Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Jean Toyama

Interview of Jean Toyama (JT), conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on May 29, 2023. Jean speaks about her early education, her time in France, becoming a Professor of French, her literary and scholarly publications, and her involvement in Bamboo Ridge Press Preservation Project, and issues she edited. Jean also recalls Marie Hara, Juliet S. Kono, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Jean Toyama (JT) on May 29, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is one session in length.

Jean Toyama and Ken Tokuno have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

KT: When and where were you born?

JT: I was born right after the start of World War Two in January 1942 at Kapi‘olani Hospital, but I had to stay in an incubator for a few months because I was lighter than five pounds so after fattening up a little, I moved to Ke‘eaumoku Street and I still remember the address, 1426 F, Elm Street which was behind the Shingon Temple and behind Tanabe Stores but right in the middle of where Ke‘eaumoku is now so it no longer exists. That’s it.

KT: Okay. What were the elementary and secondary schools that you attended?

JT: I went to Ka‘ahumanu Elementary School. A neighbor girl walked us there from Elm Street. It didn’t seem long to me at that time, but I think it’s that it’s not that close anyway. I was there for kindergarten and 1st grade and then we moved to Mānoa and I went to Manoa Elementary School, which at that time was across the street from the graveyard. Manoa Valley Theatre was across from the elementary school, but at that time, Manoa Valley Theatre was Manoa Valley Church. So, my memory goes way back because Manoa Street. Is that called Manoa Street? No, Manoa Road. It was a dirt road.

KT: Oh. And secondary school.

JT: Secondary school was Stevenson. Oh, but I have a long story to tell you about why we moved.

KT: Okay.

JT: It started at Ka‘ahumanu School, first grade. They used to have these elocution classes for people who spoke Pidgin and I guess my Pidgin must have been pretty bad because I had to meet every Friday with the teacher, who did that thing with the candle you know, the one from Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. We would have to say “the,” “this,” “that,” [without blowing out the candle] and it was fun. It took us out of school, but I guess it must have bothered my parents that my Pidgin was to be remarked by the teachers and so my father investigated, I guess. This is what I found out later on: that in order for us to go to an English standard school we would have to live in the area and Manoa Elementary School fed into Stevenson school, which fed in directly into Roosevelt. So this was completely unknown to me and my sisters. We just went wherever they told us to go but they really must have believed in it because it was not cheap to buy land in Manoa. And it just so happened that in 1948 a pastureland was being sold. A lot of Japanese families, maybe there were five of us, and my father and his friends who were carpenters like himself, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers would go there every Sunday and they built the house from scratch. It took us a year and it’s funny that all our neighbors around us but not behind us were haoles and they lived in really fancy houses and here we were in this kind of simple wooden house, but it was big enough for my father and his two brothers and my grandmother and grandfather because my grandfather insisted that we all live together, which we did until I married out. Just a few years ago, my mother sold her portion of the house. And my cousin still lives there. So is that—does that answer your question?

KT: Oh, that’s funny. So you basically went to Stevenson and Roosevelt after you moved.

JT: Yeah, in order to get into an English standard school and, actually, my graduating class, 1960, was the last English standard school, at that time. Everybody called it the Punahou of the public school system, which—I was completely ignorant of that, and I was also ignorant of the fact that people like, for instance, my husband, who graduated from McKinley, thought that all of us from Roosevelt were snooty, especially the girls. But I never thought that we were snooty, I mean, but we thought that Punahou was our rival, so I guess we were snooty.

KT: Okay, what was your life like for you growing up? Did your parents read to you or otherwise have a hand in shaping your education? I mean, you kind of answered that already.

JT: Yeah, the important part of our schooling, but as far as home, my mother and father only went up to eighth grade so their—after a certain point there wasn’t much that they could do except they, you know, if we wanted books, but the kinds of books that I grew up with when I was in elementary school were the Golden Books, you know, the small, simple kinds of books. We never read anything more than that, but our language came from the radio.

KT: Okay.

JT: Because we listened to the radio a lot: Mystery theater, Boston Blackie, Philo Vance. I still remember all of those—oh, the Lone Ranger. We, my sisters and I, would listen very attentively and I guess through listening to the language we got English through osmosis. And I remember when I went to second grade my first encounter with this Manoa school, of course, not everybody spoke standard English. There were some of us who spoke Pidgin. But I remember my first report card was a shocker to me because I got minuses for Spoken English, Written English and English Comprehension, which might have motivated me to work a little harder. We didn’t read, I mean, I don’t remember reading anything that was beyond what was assigned in school except in fifth grade. I got really enamored of Aztec civilization and Inca civilization. So I would read whatever was in the library about that. And then I read a lot of fairy tale books.

KT: Okay, we’ve kind of already gotten into the next question, but I’m gonna ask it. What kinds of literature were exposed to in school? Which teachers were particularly influential for you and how did they influence you?

JT: Oh, okay. The teacher that I remember influencing my reading was Pat Saiki, the writer, and she was my 7th grade teacher. She assigned us, I guess, books like the Good Earth, which is the book I chose to write my book report on. I remember that book because I loved it and I continued reading other books by Pearl Buck. But as far as other authors, I really don’t remember reading anything special except maybe Gone with the Wind, when I was a senior. I mean, I guess I wasn’t that much of a reader.

