Today’s Google Doodle Celebrates Writer Hisaye Yamamoto

When the American-Japanese writer Hisaye Yamamoto began her career as a scribe as a teenager, it was under a pseudonym: she bore the nickname Napoleon, which signaled the level of her ambition and the scale of things to come. Tragically, however, Yamamoto and her family were forced to go to Japanese internment camps under Decree 9066, but she continued to write; produce reports and columns for the “Poston Chronicle”, the camp newspaper. Google Doodle of today Yamamoto champions and his extraordinary career, which illustrates how marginalized writers in America must face in order to be successful.

After the end of World War II, Yamamoto found work as a reporter for the black-owned Los Angeles Tribune where she was able to write firsthand about the racism and persecution facing members of her community. were facing. Soon after, she published her first short story, titled High-heeled shoes; always, the intersectional themes of race, gender and class were central to her work, no matter what form it took.

In her short story, she also explained what it had been like to survive an internment camp and became a lifelong radicalized activist against war and all that comes with it. Throughout his prolific career, Yamamoto has been presented in the Partisan review, Kenyon Reviews, Harper’s Bazaar, Carleton Miscellaneous, Arizona Quarterly and Furioso, but she also found time to raise children and be a housewife.

Perhaps Yamamoto’s best-known piece is “Seventeen syllables», In which a young girl tells the story of her mother, who writes haiku to transcend the boredom of working on a farm. However, the mother is punished for her hobby by her ignorant husband. The purpose of the story seems to reflect Yamamoto’s own life, which illustrates that you always have to find a way to make art, even if it’s suppressed or misunderstood.