Violet Kazue de Cristoforo
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Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (September 3, 1917 – October 3, 2007) was a Japanese American poet and composer of haikus. Her haikus reflected the time that she and her family spent in detention in Japanese internment camps during World War II.[1] She wrote more than a dozen books of poetry during her lifetime.[1] Her best known works were "Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944", which was written nearly 50 years after her detention.[1] She also was the editor of "May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow; An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku."[1]
She was also a major advocate for the plight of Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during the war. The work of Cristoforo and other activists ultimately led theUnited States government to make reparations and issue an official apology to the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II.[1]
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[edit] Early life
Cristoforo was born Kazue Yamane on September 3, 1917, in Ninole, Hawaii. However, she was raised in both Fresno, California, and Hiroshima, Japan.[1]
Cristoforo married her first husband, Shigeru Matsuda, soon after graduating from a high school in Fresno.[1]
[edit] World War II
Cristoforo and Matsuda had two small children, and Cristoforo was pregnant with her third, when the family was sent to a Japanese American internment camp near Fresno.[1] There she gave birth to her third child on a make shift table made of orange crates.[1] She was forcibly separated from her husband and they were sent to separate internment centers. She spent the rest of World War II being moved between two more detention camps in Jerome, Arkansas, and Tule Lake, California. She and her children were finally released from custody at the end of World War II.[1]
Her time in the internment camps left a lasting imprint on Cristoforo's writings. Much of the original haikus that were written during her years in the camps has been lost or destroyed.[1] However, her remaining writings and later works reflected the desolation and despair that she felt in the camps.[1]
[edit] Post World War II
Cristoforo and her children were repatriated to Japan in 1946.[1] Her husband, Shigeru Matsuda, was also sent to Japan separately. Life was not easy for the family. While living in Japan, Cristoforo discovered that her husband had married a Japanese woman.[1] She also witnessed first hand the destruction and the aftermath of the atomic bomb and its effects on Japanese civilians.[1]
Cristoforo met her second husband in Japan, an officer in the United States Army named Wilfred H. de Cristoforo.[1] The couple moved back to the United States and settled in Monterey, California.[1] In addition to her writings, Cristoforo took a job at The McGraw-Hill Companies.[1] Their marriage lasted until Wilfred's death in 1998.[1]
[edit] Honors
Violet Kazue de Cristoforo was honored in Washington D.C. by the National Endowment for the Arts in September 2007, just weeks before her death.[1] The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a National Heritage Fellowship for cultural achievement for her writings.[1] The National Heritage Fellowship Award is the highest award in the given in the United States to honor achievement in traditional and folk arts.
[edit] Death
Violet Kazue de Cristoforo died from complications from a stroke on October 3, 2007, at her home in Salinas, California.[1] She died just two weeks after receiving the National Heritage Fellowship Award. She was 90 years old.
Cristoforo was survived by two daughters, a son and two grandchildren.[1]
