Wakako Yamauchi | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 23, 1924 Westmorland, California, U.S. |
| Died | August 16, 2018 (aged 93) Gardena, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Drama |
| Notable works | And the Soul Shall Dance The Music Lessons |
| Notable awards | Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award (1977) |
Wakako Yamauchi (October 23, 1924 – August 16, 2018) [1] was a Japanese American writer. Her plays are considered pioneering works in Asian-American theater.
Yamauchi (née Nakamura) was born in Westmorland, California. Her mother and father, both Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, were farmers in California's Imperial Valley. Many of her stories and her two plays, And the Soul Shall Dance and The Music Lessons , are set in the same dusty, isolated settings". [2] Her plays and stories examine the hardships that Japanese Americans faced in California's agricultural communities and in the internment camps during the second World War. [3] In 1942, at seventeen, Yamauchi and her family were interned at the Poston, Arizona camp; the title of her play 12-1-A refers to the family's address in the War Relocation Authority camp. While there, she worked on the camp newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, alongside fellow writer Hisaye Yamamoto (with whom Yamauchi would maintain a lifelong friendship). [4]
After a year and a half in Poston, Yamauchi resettled outside camp, first in Utah and then in Chicago, where she began to take in interest in theater. In 1948, she married Chester Yamauchi, with whom she had one child before the couple divorced. She returned to the Los Angeles area, where she studied painting at Otis Art Institute (now called Otis College of Art and Design) [5] and continued to write. Her first published story, And the Soul Shall Dance, appeared in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers . Encouraged by East West Players director Mako, she soon after adapted the story into a play. [4] The stage version of And the Soul Shall Dance was first performed at the East West Players in Los Angeles in 1974, and won the 1977 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best new play. It was later produced for public television. [2]
Rosebud and Other Stories, a collection of stories she wrote in her seventies and eighties, was edited by Lillian Howan and published by University of Hawai'i Press in 2010. A collection of her plays and stories was published in 1994 under the title Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir. [6]
In 2018, Yamauchi died in Gardena, California at the age of 93. [1]
Some of Yamauchi's best-known short stories depict the tensions between the aspirations of Issei women and the patriarchal norms of Issei culture. The stories And the Soul Shall Dance and Songs My Mother Taught Me both depict Issei women struggling to fulfill ambitions that contradict traditional gender roles. And the Soul Shall Dance represents one of the most straightforward depictions of an Issei woman's rebellion. By depicting the complex relationships among the female characters, Yamauchi portrays Issei women's resistance and containment. [3]
Jade Snow Wong was a Chinese American ceramic artist and author of two memoirs. She was given the English name of Constance, also being known as Connie Wong Ong.
John Okada was a Japanese American novelist known for his critically acclaimed novel No-No Boy.
Toshio Mori was an American author, best known for being one of the earliest Japanese–American writers to publish a book of fiction. He participated in drawing the UFO Robo Grendizer, the Japanese series TV in the years 1975-1977.
Mitsuye Yamada is a Japanese American activist, feminist, essayist, poet, story writer, editor, and former professor of English.
The Poston Internment Camp, located in Yuma County in southwestern Arizona, was the largest of the ten American concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority during World War II.
Garrett Kaoru Hongo is a Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet. His work draws on Japanese American history and his own experiences.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston is an American writer. Her writings primarily focus on ethnic identity formation in the United States of America. She is best known for her autobiographical novel Farewell to Manzanar that narrates her personal experiences in World War II internment camps.
Shizuko Hoshi is a Japanese-American actress, theater director, dancer and choreographer. Born in Japan, she is a graduate of Tokyo Women's College and University of Southern California. She was married to actor Mako, the founding artistic director of East West Players in Los Angeles, and worked closely with the Asian-American theatre company from 1965 to 1989.