KT: Really? Okay. So I mean in terms of the general curriculum you just read what everyone else in the class read, pretty much.

JT: All right, and when we were at Roosevelt, we were always reminded that we were in English standard school. I mean, remember, Miss Case. She was the aunt of Ed Case. She would always talk to us about, “Now—” and she was very strict with our English so she would tell us, “Now know you’re in English standard school. So don’t forget that.” And so we didn’t. But I didn’t—oh, it’s just like a regular high school. It seemed to me I didn’t know anything different.

KT: Yeah, so you probably didn’t—I mean, so the counterpart to the English standard school Roosevelt was McKinley, right? Did you have any idea what they, what they were doing? Did you ever find out how it was different from Roosevelt?

JT: No, I don’t because, I mean, I did have friends from McKinley. Because, our churches would get together and, often, we’d get together with people from Makiki Christian Church and the boys there went to McKinley. And, you know, they didn’t speak Pidgin, they spoke regular English. I mean, I don’t know what this big deal was.

KT: Okay. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, just for the record because I think a lot of people who view this, read this transcript won’t understand in the old days there was a segregation of students.

JT: Yeah. Which is why they got rid of it. And it was prejudicial, but at that time we didn’t—you know, it didn’t appear to us that it was segregation. We did know that we were privileged. Because we were able to go to Roosevelt.

KT: Okay, let’s move on. What was the first time you felt like you connected to something you read? And what kind of literature did you first feel connected to?

JT: Well, I guess it was in senior, Miss Case’s class. I felt connected to some of the poetry that we read in class, Edna St. Vincent Millay and, of course, Emily Dickinson. Some of those, you know, Emily Dickinson’s, “I’m Nobody! Who are you/ Are you—Nobody—too?” Then there’s a part, “They’ll banish us, you know.” I mean, I liked it so much I even memorized. Probably because it was short. I hardly memorized anything. When I memorized that. So I was touched by some of the poetry that we read and I enjoyed reading in that class, but I don’t remember very much.

KT: Okay, I notice you picked out two female poets. Is that something that was just random or you actually identified with the fact that they were female authors.

JT: I don’t know. I connected with their words. I mean, yeah, I connected with their words and their sentiment like the one line I remember from Edna St. Vincent Millay was, “The world is too much with us.” Or something like that. Yeah.

KT: Yeah, that’s a famous line. Okay, what kind of career goals did you have in your youth? I’m talking about high school and maybe college. And why, why did you choose to become a professor of French?

JT: Well, I think the class in which I really got interested in literature was as a freshman at UH, in English class, and my professor was Florence Maney. And she was, I later found out that she was just an instructor, “just an instructor.” I didn’t know the difference between instructors and professors.

KT: Right.

JT: I, you know, I called the professor, Dr. Maney, anyway. She introduced me to the Japanese novel and so I read Tanizaki’s, Some Prefer Nettles and Kawabata’s, Snow Country. But that kind of thinking, that kind of expression in the translation of Some Prefer Nettles and then the relationship between the husband and the wife. I mean, it reveals some things that I didn’t understand about human relationships. And, so I liked literature at that time but I wasn’t thinking of becoming a professor of literature because my father died when I was a senior in high school and he died of cancer and he had a wonderful doctor. And for a while there I thought maybe I wanted to be a doctor and, you know, work on cancer. But then I got introduced to this kind of literature or writing at the university. And then one day my French 101 teacher, Dorothy Aspinwall, she comes to class and she says Miss Yamasaki, how would you like to go to France? I said, Yes!—I didn’t hesitate one minute.

KT: Really? Wow.

JT: And here I was a freshman in French 101. I had never taken French in high school. I had taken Latin. And I guess I was so enthusiastic in her class she thought that I would be a good candidate to go to France. So she told me what I should do, which classes I should take and then finally in my junior year I was in France. Of course, after I, you know, did summer school and tried to catch up, I was in France and spent my junior year in France, mainly through her influence, because she was such a wonderful teacher and so kind and beautiful and so sophisticated. I guess I wanted to be sophisticated because people said why do you want to go to France? Why don’t you go to Japan? You’re Japanese, you know, but I didn’t make the connection. People probably thought I wanted to be haole.

So then I came home with so many credits in French and I could graduate with a French degree, but I still had the idea that I wanted to teach English. And I took English courses and one of my teachers, Dr. Bouslog [I later learned that he was the husband of the famous lawyer, Harriet Bouslog, “champion of the poor and disadvantaged” -JT]. I remember he asked me what I wanted to do in my future. And I said, I think I wanted to be an English professor. And he said, “What other things do you take?” And I said, French. And he said, “Well, you know, you’d have an easier time getting a professorship in French than in English if you want to come back to Hawai‘i.” I would wonder, how come? You know, why is that so? And then when I became Associate Dean, I understood that the women in the English department at that time were having a hard time getting tenured and promoted.

KT: Oh.

