By the Shore of Lake Michigan: Recovering WWII Prison Camp & Resettlement Stories through Poetry

2025 is the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and as part of this commemoration, Japan Society is honored to present a book talk and signing focused on By the Shore of Lake Michigan, a translation of Japanese tanka poetry written by Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto, a first-generation Japanese American couple who were incarcerated in one of the ten wartime prison camps. This event will feature speakers Nancy Matsumoto (granddaughter of Tomiko and Ryokuyō), Mariko Aratani, Eri F. Yasuhara and Kyoko Miyabe.

Tanka is the oldest form of Japanese poetry, and still widely practiced today. Five lines in length, with a 5-7-5-7-7 meter, it is two lines longer than haiku. Unlike haiku, which usually describes the natural world and the feelings evoked by nature, tanka covers a wide variety of themes from politics and public events to the most private feelings. In part because of this, it was the form chosen by first-generation (Issei) Japanese immigrants to share their feeling of loss, dislocation and trauma they experienced in prison camps during WWII.

Published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, By the Shore of Lake Michigan is now accessible to English-language readers for the first time. The Matsumotos’ poems chronicle their lives over a 17-year period, from their 1942 forced relocation from Los Angeles to the Heart Mountain prison camp in Wyoming, through their resettlement in Chicago at war’s end. While many second- and third-generation Japanese American voices have told the story of wartime incarceration in fiction, on stage and in film, very little of the Japanese-language writings of this era have been translated into English. By the Shore of Lake Michigan is a rare account of the events of WWII and its aftermath from a first-generation point of view.

Nearly 15 years in the making, the book is a collaboration between editor Nancy Matsumoto, granddaughter of Tomiko and Ryokuyō, and accomplished translators Mariko Aratani and Kyoko Miyabe.