Photograph of Toyo Suyemoto (Kawakami) Columbus, Ohio. Undated, circa 1974
On the occasion of Asian Pacific American Heritage month at OSU, Japanese Studies is pleased to announce the online publication of select materials from the Toyo Suyemoto (Kawakami) Collection. Highlights of the digital exhibit include a rare oral interview, available in streaming video format, in which Suyemoto discusses memories of forced relocation and incarceration in U.S. internment camps during World War II. Images of diaries, personal photographs, notes and essays are also available in this online collection.
Suyemoto’s connection to The Ohio State University dates back to her years of service as faculty librarian and associate professor in OSU Libraries. Before retiring in 1985, she held positions including Head of the Social Work Library and Assistant Head of the Education Library. Her close relationship with OSU led to her donation of over forty boxes of personal papers, essays, and poems to the Libraries’ Special Collections. An online finding aid provides a detailed summary of the physical collection, which forms the basis of the new online collection.
Suyemoto was born on January 14, 1916 in Oroville, California, where she grew up in a family that stressed education. Her mother’s love of literature fueled Toyo’s interest in poetry. After earning bachelor’s degrees in English and Latin at the University of California, Berkeley, she pursued graduate work in English from 1937 to 1941. During this time, she married a Nisei newspaperman, Iwao Kawakami, from San Francisco and gave birth to a child named Kay. In her memoir I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment, Suyemoto recalls the moment when she heard about the Pearl Harbor attacks soon after giving birth. She describes what it was like to be of Japanese descent after the attacks took place; many friends were lost and basic tasks, such as grocery shopping, became difficult.
Public distrust of Japanese American citizens grew, which eventually led to Suyemoto’s relocation to the Tanforan Assembly Center in 1942. Here, Suyemoto assisted in creating schools for the children at the camp and worked as an English teacher. Eventually she was moved again to the Topaz Camp in central Utah, one of ten US internment camps administered by the US War Relocation Authority (WRA). The Topaz Camp is where Suyemoto spent most of her internment and where she worked at the camp’s public library. A visitor sign-in log from the Topaz Public Library is one of the many artifacts from the Suyemoto Collection now preserved at OSU Libraries.
For more information on Toyo Suyemoto:
Schweik, Susan. “The ‘Pre-Poetics’ of Internment: The Example of Toyo Suyemoto.” American Literary History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 89–109.
Toyo Suyemoto by Densho Encyclopedia contributors (Densho Encyclopedia, 2013)
