Hisaye Yamamoto Wiki

                                          Hisaye Yamamoto Biography

Who was Hisaye Yamamoto?

Hisaye Yamamoto was an American author who wrote about the experience of Japanese immigrants. He is currently celebrating it with Google Doodle in honor of Asia Pacific American Heritage Month. “In honor of Asia Pacific American Heritage Month, today’s Doodle celebrates Japanese-American short story writer Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian Americans to receive national postwar literary recognition,” Google wrote. .

Google Vice President of Marketing Marvin Chow said in a blog post: “This year, for Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, Google reaffirms its commitment to stand alongside the Asian and Pacific Islander community in the fighting hate while honoring the diversity of different Asian cultures and raising API voices. We are doing this in part by launching a series of initiatives that enhance the API community through our products. ”

Hisaye Yamamoto Net Worth

Chow added, “We are honored to increase our support for organizations on the front lines fighting for safety, dignity and fairness for the API community.”

Hisaye Yamamoto Age

Born on August 23, 1921, Hisaye Yamamoto is 99 years old today.

Biography of Hisaye Yamamoto

Hisaye Yamamoto was born on August 23, 1921, in Redondo Beach, California, according to Google’s Doodle page.

His parents were immigrants from Japan. She was one of three children, along with hers, two of hers.

“Her parents were immigrants from Kumamoto prefecture in Japan and they grew strawberries for a living in America.”

“Because they were not allowed to own farmland under the California Foreign Land Act of 1913, Hisaye’s family moved from place to place as she and her siblings grew up,” according to the Museum of American Writers.

According to the Museum of American Writers, “Hisaye’s mother encouraged her daughter to write when she was young. Many of Hisaye’s short stories explore the issues facing immigrant parents (Issei) and their US-born children (Nisei). ”

Yamamoto told the museum: “I remember one of my favorite things in school was having the teacher read to us. I remember the Wizard of Oz and Doctor Doolittle and things like that. She just loved it. I would go through as many books as they let me. So, I think I thought writing was that, writing books. ”

Hisaye Yamamoto Family

According to the Museum of American Writers, Yamamoto began publishing her writings as a teenager. “At the age of 14, she had her own column in the local Kashu Mainichi magazine. She wrote under the pseudonym Napoleon, ”the museum wrote. She told the museum: “On the weekends [Japanese newspapers] would have a feature page, where people would post all kinds of things. They would print anything, that’s how I started. ”

Yamamoto and her family were sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. According to Google, “Following the outbreak of World War II and due to Executive Order 9066, Yamamoto’s family was among the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans forced by the US to move to government prison camps (also known as Japanese internment camps), where they faced violence and harsh conditions.

She and her family were interned at the Poston, Arizona camp in 1942, according to the Chicago Review. She and her siblings were transferred to Massachusetts in 1944, but returned to Poston after one of her siblings was killed while serving in the military in Italy.

She added: “The United States has a long way to go in treating minorities, including descendants of the original inhabitants.”

Hisaye Yamamoto’s Wikipedia

After being released from internment, Yamamoto, who graduated from Compton College, began her career as a professional writer as a columnist for the Los Angeles Tribune. The newspaper was owned by blacks, according to the Los Angeles Times.

After her story was published, the Shorts were killed in an apparent arson. Yamamoto chided herself for not conveying the urgency of her situation. ”

The Times quoted her saying in a 1985 essay, A Fire in Fontana, “I should have been an evangelist on Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their situation in Fontana … Instead, she uttered her effort to communicate so pathetic as ‘the little saliva that occasionally dripped’ from the corner of a weak man’s mouth, “wrote the Times.

Hisaye Yamamoto Books

Yamamoto published several collections of short stories from 1948 to 1986, including Seventeen Syllables, The High-Heeled Shoes: A Memoir, Wilshire Bus, Underground Lady, and A Day in Little Tokyo. King-Kok Cheung, a UCLA professor and literary critic, wrote in Articulate Silences that Yamamoto was “one of the first Japanese-American writers to gain national recognition after the war, when anti-Japanese sentiment was still rampant.”

Japanese-American playwright Wakako Yamamuchi told the Times: “He wrote with a true voice. He wrote about what he knew and about us: Asians, Japanese-Americans. Their stories were wonderful, beautiful legacies. “Yamamoto told the Chicago Reader in 1993,” I guess I just write to please myself, to express myself, mostly, since I don’t know that anyone will ever read it. I’m just trying to let go of what’s stuck in my mouth the best I can. ”

She was honored with the 1986 American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 1989 Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was honored with the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Asian American Writers Workshop.

Hisaye Yamamoto Husband, Children

Yamamoto was married for 48 years to Anthony DeSoto until his death in 2003, according to his obituary. She and her husband had five children, Paul, Kibo, Yuki, Rocky and Gilbert, along with seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, her obituary said.

In announcing that award, the Asian American Writers Workshop wrote: “Like Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, Yamamoto’s stories are brutal and efficient racial fables, saturated with the social subtext of the American small town. Her work focuses on the normal lives of Japanese women, fully formed characters described by Grace Paley as “ brave and frail ”, and the uneasy relationship between Japanese immigrants and their children, many of whom grew up speaking only Japanese until kindergarten, but they found themselves. increasingly removed from their parents’ way of life. ”

Hisaye Yamamoto Cause of death

Yamamoto suffered a stroke in 2010 and died a year later, on January 30, 2011, in Los Angeles, according to an obituary written by the Los Angeles Times.

Yamamoto said in a 1999 interview about her experiences in the Japanese internment camps: “I have a lot of anger inside of me… I express it in my writings. … I don’t think I’ll ever get over being angry about the internment, because in the right circumstances, tears still flow from my eyes, you know? … I see things like this have happened throughout the recorded history of man, so it’s just widespread anger at injustice … ”

The Doodler Alyssa Winans said of her work in tribute to Yamamoto in 2021: “Reading Yamamoto’s work and working on this Doodle amid all the recent news about the rise in violence, especially hit. It’s hard to see elements of the story. that are repeated and my heart goes out to all the individuals and families that have been affected. As someone of mixed origin, I have a complex relationship with different aspects of my culture, so I am honored to be able to work on a Doodle for APAHM I am always happy to see a space where Asian American and Pacific Islander voices, causes and culture rise up and celebrate. “