Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a California poet and scholar who wrote, collected and translated haiku that compressed into a few lines the heartaches and realities of the detention camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died Wednesday at her home in Salinas. She was 90.
De Cristoforo died two weeks after returning from Washington, D.C., where she was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts with a National Heritage Fellowship award for achievement in traditional and folk arts. She died of complications from a stroke, said her daughter, Kimi de Cristoforo of Santa Rosa.
A native of Hawaii who grew up in Fresno, De Cristoforo was one of about 110,000 Japanese Americans who were sent to 10 camps in seven states after the bombing of Pearl Harbor cast suspicion on people of Japanese heritage.
De Cristoforo, who ran a Japanese-language bookstore in Fresno with her husband, had two young children and was expecting a third. She still was weak from an operation to remove a tumor when an executive order was imposed on Feb.19, 1942, authorizing the military to remove any citizen from a broad swath of the West Coast who might be a threat to national security.
By April of 1942, she and her family were living in 110-degree heat in a tar-paper shack at the Fresno Assembly Center, formerly a horse track.
She gave birth to her third child over an orange crate and two weeks later was on a dilapidated train with a sick baby to another camp in Jerome, Ark.
At Jerome, her husband, Shigeru Matsuda, and his parents decided that because they were forced to leave behind everything of value in Fresno they would return to Japan, where they still held some property. When it came time to fill out a loyalty questionnaire, De Cristoforo followed her husband's advice. "My husband had told me, 'Don't answer this. . . . Don't trust the government. Don't trust anybody. Just say you're seeking repatriation with my family.' And that is the only thing that I wrote. I did not answer yes or no to the questionnaire," she said in "And Justice For All," a 1999 oral history of Japanese-American internees by John Tateishi.
From Jerome they were sent to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, a high-security camp built on old lava beds in Northern California, near the Oregon border, where Japanese internees who had refused to sign the loyalty oath were imprisoned.
