ines a sexual encounter with Marpo, Payne (1993) asserts that “[t]he
Japanese American characters: “Most of Yamamoto’s stories have            bathing scene also begs the question of the voiceover’s omniscience:
something to say about the relationship between the issei and nisei       how did the adult Yoneko, supposedly the film’s narrator, get inside
generations, who are brought together in stories essentially addressed    her mother’s head—especially in a scene where the child Yoneko
to fellow nisei almost as a warning to them not to lose the experiences   isn’t present on-screen? The viewer may conclude that Yoneko ul-
of their parents, which they (and she) can only partially understand.     timately isn’t the film’s controlling perspective. Rather, Yoneko’s
[. . . ] Generally, the stories are told from the viewpoint of a nisei    split points of view (as a child and as an adult) are only two of many
narrator who sees the issei as through a glass darkly, without ever       perspectives (including the mother’s) sewn together by the film to
fully comprehending the feelings and actions of the older persons.        create its omniscient visual field. This narrative strategy reinforces
The understanding is incomplete partly because of communication           the film’s adherence to dominant cinema.” (217)
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                                       29

definitive, and irreversible. For example, while the movie            rative ploy that forces Mr. Hosoume to stay absent from
includes the scene of the burning of the painting, this               the farm for some extra time while giving Mrs. Hosoume
scene does not have the peremptory tone that can be                   and Marpo the right amount of time to develop their rela-
found in “Seventeen Syllables”, primarily because Mrs.                tionship. A final difference between Hot Summer Winds
Hosoume receives a new pen by her husband at the end of               and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” is that the character of Seigo
the movie as a consolation prize for her forced abortion.             does not pass away, and that Emiko Omori’s film does
In addition, while there is only one dramatic burning                 not include any reference to Yoneko’s racist jokes against
scene in the short story, in the movie Mr. Hosoume is                 her brother as found in Yamamoto’s short story.14 Thus
later shown again burning things, as if this were a com-              the film erases another irreversible event, Seigo’s death,
mon habit of his rather than an exceptional (and rather               along with the pervasive anti-Japanese racism expressed
emotional) event. After the fire, Mrs. Hosoume actually               through Yoneko’s jokes, preventing the viewers from
finds her old pen among the ashes, as if Mr. Hosoume’s                making any connection between the movie and the death
fire was not effective in destroying his wife’s connections           of many second-generation Japanese Americans who had
with Japanese traditional culture, nor meant to destroy               joined the Army in order to prove their true identity as
objects that might be used to prove any allegation of                 American people.
disloyalty by Japanese American people against the US                     The differences found between the movie and the
government.                                                           short story all point in the same direction: downplaying
    Other important changes concern the earthquake.                   the tragic, irreversible quality of the events in the story,
While also the movie is set before the war (more pre-                 by erasing any trace that could remind the audience of
cisely in 1934), the earthquake does not seem to repre-               the metaphorically seismic internment of Japanese Amer-
sent a clear equivalent of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent            icans during World War II. What the PBS movie tries to
internment of Japanese Americans, since its role in the               implicitly suggest is that, after more than forty years, the
movie is obviously different. In the movie, the earth-                internment of the Japanese Americans can be considered
quake is preceded by the scene of the burning of the                  like a healed wound that, retrospectively, did not damage
painting by Mr. Hosoume, who abruptly leaves the farm                 in any irreversible way the lives of the people involved.
by car right after having humiliated his wife. The adult              In fact, it seems that every possible effort is made in Hot
Yoneko informs the audience through the voiceover that                Summer Winds to offer a positive and happy conclusion
“Papa didn’t come home right away; sometimes, when                    to the story in a way that brings the characters and their
he got very angry, he’d stay away for several days,” thus             world all the way back to the calm and peaceful situa-
transforming an absolutely exceptional event as described             tion found at the beginning of the movie. By contrast,
in “Seventeen Syllables” into an ordinary event in Hot                Emiko Omori’s effort to develop a reassuring ending for
Summer Winds, due to the quick-tempered behavior of                   Hot Summer Winds retrospectively throws into relief the
the movie version of Mr. Hosoume.13 While in the short                irreversibility of all major events in Yamamoto’s stories,
story Mr. Hosoume is described as a truly unfortunate                 reinforcing the idea that the irreversible quality of those
victim of the earthquake since he just happened to be driv-           events is exactly the point of the stories, which should be
ing his car to go buy some fertilizer when the earthquake             read as metaphors of that irremediably traumatic event,
happened, in the movie Mr. Hosoume is willingly leaving               the internment experience.
the farm as a consequence of his bad temper; in addition,                 The lack of different layers of meaning in the movie
and contrary to the short story, in Omori’s movie the                 compared to Yamamoto’s short stories strongly reduces
car accident does not seem to have any permanent and                  the interpretive potential of the movie. Furthermore,
irreversible effect on the Hosoume family, given that Mr.
Hosoume quickly returns to full health after a short time,            14 The movie is mostly purged of any reference to racism, with only
thus completely regaining, by the end of the movie, the               one racist line left: after the earthquake, there is a scene involving
patriarchal role that he had before the seism, and that               both the Housoumes and Marpo in which Mr. Hosoume—who has
Marpo manages to briefly challenge only during the time               finally realized at that point that Marpo and his wife feel something for
                                                                      each other—comments on Yoneko’s painted nails by telling his wife:
Mr. Hosoume is away. As a consequence, the earthquake                 “Your daughter, she looks like a painted Mexican puta.” The result is
in Hot Summer Winds represents nothing more than a nar-               that, while identity issues are crucial in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and
                                                                      racism can be considered a recurring theme in the short story, racism
13 The volatility of Mr. Hosoume’s behavior in the movie is further   in the movie seems to be exclusively confined to the bad temper of
highlighted by his drinking habits, while in “Yoneko’s Earthquake”    Mr. Hosoume, with Yoneko consciously reacting to her father’s racist
he is characterized as a teetotaler.                                  slur with an offended as well as defying stare.
30                                                                          América Crítica 5(1): 19–31, 2021. ISSN: 2532-6724

