27 pages • 54 minutes read
Hisaye YamamotoSeventeen Syllables
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Hisaye Yamamoto
Like Rosie, Hisaye Yamamoto was raised in the United States by parents who immigrated from Japan. Rosie and Yamamoto are second-generation Japanese Americans, or nisei, while their parents are first generation, or issei. Many of Yamamoto’s stories address conflicts between the two generations.
Born in Redondo Beach, California in 1921, Yamamoto experienced a typical nisei childhood, balancing pressure from her issei parents to preserve Japanese language and culture with her own desires to experience and fit into American culture. “Seventeen Syllables” represents this conflict through Rosie’s interest in American popular culture in contrast to Tome’s passion for haiku and ukiyo-e. Yamamoto’s mother passed away in 1939, around when “Seventeen Syllables” is meant to take place.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, known as the Japanese Relocation Act of 1942. All Japanese Americans on the west coast were forcibly relocated to concentration camps. Yamamoto was incarcerated in Poston, Arizona, from 1942 to 1945, along with her father and brothers. She was 20 years old at the time. There, she worked as a reporter for the camp newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, and wrote short stories. In the camps, Japanese cultural expressions, like haiku, were aggressively discouraged by administrators in favor of American forms of art. Because Yamamoto wrote “Seventeen Syllables” after her experience in the camp, Tome’s passion for haiku represents a larger cultural desire to preserve endangered art forms.
After the war, Yamamoto worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, a weekly newspaper with a predominantly African American readership, from 1945 to 1948. During this time, she expanded her writing beyond purely Japanese American themes to discuss race and racism in America more broadly.
Socio-Historical Context: Anti-Japanese Sentiment in the US
Although Mr. Hayashi operated the tomato farm in the story, he would not have owned the land himself. Per the Alien Land Act of 1913, Japanese immigrants were forbidden to own property or lease land for longer than three years. The law was passed because many white American farmers were threatened by the growing economic influence of Asian American farmers. To work around this law, many Japanese American families purchased land under the names of their nisei children, who were legally able to own land. It is possible that the Hayashi tomato farm was technically owned by Rosie; although this never comes up in the story, it is worth noting that these factors would contribute to Mr. Hayashi’s feelings of insecurity. He is forced to toil on land that is not his own while his wife becomes increasingly distracted by something associated with upper class and leisure.
After Pearl Harbor, even land owned by nisei Japanese Americans would have been seized by the US government and given to a non-Japanese tenant. Thus, Yamamoto, writing the story after this moment, purposely sets her story on a tomato farm that would soon not even belong to the Hayashi family. Even before World War II, US anti-Asian sentiment would have been a fact of life for the Hayashi family. In addition to the Alien Land Act, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 all but banned immigration from Asia. The law signaled to Japanese Americans already settled in the US that many of their neighbors did want them around.
