Seventeen Syllables

Like Rosie, Hisaye Yamamoto was raised in the United States by parents who immigrated from Japan. Rosie and Yamamoto are second-generation Japanese Americans, or nisei, while their parents are first generation, or issei. Many of Yamamoto’s stories address conflicts between the two generations.

Born in Redondo Beach, California in 1921, Yamamoto experienced a typical nisei childhood, balancing pressure from her issei parents to preserve Japanese language and culture with her own desires to experience and fit into American culture. “Seventeen Syllables” represents this conflict through Rosie’s interest in American popular culture in contrast to Tome’s passion for haiku and ukiyo-e. Yamamoto’s mother passed away in 1939, around when “Seventeen Syllables” is meant to take place.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, known as the Japanese Relocation Act of 1942. All Japanese Americans on the west coast were forcibly relocated to concentration camps. Yamamoto was incarcerated in Poston, Arizona, from 1942 to 1945, along with her father and brothers. She was 20 years old at the time. There, she worked as a reporter for the camp newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, and wrote short stories. In the camps, Japanese cultural expressions, like haiku, were aggressively discouraged by administrators in favor of American forms of art.