Date on Honors Thesis

Spring 5-8-2026

Major

English Literature

Minor

Chinese Studies / East Asian Studies

Examining Committee Member

Carrie Jerrell, PhD, Advisor

Examining Committee Member

Ray Horton, PhD, Committee Member

Examining Committee Member

Julie Cyzewski, PhD, Committee Member

Abstract/Description

In 1957, nearly ten years after the closing of Tule Lake Segregation Center in Newell, California, the last of the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) concentration camps to close, author Keiho Soga writes on a piece of paper:

“Untitled”

By: Keiho Soga

Beyond the forbidding fence 

Of doubled barbed wire 

The mountain, 

Aglow with purple,

Sends us its greetings.

In this brief moment of reflection, Soga recounts his time in Sand Island Internment Camp, another of the Japanese American internment camps established during World War II by the United States government after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Those forced to live in the camps faced torturous conditions such as “no running water or toilet facilities… each person was allocated a space approximately two by six meters in size… people had to take group showers, and in the summer there was no air conditioning” (Toelken 80). Despite these circumstances, some camps were known to offer cultural classes – including writing courses – on traditional Japanese poetry.

The poetry of Japanese Americans during World War II has often been analyzed through an environmental/postcolonial relational perspective. In Robert Grotjohn’s post-colonial analysis of Japanese American poetry, he states that poets Mitsuye Yamada and Lawson Fusao Inada create a “parallel between cultural and geographic space to establish a diverse postcolonial poetics…by overturning colonial mastery of the landscape and its maps” (Grotjohn 249)

However, this symbolism carries not only a connection to colonialism and colonization theory, but also a connection to a centuries-long tradition of kigo – or “seasonal references” – within Japanese poetry. Kigo is especially popular in haiku, a poetic form first founded and popularized in the 19th century, and is considered a defining feature of the genre. Much of kigo has previously established symbolism (through Shintoism and Buddhism) within Japanese literature, such as flowers, mountains, rivers, and seasons. For example, “The original appearance of the kami” – or Shinto gods – “was usually, but not always, identified with some place such as a seashore, mountain, grove, or the site of a natural object” (Nanzan University 112). Japanese American poets such as Lawson Fusao Inada, Akira Togawa, Toyo Suyemoto, and Shonan Suzuki, as well as many unidentified internment camp poets, combine elements of kigo and their experiences within the camps to create an evolution of kigo from appreciation to longing. In the aforementioned poem by Keiho Soga, the bitterness of the mountain’s shadow leaves readers with a double meaning: Not only does the speaker wish for freedom from the “doubled barbed wire,” but also for God to do more than send greetings from the peak.

In this thesis, I will analyze the kigo of Japanese American internment camp poetry, offering readers a more nuanced understanding of the victims’ trauma, which  Cathy Caruth defines as, “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance - returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 4). Additionally, by establishing the religious, literary, and historical significance of kigo symbolism, readers will discover a newfound comprehension of interned Japanese American’s perception of their cultural identity during and after World War II.

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