KUBOTA AND THE POETRY OF INCARCERATION
I want to talk about building something from the twin gifts of remembrance and learning—remembrances that are mixed with fondness and pain but that are sketchy and learning that is passionate. I want to talk about my calling as a poet, how a deep family shame and the destruction of a lifetime of dedication came to be my poetry, but only after I’d reimagined this ruinous and hurtful past that came to me through shadows lit by the light of my learning as a poet. I want to talk about the poetry of incarceration.
This involves a mission I was given since childhood—to redeem my maternal grandfather’s life and to restore his honor, if not during his lifetime, at least in a new legacy of remembrance for the shame of his having been arrested, then incarcerated for almost the entirety of the four years of World War II. His name was Hideo Kubota and he was a storekeeper in L?‘ie village on the North Shore of O‘ahu—the island in Hawai‘i where Pearl Harbor and Honolulu are on its South Shore.
Kubota was born on Waialua Plantation in 1899—I have a census document from 1900 that lists him as an “infant,” one year old. This meant that he was an American citizen, born in the Territory of Hawaii. But he was sent as a child to be educated in Japan, back to his father’s home in Hiroshima, to a military boarding school where he learned judo and mathematics, calligraphy and literature, weaponry and how to shoot. He came back to Hawai‘i as a teenager versed in Japanese culture and its ways, literate in two languages, and found a job as a clerk at the general store owned by the Tanaka family near Kahuku Plantation. I’ve a photograph of him with close-cropped hair, dressed in a white, high-collar shirt and tie, standing with others on the porch of the store around 1917.
Pretty soon, he was recruited to manage his own store in the nearby village of L?‘ie, famous now as the site of the Mormon Temple of the Pacific and a tourist attraction called the Polynesian Cultural Center where indigenous islanders from across the Pacific, converted to Mormonism, perform dances and pageantry under tiki lamps and piped-in Polynesian muzak. In my grandfather’s time, it was a plantation village of Filipino, Japanese, and Portuguese laborers situated amidst an old Native Hawaiian community. Kubota’s clientele consisted of people from all of these ethnic groups, and he picked up phrases in all of their languages in order to exchange a good word with everyone who came to his store. He sold dry goods, canned food and rice, millinery supplies, guns and ammo, kerosene, pastries and , and was also the town butcher. He married my grandmother, Tsuruko Shigemitsu, when she was seventeen
