What is Tessaku?
Tessaku [Iron Fence] is a nine-volume Japanese-language literary journal of works written and edited by a group of dissident Japanese Americans incarcerated in Tule Lake Segregation Center. Published from March 1944 to 1945, it was read by thousands of incarcerees throughout the American concentration camps.
Tessaku "provided a protected space where interned writers could express complex and contradictory sentiments regarding loyalty and military service."
Who were the Tessaku writers?
Most of the Tessaku writers were Kibei, Japanese Americans born in the U.S. but educated in Japan. Members of a literary movement that emerged in the 1930s, they wrote poems, short stories, and essays about their experiences before and during incarceration. These were writers who had been transferred to Tule Lake Segregation Center from other camps, because they had refused to swear unconditional loyalty to the United States while incarcerated.
Tessaku has remained largely unknown and untranslated for nearly 80 years.
We are currently living a life robbed of our freedom in a concentration camp. Yet this situation is in fact a trial through which we can express our culture. In this way (publishing literature) we can survive this trial without losing ourselves.
Will Tessaku be translated into English soon?
A full translation of Tessaku is now underway. The Tessaku Translation Project, led by UC Berkeley literature professor Andrew Leong, launched in November 2023 and is completing draft translations and engaging with the community in a series of events scheduled through 2026, including at the upcoming Tule Lake Pilgrimage. The Tessaku Community Advisory Board established for the project includes incarceration survivors Hiroshi Shimizu, Kyoko Nancy Oda, and Satsuki Ina, filmmaker Konrad Aderer, and author Frank Abe.
Tessaku-related articles & news:
- A Literary Lion - obituary for Masao Yamashiro, by Martha Nakagawa
- Bitter Sweet Home: celebration of biculturalism in Japanese language Japanese American literature, 1936-1952 - dissertation by Junko Kobayashi
- An English translation of They Took My Father Too was published in The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung
- Beauty In Resistance: The Forgotten Art of Mary Masako Oshiro by Jonathan van Hermelen
- A Trip to the National Archives - On the Search for Tessaku by Jonathan van Harmelen
- "The Iron Fence" - The Developing Literature of the Second Generation Returned to America by Satae Shinoda
Upcoming in 2025-2026:
- Tessaku website: A website making the full works available to the public in Japanese and English for new frontiers of understanding of the transnational Japanese American incarceration experience, and further study.
- Short Film Adaptation: They Took My Father Too - Based on a story by Fujiwo Tanisaki, They Took My Father Too follows Kenji, a young Kibei, as he discovers his father has been abducted and his family makes a journey to visit him in a detention camp.
- Feature Film Adaptation: Jidai (The Age) Kazumi, a young Kibei incarceree Poston, Arizona must decide whether to separate from his mother after he refuses to sign a loyalty oath to the United States.