| Summary: | Soon after World War II, Hisaye Yamamoto worked as a columnist and a reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, an African American weekly. During that period, she participated in the Civil Rights Movement. She also became interested in pacifism and spent two years at The Catholic Worker Farm in New York. Working actively with the other racial and ethnic groups, she widened her perspectives as a Nisei writer, which gave her a unique position in the field of Japanse American literature. Interethnic bonding is a recurrent theme in the texts of Yamamoto. “The Eskimo Connection,” written in Yamamoto's later years is notworthy for her observation of interethinc relations in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the movement for redress and reparation for the internment during World War II was at its height. This paper will examine Yamamoto's observation of such a transitional period in the Japanese American community. “The Eskimo Connection” tells of the curious relationship between Emiko, a widowed Nisei poet and Alden, a young Eskimo in a federal penitentiary. Alden in itiates a correspondence with Emiko, writing that he had read a poem of hers in a magazine and that he would like to get her comment on an essay he had written for his prison newsletter. Emiko, is at first, very hesitant to respond to Alden because she cannot imagine what they might have in common. However, she finally decides to answer his letter, and a two-year relationship between the two is started. Emiko gradually comes to understand Alden's isolation and inner struggles. Without knowing the true reason for Alden's incarceration, Emiko begins to sympathize with him because his situation reminds her of her own experience of internment in the wartime camp. Subsequently, she realizes that his anguish is mostly caused as a result of the colonial history of Alasaka. A simplistic reading of “The Eskimo Connection” indicates that Yamamoto seems to have an idealistic view of the interethinc bonding between Japanese Americans and Native Americans in the 1980s. ...
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