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Hisaye Yamamoto, a Japanese American writer who is best known for the short story collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stones, was born on August 23, 1921 in Redondo Beach, California. She is the daughter of immigrants from Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, Kanzo and Sae Yamamoto. The number of Japanese Americans with last name Yamamoto is the second largest to those with last name Tanaka among others. Her work has a showdown with issues of the Japanese immigrant experience in America, the gap between Is sei (first) and Nisei (second) generation immigrants.
Hisaye Yamamoto's generation, the Nisei, was born into the roaming lives imposed upon their parents by the Alien Land Law,1 which limits the property possession by Japanese immigrants, and the Asian Exclusion Act, which in principle prohibits the immigration of Asians into the United States. Yamamoto replied the interviewer about her repeated moving: "We moved at least four times in the Redondo Beach area, then inland to Downey, Artesia, Norwalk, Hynes (the Greatest Hay and Dairy Center in the world), which is now known as Paramount, and finally down to Oceanside" (Cheung, "Interview" 77).
Yamamoto found ease in reading and writing from a young age. As a teen, she began publishing her letters and short stories in newspapers. Many Issei immigrants tried to preserve their native Japanese language, while the interests of the Nisei are likely to be in the culture of the United States, easily obtained through the English language as Yamamoto says, "My spoken and written Japanese is practically nonexistent" (Cheung, "Interview" 76). As a result, the relationship between Issei parents and their Nisei children confronted immediate tension, causing them to misunderstand each other.
Yamamoto became a published writer at the age of 14, writing for the Kashu Mainichi under the pen name "Napoleon." Yamamoto attended Compton Junior College in Los Angeles, where she majored in French, Spanish, German, and Latin. As mentioned in the short story, "Seventeen Syllables," she also attended Japanese school for 12 years. Her father was a farmer, and the family was living in Oceanside when World War II broke out.
At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the Pacific coast....