Ronyoung Kim, aka Kim Ronyoung, was the pen name of Gloria Hahn, a Korean American writer. She was born and raised to Korean immigrants in Los Angeles's Koreatown and died not long after finishing Clay Walls (1987), a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel about a Korean family that leaves Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1920s to live in the United States that was "the first major novel to illustrate the experiences of Korean immigrants and Korean Americans in the United States".
Hisaye Yamamoto was an American author known for the short story collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, first published in 1988. Her work confronts issues of the Japanese immigrant experience in America, the disconnect between first and second-generation immigrants, as well as the difficult role of women in society.
Diana Chang was a Chinese American novelist and poet. She is best known for her novel The Frontiers of Love, one of the earliest novels by an Asian American woman. She is considered to be the first American-born Chinese to publish a novel in the United States.
Monica Sone, born Kazuko Itoi, was a Japanese American writer, best known for her 1953 autobiographical memoir Nisei Daughter, which tells of the Japanese American experience in Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the World War II internment camps and which is an important text in Asian American and Women's Studies courses.
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers is a 1974 anthology by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, members of the Combined Asian American Resources Project (CARP). It helped establish Asian American Literature as a field by recovering and collecting representative selections from Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-Americans from the past fifty years—many of whom had been mostly forgotten. This pan-Asian anthology included selections from Carlos Bulosan, Diana Chang, Louis Chu, Momoko Iko, Wallace Lin, Toshio Mori, John Okada, Oscar Peñaranda, Sam Tagatac, Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, many of whom are now staples in Asian American literature courses. Because of this anthology and the work of CARP, many of these authors have been republished; at that time, however, they received little attention from publishers critics because they didn't subscribe to popular stereotypes but depicted what Elaine H. Kim calls the "unstereotyped aspects of Asian American experience". The "aiiieeeee!" of the title comes from a stereotypical expression used by Asian characters in old movies, radio and television shows, comic books, etc. These same stereotypes affected the anthology itself: when the editors tried to find a publisher, they had to turn to a historically African-American press because, as Chin states:
The blacks were the first to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers.... [I]t wasn't surprising to us that Howard University Press understood us and set out to publish our book with their first list. They liked our English we spoke [sic] and didn't accuse us of unwholesome literary devices.
And The Soul Shall Dance is Wakako Yamauchi's first full-length play. Written in 1977, the story involves a young Japanese American girl and her parents as they struggle to live in a white America during The Great Depression. And The Soul Shall Dance grapples with many of the issues facing Japanese Americans in America such as assimilation, immigration, social, economic and political status, and simply surviving in the cruelties of the "California Dream" era.
Emiko Omori is an American cinematographer and film director known for her documentary films. Her feature-length documentary Rabbit in the Moon won the Best Documentary Cinematography Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award after it was broadcast on PBS that same year. One of the first camerawomen to work in news documentaries, Omori began her career at KQED in San Francisco in 1968.
Tamie Tsuchiyama, a Nisei woman, was the only Japanese-American to work full time for the Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Study. She kept a wide-range sociological journal and ethnographic reports while she was in Poston War Relocation Center. In 1947, she worked with the U.S. government overseas operation that was run by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) as a researcher. Due to the stress from gathering information, Tsuchiyama resigned in July 1944, and sought to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). Since she knew German, French and Spanish, she was assigned to Japanese language school and military intelligence assignment translating official Japanese documents.
Mia F Yamamoto born in 1943, is a Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney and civil rights activist. Mia is a transgender woman of Japanese American descent, born in the Poston War Relocation Center during World War II.
Daizo Sumida(住田 代蔵, August 7, 1887 – December 30, 1961) was a Japanese American businessman.
Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto is a Japanese-American folk singer, songwriter, author, and activist in the Asian American Movement. She was a member of the band Yellow Pearl along with Chris Kando Iijima and Charlie Chin. They are known for co-creating the 1973 folk album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America. This album is considered the first Asian-American album in history. She was a member of the band Warriors of the Rainbow during the late 1970s.
The following articles are listed in the MLA database and are arranged from most recent to oldest:
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Art research institutes | |
| Scientific databases | |
| Other | |