JT: In fact, I joined the Women’s Faculty Caucus because I met some women in the English department who were having a hard time . And so maybe it’s changed now. But up until 2000 I think, you know, they didn’t have very many and local people, too. They didn’t have very many local people on the faculty.

KT: Yeah, I know. They still don’t, right?

JT: Don’t they have a local? Don’t they have a few? They have Candace, Candace Fujikane.

KT: Yeah, she’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

JT: Yeah, but I know that there were a lot of people denied. But they were also some haole people denied promotion or tenure too, there. But, anyway, that was very good that later women and locals got tenure.

KT: But your junior year in France is probably a whole story by itself. Where did you stay in France?

JT: I stayed in Paris. I mean, I went with the Hamilton junior year in college. Because Madame Aspinwall knew people there and I was able to get a partial scholarship from Hamilton College. Of course, you know, it would—my mother was struggling, you know, she had three daughters. And, I worked at the Kelly Hotels: the Reef and some others. Also the Waikiki Grand and the Waikiki Circle. I worked as a maid during the summers and Easter vacation. I worked at the Halekulani when there were still bungalows. It was a great experience. I learned about hard physical work. Eighteen-fifteen rooms a day. When I go to a hotel, I always give a good tip. I worked at a lot of those hotels to get enough money to go to France and then I borrowed—I borrowed money from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

KT: Wow, really? Okay.

JT: Which I only paid off after I got married [laughs], but, anyway, Hamilton College was one of the Junior Year in France programs, well, there were others. There was Sweet Briar, Hamilton, and then some place from Louisiana. When I was on the SS France, leaving New York City. I met several students from these different schools. Some of them were assigned to the same dining table as I. We had, I don’t know, five, six days on the ship together. We left New York on the SS France. We never socialized except at the dining table to go over French and they would give us exams to see what level we fit in when we went to Biarritz. And we spent six weeks in Biarritz and I was at the bottom of the class with another guy.

KT: Yeah?

JT: Yeah, because we were the least prepared. I mean, lots of the people who went on this group had six years of French.

KT: Oh wow.

JT: They went to French schools, you know, and they really spoke wonderful French and here I was struggling.

KT: Oh, you had French 101 at UH–Mānoa.

JT: I was a true fresh French 101 student in college.

KT: Huh. So by the time you were a junior, you only had two years.

JT: I went, yeah, I only had two years. I had—I got intermediate French during the summer. So I got French 201 and 202 during the summer and my sophomore year I took two or three 300-level courses.

KT: Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so you had more than just two years. Still, it’s tough to master in that time.

JT: Yeah, and so when I was—I struggled. I guess my French was so bad that one of professor in Biarritz told me. “Mademoiselle, vous savez.” I mean, “Miss, do you realize that you’re gonna have to take a test, when you’re in Paris?” Oh, that terrified me. Anyway, we went to Paris and I stayed in the home of one of the grandsons of Carl Jung. He had three daughters: France, Dominique, and—I forgot the name of the eldest. I only saw her a few times. Dominique lived in the apartment.

KT: Oh my gosh.

JT: In a pretty, yeah, in a pretty ritzy area of Paris, the sixteenth arrondissement, and I shared the apartment with two other women, girls. One was from New York, upstate New York, and she went to—Wells? Yeah. And then the other one was from Pennsylvania. So, yeah, we have lots of adventures there too.

KT: I bet, let’s not go there.

JT: Yeah, but then we took classes at the Sorbonne. And then, so, I took an art class at the Sorbonne and we would go to the museums and look at the actual paintings and the teacher would lecture in front of the painting.

KT: So the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and everything else. Yeah.

JT: Yeah, at that time the National Gallery was called “Jeu de Paume” and it was in the Tuileries Gardens. It’s not where it is now. And, we would be able to go into the museum anytime we wanted because we had a year’s student pass. And we’d go there and nobody would be in the rooms. We would just sit there and look at the paintings. Then I also went to many theaters. I did a theater course, so we saw all these famous actors, French actors. Got it exposed to theater. And, then—

KT: The instruction was in French too, in the class?

JT: Oh yeah, all the instruction was in French. Then we went to the Phonetic Institute, which was very good for me because I learned French pronunciation there. And then we saw, at the theater, Ionesco. I think we saw a Beckett play. No, that’s when I came back. I had already become enamored of Beckett when I was a senior at UH. I took a Philosophy in Literature course. Do you remember Harold McCarthy?

KT: No.

JT: He was a professor. He was a professor of philosophy, but he taught, philosophy and literature and I took a course from him in which he did three of—I mean, Beckett’s Trilogy, which got me hooked on Beckett, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

KT: And you read Ionesco in French!

JT: Oh, sorry. Oh yeah. What I mean, his plays are pretty—they’re pretty simple, you know. La Cantatrice Chauve has lots of repetition.

KT: Yeah. Okay, great. So at that point you were—but you were still thinking you were going to be a professor of English even after you got through your studies of French. So you decided to—how did you decide to get a PhD in French?

