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Yamada, Mitsuye (May) (1923– )
While she has published less extensively than some
of her contemporaries, Mitsuye Yamada is an im-
portant figure in Japanese-American literature, as
she is noted for her political and feminist activism
as well as for her poetry. Born on July 5, 1923, in
Fukuoka, Japan, to parents who were legally U.S.
residents living abroad, Mitsuye Yamada (then
Mitsuye Yasutaka) immigrated to the United States
in 1926 when her parents returned home to Se-
attle, Washington. She became a naturalized U.S.
citizen in 1955.
In 1942, pursuant to Executive Order 9066,
Mitsuye’s family was incarcerated at Minidoka
Relocation Center in Idaho, an experience that
would serve as the primary subject of her first and
most widely known book, Camp Notes (1976).
After signing a statement renouncing loyalty to
Japan, she was released along with her brother to
attend the University of Cincinnati in 1944. She
later transferred to New York University, where
she received her B.A. in 1947, and went on to the
University of Chicago’s graduate school, obtain-
ing her M.A. in 1953. While living in Chicago, she
met Yoshikazu Yamada, an artist, scientist, and U.S.
Army veteran who was then pursuing a Ph.D. in
inorganic chemistry at Purdue.
Mitsuye and Yoshikazu were married in 1950,
first living in Chicago and then in Brooklyn. In the
mid-1960s the couple—by now with a daughter,

Jeni, and two sons, Stephen and Kai, in tow—re-

located to Southern California, where their second

daughter, Hedi, was born. In California, Mitsuye

Yamada began teaching literature and creative

writing at several colleges and universities. From

1966 to 1969 she was an instructor at California

State University, Fullerton; she later joined Cypress

College in Orange County, California, first as an

instructor, and later as an associate professor of

English and coordinator of the Women’s Program

in 1976.

Yamada, whose father was a translator and

poet, began writing after her release from Mini-

doka in an attempt to come to terms with that ex-

perience. Camp Notes, a cycle of poems about her

family’s incarceration, examines “visibility” and

“invisibility” as two unavoidable states of being

for Japanese Americans, particularly for women.

As presented in Camp Notes, life in Minidoka is a

constant struggle between wanting to be “seen” as

American and wanting to remain “invisible,” un-

detectable by camp administrators so as to avoid

danger and harm.

In “Evacuation,” the opening poem, a young

girl is told to smile by a Seattle Times photogra-

pher as she boards the bus to Minidoka; the child’s

photo is later printed in the Times over the cap-

tion: “Note smiling faces / a lesson to Tokyo.” In

“The Question of Loyalty,” Yamada suggests that

the twin desires for visibility and invisibility are