About
The Issei Poetry Project seeks to recover, preserve, and share the Japanese-language literature of Los Angeles’ Issei (first-generation) writers, and trace their significant creative and cultural contributions within the larger network of Issei artists of the pre-war and interwar period.
This era was shaped by intense U.S. anti-Asian sentiment, economic hardship during the Great Depression, and growing uncertainty leading into World War II. Many of these works were long believed to have been lost, particularly due to the upheaval of the war and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Today, through archival recovery and translation efforts, these writings are being rediscovered and brought to light as an essential and largely untapped part of Japanese American history.
Learn MoreThis era was shaped by intense U.S. anti-Asian sentiment, economic hardship during the Great Depression, and growing uncertainty leading into World War II. Many of these works were long believed to have been lost, particularly due to the upheaval of the war and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Today, through archival recovery and translation efforts, these writings are being rediscovered and brought to light as an essential and largely untapped part of Japanese American history.
Credit & Sponsors
The Issei Poetry Project is supported, in part, by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission and the Mellon Foundation.
Issei Poetry Friday
Issei Poetry Friday is a weekly social media series spotlighting poems and haiku from the Los Angeles Issei Poetry Collection Digital Edition. Featuring works from 1920s-30s publications like Torch (炬火) and Sen A Kai (蟬蛙會句集), the series shares the voices of first-generation Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles, offering insight into their daily lives, creative communities, and emotional worlds while preserving a literary legacy long obscured by language barriers and wartime disruption.
Learn MoreEssays
Issei Poetry Between the World Wars
by Kenji C. Liu
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, (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 living-room 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 aesthetic, forged from daily experience...
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 living-room 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 aesthetic, forged from daily experience...
Poems
Raindrops (雫)
Songs of Wandering (放浪の詩)
Where to Go (何処へ行く)
Raindrops (雫)
translated by Dr. Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda & Dr. Andrew Way Leong
Raindrops is a collection of tanka and free-verse poetry composed by the poet Sakiko Hasegawa (active 1918-1935). At present, very little is known about Hasegawa beyond a few ephemeral references in Los Angeles Japanese-language newspapers such as the Rafu Shimpo and Kashū Mainichi Shinbun. Hasegawa’s first recorded poems, a sequence of five tanka, appeared in the September 14, 1918 issue of the Rafu Shimpo in conjunction with the poems of...
© 2026 by Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Songs of Wandering (放浪の詩)
translated by Dr. Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda & Dr. Andrew Way Leong
Songs of Wandering (Hōrō no uta, 1925) is an anthology of shintaishi or “new-form verse” composed by the twenty-five poet members of the “Wandering Poetry Society” (Hōrō no shisha). The anthology’s editor, poet Isshin Yamazaki, would go on to become a prolific anthologist of Japanese-language Japanese American literature, producing the volumes Hokubei bungeisenshū (Selected Literary Works of North America, 1927), Amerika bungeishū...
© 2026 by Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Where to Go (何処へ行く)
translated by Dr. Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda & Dr. Andrew Way Leong
Published in 1928, Doko e yuku, or Where to Go?, is the poet Morio Hayashida’s (b. Aug. 25, 1904 Fukuoka, Japan–d. Apr. 23, 1993 Los Angeles, USA) longest work of collected poetry, consisting of 130 free-verse (shintaishi) poems. According to the Zaibei Nihonjinshi (History of Japanese America, 1940), this volume was one of a trio of poetry monographs that defined a “golden age” of late-1920s Japanese-language modernist poetry in the Los Angeles area...
© 2026 by Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0