JT: Well, I came home, let’s see. Got my BA, did practice teaching at the lab school. I had a terrific teacher-mentor, Helen Nagtalog-Miller, as a supervisor. She taught me how to teach. I went to Purdue, got my MA, got married, and came home. Lucky enough to work at the University Lab School.

KT: Okay, so. Just to kind of link things together. So you graduated with a degree in English or—

JT: And then I would, yeah, I graduated in French. And then I went to Purdue.

KT: Okay. Oh, for your master’s.

JT: Uh-huh [affirmative]. For my masters, and then I got married in between semesters. And then I came back and then had to find a job. So I got a job at University Lab School teaching French and I would take classes at the same time, you know, because I wanted to keep up my French and then I met a French writer, Jacques Borel, and he told me, “You should go get your PhD.” And I didn’t know whether we could do that. In the meantime, my husband and I decided to spend a year in France. So I quit my job and we sold everything and we went to France and, at that time, I had already applied for a teaching assistantship at UC Irvine and I didn’t know whether I would be able to go there but we spent a year in Europe and then when we were in London, I found out that I got an assistantship at Irvine for the PhD. So then, we came home and then got ready to go to California. And that’s how I got my PhD in Irvine.

KT: Oh. And your goal, at that point was, to come back to Hawai‘i and become a professor of French.

JT: Yeah, because I was told that the university did not hire their own graduates. And anyway, there was no PhD program in French. At UH at that time, but they still don’t have a PhD program.

KT: Yeah. Still don’t have—

JT: And their MA program is kind of on its last leg. But, well, they don’t have a special French MA. They have a kind of MA in European Languages unless things have changed since I left. Anyway, they don’t have any TA-ships anymore in the European languages department and most of the candidates for the MA came from the teaching assistantships, you know. So again, I got an instructorship at UH in the department. Dorothy Aspinwall was the chair of the department and I was able to get an assistantship but she said after that you’re on your own. I was one of the few people who went from Instructor to Assistant, you know, to include tenure because, at that time, they had changed—no after me they changed the law. They changed the rules after me. I was still able to get tenure but I got tenure as an Assistant Professor. I was promoted to Assistant Professorship when I got my tenure. But after that, you had to go from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to get tenure.

KT: Yeah, interesting. I didn’t know that.

JT: Yeah, yeah, I think that my appointment might have had something to do with that.

KT: Do you want to mention anything about your dissertation in French? What was your dissertation in French about?

JT: Beckett, Samuel Beckett, yeah. Yeah, I started writing to him in 1967. And we kept on writing to each other. I mean, not long letters; just I’d have questions and I’d send him— actually, when I still had my MA. Yeah. I still had my MA. I would write to him and he’d answer me on little cards with terse answers. I remember once he wrote: “1. yes. 2. no. 3. no.” If I remember correctly. I had asked three questions. Didn’t know what I had asked him. But we were corresponding until 1985. And I got to meet him in 1980 on a trip. In fact, I was just, I mean, this is fresh in my mind because I’m just getting ready to send my correspondence with him to Emory University where they have their archives for his correspondence. But you know, I’m so dumb. I didn’t keep my letters to him. He probably didn’t keep my letters. So he would say thank you for your poems or thank you for your essay and I wouldn’t know what I sent him because I didn’t keep my original letter.

KT: Okay. I don’t think that’s very common thing to do. People don’t think of keeping copies of their own letters.

JT: You don’t think that’s a common thing to do?

KT: Oh, I don’t, I never did.

JT: But if you work with, maybe, I think people who are famous—

KT: Yeah, I guess if you have a sense of history, maybe you would.

JT: Yeah, if you have a sense of history, you will keep your letters to them, but I didn’t, so—

KT: Do you think your study of French affected your creative writing?

JT: I think in, in the beginning, yeah, because my writing in the beginning, you know, was kind of surrealistic. In fact, I mean, my—the first poems I wrote were published in Ștefan Baciu’s Mele, which he published from UH. He was a celebrated Roumanian [that’s the way it was spelled then -JT] poet who had to escape from Communism, lived in Brazil and elsewhere. When Ionesco won the Nobel Prize for Literature, his wife, Mira, who was my colleague in French, said she had called to congratulate him and he said, “Trop tard.” [Too late. -JT] Mele was an international newsletter because he knew all kinds of famous writers and my humble poems would appear with them. I mean, it was just a mimeograph kind of a publication, but I remember that Arnold Hiura and Steven Sumida had included it in Asian American Literature of Hawai‘i: An Annotated Bibliography where they listed all the things that were published by Asian American authors. Anyway, I was surprised to see that one of my poems was noted and I think the comment was, “We don’t understand what it’s about.”

KT: It was, it was in English?

JT: Huh? It was, oh yeah, my poems are in English.

KT: More surrealistic.

JT: Yeah, it was about elephants sitting on your head.

KT: Yeah. I get that. Okay, moving along then. Getting into your creative phase. I know you published somewhere prior to being in the pages of the Bamboo Ridge in 1986. I checked that out. Is that accurate your first Bamboo Ridge publication was in 1986?

JT: I have something in ’80—oh, it might have been ’86. I had—I thought my first publication was 1981. But I had—do you remember Ka Huliau the publication from Ethnic Studies? Roland Kotani was the editor.

