Bunichi Kagawa — Collected Poems

November 4, 1904, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan – December 19, 1981, Los Angeles, California

Bunichi Kagawa moved between languages and literary communities with extraordinary resolve. Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1904, he joined his family in California as a teenager, worked in domestic service around Stanford, and educated himself in English and poetry. Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis encouraged him; Ruth Mantz’s Half Moon Press issued Hidden Flame in 1930, a finely printed book of two hundred copies. Kagawa’s English poems appeared in Poetry and Japanese American newspapers, while his Japanese writing and organizing helped create Shūkaku before the war and Tessaku inside Tule Lake. This edition gathers every English poem that could be recovered from accessible original pages, including four poems from the unavailable book, and restores their lineation and stanza structure from periodical or anthology witnesses.

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Catalogue

Asian American and Transpacific Poetry

Associations

Japanese American Incarceration Japanese Diaspora Migration and Exile Transpacific Writing World War II, Fascism, and Exile Yvor Winters Circle

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Kagawa, Bunichi. “Hunger,” “July,” and “Soaring Hour.” Under the collective title “Under the Skyscrapers.” Poetry, vol. 36, no. 5, Aug. 1930, pp. 246–247.

———. Hidden Flame. Foreword by Yvor Winters. Half Moon Press, 1930.

———. “To a Man and His Heritage.” The Japanese American News, 26 May 1931, p. 5.

———. “The Village Spring” and “The Rumor.” Under the collective title “News.” Poetry, vol. 43, no. 4, Jan. 1934, pp. 196–197.

———. “Identity.” The Japanese American News, 11 Feb. 1935, p. 1.

———. “Night.” The Japanese American News, 7 Oct. 1935, p. 2.

———. “Silent Intimacy.” Poetry, vol. 47, no. 4, Jan. 1936, p. 192.

———. “First Words.” Shūkaku, no. 1, Dec. 1936.

———. “Publication Message.” Tessaku, no. 1, Mar. 1944.

———. “Trivial Things.” Tessaku, no. 3, 1944.

———. “Geta.” Tessaku, vol. 8, Apr. 1945, pp. 24–29.

———. Kagawa Bun’ichi shishū. 1982.

———. Zuihitsushū okidokei. 1983.

Contributions to Carillon and Roon. Half Moon Press, circa 1929–1930.

Contributions to Shūkaku, 1936–39. Published in Los Angeles.

Contributions to Tessaku. Tule Lake Segregation Center, 1944–1945.

Works About the Author

Abe, Frank, and Floyd Cheung, editors. The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. Penguin Classics, 2024. Includes a complete English translation of Kagawa’s “Geta,” pp. 160–164.

Chang, Juliana, editor. Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970. Asian American Writers’ Workshop; distributed by Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Densho. “Iron Fences and Pepper Pods: Four Poets at Tule Lake and Their Stories.” 13 Sept. 2022.

Izumi, Masumi. “Japanese American Literary Groups in the 1930s: An Analysis of Shūkaku, Current Life, and Related Magazines.” Japanese Journal of American Studies, vol. 29, 2018.

Los Altos History Museum. 51 S. San Antonio Road: Shoup House Centennial Program. 2010.

Mizuno, Mariko. “Kagawa Bunichi no bungeikan to kyōsei shūyōjo taiken: Iminchi bungei kara Kibei Nisei bungaku no hatten ni oite.” Shakai System Kenkyu, vol. 11, Feb. 2008, pp. 169–182.

“Study of Japanese American and Kibei literary culture including Bunichi Kagawa.” University of California eScholarship dissertation.

Yamamoto, Iwao. “The Phantom Literary Magazine Shūkaku.” Discover Nikkei, 14 Jan. 2011.

———. “The Literary Magazine Tessaku.” Discover Nikkei, 22 Apr. 2011.

Yee, April. Mending Fences: The Japanese American Literary Magazine Tessaku and the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Master’s thesis, Brandeis University, 2021.