while being scrupulously realistic in terms of represen-                  became reality, and, as a matter of fact, the main organi-
tation of life for Japanese American people in pre-war                    zation which promoted the redress, the JACL, already in
rural California,15 Hot Summer Winds presents a story                     2001 had to tenaciously act in defense of Muslim Ameri-
that is completely decontextualized from a historical and                 cans who, in the aftermath of 9/11, ran the serious risk
socio-political perspective.16 And yet, perhaps that is                   of being racially discriminated, just like the Japanese
just a deceptive appearance, especially if one keeps in                   Americans after Pearl Harbor. In more recent years, a
mind the context of the film’s production. Hot Summer                     number of voices have even tried to offer revisionist inter-
Winds was broadcast on PBS in 1991, that is, after the                    pretations of the internment experience, (Rothstein 2011,
redress and the first payments, which started to be sent                  Lotchin 2018) including the 45th President of the United
to the surviving victims of the internment by the end of                  States, Donald J. Trump. (See for examples Scherer
1990, together with the letter signed by President George                 2015, Bromwich 2016, and Hennigan 2019) This is not
Bush, in which the government officially apologized for                   surprising, given the treatment reserved to racial and eth-
the racist and criminal behavior against Japanese Ameri-                  nic minorities during his administration, which explains
cans during World War II. In other words, Omori’s movie                   why it is absolutely important to keep reading stories like
seems to offer a more optimistic view of the history of                   the ones written by Hisaye Yamamoto while trying at
the Japanese Americans as a possible consequence of                       the same time to understand through them the horror that
the positive outcome of the redress movement, implicitly                  the Japanese American people had to experience during
suggesting that the Japanese Americans ended up surviv-                   the internment, which should remain in the national con-
ing the internment experience without being too damaged                   sciousness as an indelible memory of one of the darkest
by it, and should leave that episode behind them and start                moments in the history of the United States of America.
a new life with a bright future ahead of them as accepted
members of the US society.                                                R EFERENCES
    However, if the original goal of the Japanese Ameri-                  Anonymous. 1942. “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain
can redress movement, as clearly stated by John Tateishi                      Camp.” Life (April): 15–19.
(2020), was to push “for an official apology,” thus “pre-                 Bromwich, Jonah Engel. 2016. “Trump Camp’s Talk of Reg-
vent[ing] the United States from ever repeating the treat-                    istry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears.”
ment [Japanese Americans] had experienced in wartime,”                        The New York Times, https://nyti.ms/3FKZzTd.
(ix) then it is possible to state that it ultimately ended in             Cheung, King-Kok, ed. 1994. “Seventeen Syllables”. Hisaye
a defeat for both the Japanese Americans and the United                       Yamamoto. Edited and with an introduction by King-Kok
States at large. Unfortunately, this desire to set a prece-                   Cheung. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press.
dent that would provide in the future more justice and                    Cheung, King-Kok. 2001. “Introduction.” In Hisaye Ya-
equality to all the minority groups living in the US hardly                   mamoto. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised
15 As pointed out by Payne (1993), “[b]ecause Omori entered into
                                                                              and Expanded Edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
the film industry as a documentary cinematographer, it’s no surprise          sity Press.
that her film pays meticulous attention to visual detail. Great care is   Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao lnada, and
taken to naturalistically re-create rural California in 1934.” (208)           Shawn Wong, eds. 1974. AIIIEEEEE! An Anthology of
16 It is important to point out that, whenever Hisaye Yamamoto’s               Asian-American Writers. Washington: Howard Univer-
short stories are either anthologized or collected, they are gener-
                                                                               sity Press.
ally preceded by introductory comments which both offer context
information about the author and her stories and at the same time         Creef, Elena Tajima. 2004. Imaging Japanese America. The
unequivocally link the author’s short stories to the history of the            Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body.
Japanese Americans and the internment experience. On the other                 New York: New York University Press.
hand, the movie does not include any similar introductory frame,
and in fact it seems to actively avoid any kind of reference to the       Daniels, Roger. 1988. Asian America. Chinese and Japanese
internment experience, starting from the year in which the movie               in the United States since 1850. Seattle: University of
is set to the fact that the lives of the characters in the movie are at       Washington Press.
no time in real danger. Payne reports that “given the infrequency         Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. 1996. Norton An-
of popularly available Japanese American dramas, the co-producing              thology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in En-
PBS station created a curriculum guide for the high-school classroom
                                                                               glish. New York: Norton.
to emphasize what students can learn from Hot Summer Winds’s pre-
sentation of Japanese American life” (203). The publication Payne is      Hennigan, W. J. 2019. “Trump Administration to Hold Mi-
referring to, written by Cayleen Nakamura, is Seventeen Syllables:            grant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese
A Curriculum Guide for High School Classroom Use. (Nakamura                   Internment Camp.” Time, https://bit.ly/3azuTWU.
1991)
Becce, “Watching the world about them rock and sway”                                                                     31

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Hsu, Kai-Yu, and Helen Palubinskas, eds. 1972. Asian-                West Film Journal 7 (2): 39–53.
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