KT: Early ’80s?

JT: Yeah, in the ’80s, because then I wrote a short story called “Invasion” and it got first prize for Ka Huliau’s contest. So. But yeah, I mean, I had submitted short stories to Honolulu Magazine and I got runner-up for “Chichi Dango” in 1985. In 1988, “Neighborhood Healer” won First Prize for non-fiction in the local PEN Contest. These stories got published in BR later [Issues #72, 73 -Ed.]. In 1988, my poem “Red” was published in The Forbidden Stitch from Calyx [Press] in Oregon. I was sending stuff to BR from time to time.

KT: So when did you first start writing starting stories and poems?

JT: Well, I was writing poems from 1966.

KT: So when you were—

JT: When I was still going to—getting my masters and I dabbled in writing. I think the first short story I wrote was “Invasion” for the Ka Huliau publication. I think Eric won the first prize for poetry at that time. Anyway, yeah, 19—I had been writing and then some one of my stories got published in Japan, but—This was before I got published in Bamboo Ridge.

KT: Yeah, so like, was there anyone who significantly helped you in getting it published?

JT: I had lots of encouragement from people like that French author, Jacques Borel and Dorothy Aspinwall. She also wrote short stories and then I worked for Reuel Denney for a while and he was always encouraging. So I didn’t get—I mean, I think that famous book where all my rejection slips are [shows the book with all the rejection slips].

KT: Really? Okay.

JT: Anyway, I got a lot of rejections and so after a while I stopped and then, okay, Bamboo Ridge. Oh, I got some things published in New York. But I didn’t follow through, you know, I was so worried about getting tenure and losing my job at the university that I concentrated on my scholarly work.

KT: Yeah, of course. That’s natural. What do you remember about the 1978 Talk Story Conference?

JT: Okay. Nothing. I didn’t even know about it. I heard about it later. Because I think at that time, I was so immersed in trying to get my scholarly work published, you know, and they say publish or perish, it’s true unless you have a good bibliography, you’re just out the door.

KT: Yeah, we were in the same boat at the same time.

JT: Yeah, weren’t you working on your publications?

KT: Yeah. Okay. Oh, so you didn’t know about Talk Story, but how and from whom did you first hear about Bamboo Ridge?

JT: Oh, I guess, I used to see Joseph Stanton and Tony Quagliano in Ștefan Baciu’s office once in a while. And we talked about where we’re sending our stuff and they would ask me about “Well, are you sending stuff to Bamboo Ridge?” And then they would, you know—so I guess I was sending them stuff and it was always getting rejected. And I told you how Haunani Trask and I used to joke about all our rejection slips from Bamboo Ridge. So I don’t know. In my memory, I think they accepted “Etiquette,” my short poem about eating fish heads [Issue #9 -Ed.]. I’m surprised to see that “Etiquette” was accepted in 1981. And then there was a span of time when nothing got published. But I don’t remember whether I was consistent in sending some stuff, I guess. I was kinda discouraged. I only started my submission log in 1985. Nothing much for next ten years. The short stories mentioned earlier appeared after 1998. “I hate December 7th” in 1992 [Issue #81 -Ed.], “Chichi Dango” [Issue #73 -Ed.], “Reciprocity” [Issue #91 -Ed.]. That started it. Also “My Healer” [Issue #72 -Ed.], accepted in 1997. Just checked my book.

KT: Did you read the magazine itself?

JT: Did I read what?

KT: Did you read Bamboo Ridge?

JT: Oh yeah, oh, at that time. Not really.

KT: Yeah. Okay, so you didn’t really know what kind of stuff they would accept.

JT: No.

KT: Okay. Well, then beyond—but eventually you did get published and then you would read it. I don’t know those days. Would they send you a free copy of the magazine using what you got published. Is that so—?

JT: Yeah.

KT: So you read some of—

JT: Yeah, yeah.

KT: What did you think? What did you think of the journal?

JT: Well, I wanted to get published in there. I wanted to get published in there and that, you know. I was sending to the mainland and I wasn’t—I got a few, I got a few nibbles and then people would send stuff back to me and ask me to submit things and I would submit things and they wouldn’t get accepted so I said, well why ask me to submit stuff if you’re not gonna publish it [laughs]?

KT: Right.

JT: So then. Well, that’s the way it was.

KT: Okay, well beyond getting your writing published in Bamboo Ridge what prompted you to get more involved with it.

JT: Well I guess it was Marie Hara. For some reason she took a liking to me. She was my sister’s classmate. And, she asked me whether I wanted to join Study Group. So I don’t know whether I joined Study Group before or after she asked me to join them as an observer at their board meetings.

KT: And what about what time was this? This was after you’d been published.

JT: Yeah, yeah, after I’d been published, maybe in 2000.

KT: Oh, that far after, so first publication, 1986, and then 2000.

JT: Yeah, yeah, if I can remember correctly, I’m that, you know, my—that part I don’t quite recollect too well, but I—It’s what? It’s 2023 now. So I would say maybe in 2000 because I was still, I was still working at that time. And I remember going. Yeah, so I would. Actually, it started in 1997.

