Why do I suffer
spring rain wind lightning
like a scarecrow
listless
in this cold twilight
I, an immigrant child
—Morio Hayashida, from “Immigrant Child,” in Where to Go, Los Angeles (trans. Andrew Leong and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), 1928
SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Morio Hayashida stepped off the Japanese ship Shinyo Maru into San Pedro, California, in late 1921. Seven years later, while living in Los Angeles, he published a 220-page collection of Japanese-language poems, 向處に行く (Where to Go). Hayashida was part of a literary community of Issei (first-generation) immigrants — educated, aware of Japanese modernist literary trends, and firmly rooted in life in the United States.
Few Americans realize that between the world wars, there was a flowering of Japanese-language literature in the U.S. The Issei brought their love of poetry to the Western U.S., establishing livingroom literary clubs in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities and publishing literary journals and poetry collections. As they lived and worked in the U.S., they began to create a distinctly Japanese American
