By Rafu Shimpo
From: Rafu Shimpo

Los Angeles Literature Note: This obituary of Wakako Yamauchi was published in August in L.A.’s Japanese newspaper Rafu Shimpo. Yamauchi was an important writer in the Nisei Literary community and beyond, especially in Los Ángeles, breaking out after WW II and Japanese internment. Related to the article published earlier this month titled “Literary History: Los Ángeles’ Nisei Literary Community Before WWII.”

GARDENA — Wakako Yamauchi, a renowned Nisei writer best known for her play “And the Soul Shall Dance,” passed away on Aug. 16 at her home in Gardena. She was 93.

She is remembered for depicting the struggles of Japanese immigrants and their children during the Great Depression and World War II, which she personally experienced.

Yamauchi, who was also a short-story writer, a poet and a painter, published two books, “Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir” (1994) and “Rosebud and Other Stories” (2011).

She was born Wakako Nakamura on Oct. 24, 1924, in Westmorland to Issei parents who farmed in the Imperial Valley, near the Mexican border. As tenant farmers, they moved continuously with four children in tow, following work from town to town. During the Great Depression, her father was forced to begin farming for himself and her mother assisted him in the fields, but also taught Japanese on Sundays at the Buddhist church. Unable to make ends meet, they also opened a boarding house for other Japanese immigrants.

Pearl Harbor was bombed when Yamauchi was 17 years old. She recalled in an interview that her Nisei classmates stopped coming to school and one of her teachers condemned the “Japs” for attacking America. She and her family were incarcerated at the Poston concentration camp in Arizona. It was there that she got to know Nisei writer Hisaye Yamamoto, a few years her senior and already established in the Japanese American press.

Yamauchi had enjoyed Yamamoto’s column in The Kashu Mainichi, written under the pen name Napoleon, and later recalled being disappointed when she found out Napoleon was a woman. Both women worked on the camp newspaper, The Poston Chronicle, as layout artist and contributing writer, and shared an interest in art and literature. Until Yamamoto’s passing in 2011 at age 89, the two maintained a close, life-long friendship of inspiration and artistic support.

After a year and a half at Poston, Yamauchi relocated to Utah and then to Chicago, where she worked in a candy factory and began attending plays, marking the beginning of her love for theater. In 1948, she married Chester Yamauchi (1923-1992). Although the couple later divorced, she continued to write under her married name. Read Rest or Obituary Here