KT: Yes, You’d had a significant number of books and things like that already in Bamboo Ridge, poems and short stories.

JT: Yeah, yeah, I had, so I thought, okay, I gotta give back to Bamboo Ridge because they had been publishing my stuff. And then, you know, I didn’t like to say no to Marie.

KT: But I never got to know her, which is kind of a shame because apparently, she was quite the lady.

JT: She was wonderful, yeah.

KT: So, yeah, what kind of things went on in the Study Group?

JT: People would bring the stuff that they’d written and they would get comments on it. And you’d either take them or leave them or get mad at them or get upset or whatever, you know.

KT: Kind of a workshop thing then?

JT: Yeah, it is like a workshop.

KT: So do you remember who was in Study Group when you first joined?

JT: Well, certainly Darrell and Wing Tek and Juliet, Marie. Oh, and—Oh gosh, how could I forget his name? Nora. Anyway.

KT: Eric Chock?

JT: No, he wasn’t.

KT: Oh, he wasn’t.

JT: No, I don’t remember him being in any of the Study Groups. Maybe he was—maybe he was there because the Study Group had gone on for years and years before I entered the scene. So.

KT: Mostly prose as opposed to poetry?

JT: Both. Yeah, both.

KT: Okay. As you’ve published scholarly works outside of Bamboo Ridge, is there anything of significance you want to talk about in terms of your scholarly publications?

JT: Well, my book on Samuel Beckett, if I can, I’ll give it a plug. It got a nice reception. It’s Beckett’s Game: Self and Language in the Trilogy. So I was just continuing my work and at that time, post-structuralism and Derrida, the French critic, and Deleuze were very much in the air. And so I used the critical theory of Derrida to, I guess the word is “to deconstruct,” although I didn’t like the word “deconstruct.”

KT: You deconstructed Beckett?

JT: Deconstruct the voices. I don’t like to use the word “deconstruct,” but I try to show how the origin is very difficult to identify. Which—I guess the other thing that I thought was of interest is, I also wrote lots of articles on the French-Japanese connection and, one was, “Intertextuality and the Question of Origins, a Japanese Perspective,” which used structuralism and post-structuralism.

KT: So. Literary Theory, but way over my head.

JT: Yeah, Literary Theory. Yeah, well, it was in Comparative Literature Studies, so that’s the first time and the only time I ever got a fan mail. Somebody wrote me a letter about it.

KT: Okay. Moving along to something we haven’t talked about before. You were president of the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities [HCH] and in that role, you were important in starting the digital preservation project for Bamboo Ridge. Please explain how you got involved with HCH and how the preservation project evolved.

JT: Well, as I was sitting in one of the Bamboo Ridge board meetings and you know I didn’t really say very much, but I think at that time Eric Chock was the grant writer. And I remarked that, or I thought, “Oh, they don’t write grants to HCH.” And I had been on HCH—at that time it was called Hawaii Committee for the Humanities—for many years and I thought that some of the things that Bamboo Ridge was doing could be funded by HCH with a bit of a humanities perspective.

And so I mentioned it to Darrell and he said, well, go ahead [laughs]. Right, so I can’t remember whether I wrote a travel grant in order to support a reading or whether I wrote a publication grant to support the publication of No Choice but to Follow [Issue #96 -Ed.]. But I had built up a good relationship with Bob Buss who was at that time the HCH director and we got a publication grant for No Choice but to Follow, which I guess I’m gonna talk about later on, our first Renshi. And I would also hear in the Bamboo Ridge board meetings talk about digitizing copies of old issues or even new issues. But they were talking about how much it cost and it was difficult and you couldn’t do it. And so I thought, hmm, digitizing. So I asked Bob, you know, that we want money for digitizing issues of Bamboo Ridge and he said, “Well, you could apply for a preservation grant.” I said, “Oh, you have a preservation grant now?” because I didn’t know. I mean, this was developed after I left HCH that there was a category for preservation grants or if they might have had it but I was completely unaware of it because I don’t remember ever—well, anyway, so I got together with him and he told me what I had to do and then I contacted, I guess, it was the UH Press, university press, because they had had preservation grants. I found out what was involved and what company and then now, anyway—I found Gail Kuroda to help me and then wrote the grant and we got funding. And then that’s it. That’s how it was done. And then you took over. I was so glad you took over because I wasn’t gonna do it again.

KT: So this was after you retired then. [The preservation project is about digitizing past issues of Bamboo Ridge that are out of print and placing them on a public access website. Books on that website can be viewed or downloaded for free. -KT.]

JT: Oh yeah, it was after I retired. It was way after I retired.

KT: Yeah. Just for the record, what year did you retire?

JT: Well, I retired in stages. Yeah. I was fully retired in 2005, I think, or was it 2009? Anyway, it was in different stages. I was on a—I would teach one course semester or something. Until—

KT: So you’ve edited two issues of Bamboo Ridge, issue #118 and No Choice but to Follow. Can you discuss how that latter issue came about and your role in it?

JT: Yes. Well, that’s a long story. Are you ready? Okay, in 1991 Victor Kobayashi wanted a group of Local poets and he asked me. I think he must have asked me because my husband used to tune his piano [laughs]. And we talked about what I did and I told him I wrote poetry.

KT: Okay, just for the record, Victor Kobayashi was the Dean of Summer Session at that time.

JT: Summer session. Yeah, he might have been Dean of College of Continuing Ed., I don’t know. Anyway, he was a great go-getter and he had arranged for this very famous, good poet, Ōoka Makoto, who at that time was traveling all across the world advertising the modern form of Renshi, which is linked poetry, because he believed in poetry being a community of poets. And it’s connected to the kind of poetry that Bashō did in the seventeenth century and so this was the modern version of Renshi where you didn’t have to follow all of the complicated rules of haiku. So Victor got a group of us involved and we did a week session and we came up with What the Kite Thinks, a thirty-six poem collection of links written by poets: Ōoka Makoto, Wing Tek Lum, Joseph Stanton, and myself. Now comes, I don’t know how many years later, Wing Tek is on the board. I’m not on the board. I’m—

KT: Not on the board of Bamboo Ridge.

JT: Of Bamboo Ridge. I can’t remember what year it was. But he had suggested to the board at that time a way to celebrate the 35th anniversary and to keep Bamboo Ridge on people’s minds was to have a group of poets write a Renshi through the whole year. So four poets writing four poems for each month of the year and to post those poems immediately after they were written on the Bamboo Ridge site and then not have any possibility to change, except maybe grammatical changes but can’t change the poem substantially. So later on I heard that there were people just waiting to see what the next poem would be, you know, I said, “Sheesh, I wonder,” I mean, anyway Wing Tek did not want to have anything to do with it. So they told, I guess it was Marie and Darrell, to ask me whether I would edit. I said okay because I enjoyed doing the first one. But then I had to find three other poets. I asked the other poets on the, on the board. No, Bamboo Ridge poet wanted to do it!

KT: Really?

JT: Except Juliet. Juliet was the only one who wanted to do it or was willing to do it. She was willing to do the challenge of being able to write a poem in a week on demand following the line of somebody else’s poem, which is what we had to do. You took the last line of the preceding poem as your first line. So I had to find two other poets and I had a hard time until I hit upon Ann Inoshita and Christy Passion. And both of them said yes right away without a hesitation. So we had our team and we were writing our poems up until the time of the [Hawai‘i] Book & Music Festival and it was decided to have a reading of our first few months, maybe four links or something. And on that very stage was the first time I ever met everybody. We had not met each other. We had only known each other during the writing of the poems and it was on stage ten minutes before we were supposed to go on that we arranged it; then we gave it. It was so successful. People said, “We gotta get this published.” So then we started thinking about a publication after that and we completed the rest of the, of the year’s poems and then I think I wrote the request for a grant for publication. Which was granted and so then HCH became, you know, one of the insignia on our publication.

KT: So the title, No Choice but to Follow, has two meanings, right?

JT: Yeah, finding that title was very interesting because we did not know what title was. I said, “What are we gonna call it? What are we gonna call it?” And I think it might have been Eric who said, “Obviously, it’s the last line of Christy’s poem.” And I looked at it, I said, No Choice but to Follow, of course. And it was like, you know, a bolt of lightning. And it was perfect.

KT: Interesting. Okay. You wanna reflect that all on your co-editing in with Juliet on issue number 118?

JT: We had had experience doing editing with the two Renshi books. Oh, you don’t want to talk about What We Must Remember [Issue #111]? The second Renshi book.

KT: Oh yeah, let’s talk about that.

JT: Yeah, because after we did the No Choice but to Follow, we four poets were just so enthusiastic about the process and we wanted to do something else. And so we had given a reading, I think it was at Punahou and then we were having lunch and we were talking about what could we write a new Renshi about. I think it was Juliet who said, you know, it’s going to be the anniversary of the death—it was either the death of Joseph Kahahawai or the incident, the purported rape and everything. Anyway, so I didn’t know anything about it.

KT: The Massie Affair. Okay.

JT: The Massie Affair. And so we all went and got David’s [Stannard] book. You know and read about it and that’s how it started. We got so involved in the Massie Affair. And the details about it were so—It—for us it was moving to learn all of that history that we did not know anything about. I mean, I was completely, I mean, Juliet knew about it, but—So, yeah, that was really a kind of a life changing event—for me. Opening up my eyes about my ignorance of Hawaiian history and the issues of Hawai‘i. Yeah.

KT: Yeah, opened up a lot of people’s eyes. Getting near the end here. So we may not need to take a break?

JT: Oh, okay.

KT: The Press is set to celebrate its 45th anniversary. Looking back, what impact do you think the Press has had on Hawai‘i’s culture?

JT: Well I’m kind of sad that it’s not being used that much in the public schools anymore and I think that may be partly because we don’t have Poets in the Schools. Or do we?

KT: Not that I know of. I mean, Eric Chock would know more about that, because he was one.

JT: Yeah, because when we did What We Must Remember, we did go to several schools, but it never came to a really sustained involvement of the teachers in the writings of Bamboo Ridge. And I somehow feel that they have so many requirements now that they have to fulfill for their curriculum that it becomes very difficult for them to find things that are not part of the things that they have to teach. So I hope that in the future that the site, you know, that the preservation grant has created will generate some more interest in what it was like in 1977 or ’78 when Bamboo Ridge started because that’s quite a long time ago. It will be forty-five years, you know.

KT: I know.

JT: And things have changed so much. Hawai‘i has changed so much and schools have changed so much. So that there is a way for teachers who want to look at Hawai‘i’s past to plug into those kinds of resources. But I’m concerned because young people nowadays, I don’t know how much they write. I don’t know how much they read. The way schools are going, I mean, you know, everything is visual. Everything is video.

KT: Yeah. Online.

JT: And, like when we did 118, Juliet and I, oh, and I didn’t finish that story about Juliet. Her ability as an editor I just—my admiration just grew more and more. By that time Juliet and I had already worked on the previous anthology with the two other renshi poets and the two renshi volumes. My admiration for Juliet’s skills and her generosity as an editor grew and grew. I saw how a few okay stories became really good ones, because of her patience and working with the writer. I did none of that. I mean, she just has an eye and an ear and an understanding of how the story should go. I know I can’t do what she does. So, anyway, yeah, so I don’t know whether young people today are writing or caring that much about the past, you know, or even the present.

KT: Yeah, I mean, you ask them, “Who’s the vice president of the United States?” they probably don’t even know.

JT: Yeah, I mean. It’s very sad. I’m—but that, of course, I come from a language oriented generation.

KT: I don’t know if I wanna ask this last question. It’s kind of like—I think we’ve already addressed the last question, so I’m not gonna ask it.

JT: There was something that you wrote—

KT: How things have changed? And we’ve just been talking about—

JT: Yeah. And then, oh, what is the significance or something significance or the? Of Bamboo Ridge or something like that.

KT: Yeah, yeah, we asked that already.

JT: You know, I think for writers like me and writers like you, I think it’s a very important venue for us. I mean. I have tried on the mainland, but I don’t try that much, but—you know, it’s hard to get published wherever you go.

KT: It should be. I mean, it shouldn’t be too easy.

JT: No, no, but it’s always encouraging to have something appear in a book.

KT: Yeah, for sure.

JT: And so I think it’s important for people in Hawai‘i. It gives us encouragement. It gives us a drive to continue on. I mean, I could keep on writing just for myself, but it’s not the same thing.

KT: Right. Okay, my last question is sort of a question for you. Do you have anything else you want to talk about that we haven’t covered, involving especially, and your relationships with people on Bamboo Ridge?

JT: For some writers in Hawai‘i, it has had an enormous impact. Its longevity and its reach. Here we have a record of what things were like forty-five years ago, what young people were doing, thinking, how they were growing up, what they were writing. This impact may be more apparent in the future. Teachers in the future will have a resource. This is why I worked on the preservation of Bamboo Ridge. I wanted to make it accessible and to have longevity. We might not be aware of it, but Hawai‘i has a presence in the Smithsonian Asian-American Literary Festival. We are the Asian American and Pacific Islander writers from Hawai‘i. And we’ve been there from the beginning. But we had to make sure that BR-Hawai‘i was not left out. I think we can thank Wing Tek for that. We would have been forgotten but for him. He had to remind the powers that be that Bamboo Ridge had been a presence at almost all if not all the AAAS conferences. So BR has been present at all those Smithsonian festivals. I went to the first two. Right now, Bamboo Ridge is a very important part of my life. Most of my friends are somehow associated with Bamboo Ridge and if not directly associated with Bamboo Ridge that are associated with reading, you know, a book club. Writing and young people—it’s, you know, it’s a way for me to know younger people than me. Yeah, because Christy, Ann, Lisa, and Gail are younger than I am, you know.

KT: Not by that much. Not by—

JT: So, well, you know, having reached my eighties, it’s sort of like a milestone/millstone, you know, all of a sudden somehow, I mean, somehow the number eighty seems like. Something. I don’t know whether it’s just psychological or whether it is a point at which your body changes, you know.

KT: Yeah. Well, are you still in a study group?

JT: Yeah.

KT: So who is in the group now? I mean, it’s still some of the same people, right? Like Juliet, Darrell, Eric.

JT: Yeah, Juliet. And Darrell, Christy, Lisa, Gail, and there’s some people who don’t come. I won’t mention their name. We Zoom. Yeah. I mean, we were meeting, but now, you know. I don’t like to drive at night and then we used to go to people’s houses. I mean, we went to ‘Āina Haina, Hawai‘i Kai, Kalihi, but now, and Zoom is so convenient. Although it’s not the same, it’s not the same.

KT: Right. No, it’s not.

JT: It’s real. It’s real if you meet together. You know, the kind of camaraderie that you get from that kind of association.

KT: All right, good to see you. Okay, well, thank you, Jean. We’ve been talking to Jean Toyama about her experience with Bamboo Ridge and we look forward to having a final transcript.