May I start by telling you a little about myself, since many have wondered how it is that a movement aimed at making English the official language of the United States is being headed by a man with a Japanese name?
My father, Ichiro Hayakawa, was born in 1884 in Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan. Like many thousands of young people born in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, which ended almost two hundred and fifty years of the rigid isolationism of the Tokugawa Shogunate, he wanted to be part of the great movement toward the westernization of Japan. Having prepared himself by studying English earnestly in high school, he took off for San Francisco at the age of 18 to work, like many Japanese youths of that time, as a houseboy while continuing his studies.
The high point of his career in this period was when he joined the navy to become a mess attendant on a training ship, the USS Pensacola, which was moored at Goat Island, now known as Yerba Beuna Island. Father has told me that on his days off he would go to San Francisco to call on the office of the Japanese language newspaper, Shin Sekai (New World), to offer for publication his translation into Japanese of English and American poetry--Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. Many of his translations were published.
For years, Father remained proud of his Japanese translation of an English version of Heine's Die Lorelei. The files of Shin Sekai were destroyed, however, in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, leaving me unable to prove that my father was a poet.
Decades later, I learned more about what studying English meant to many Japanese houseboys in San Francisco in the early 1900s. In 1943, I visited the War Relocation Center in Colorado, where a friend of my father's from student days, a Mr. Kodama of Los Angeles, was living as a guest of the U.S. government. I really didn't know him, because his friendship with Father dated back to their bachelor days. However, he gave me a royal welcome, having bought a new used car (it was still wartime) to pick me up at the University of Denver, where I was teaching that summer.
Back at the camp, Mr. Kodama told me about how proud he was that I had become a professor and had written two books. He told me of the long talks about English literature he and my father had had, discussing especially the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. He said, glowing with pride, that I had achieved every ambition he and my father had had back in San Francisco before I born.
Father must have been twenty-one when he went to Japan to fetch his bride, bringing her back on a ship bound for San Francisco, but scheduled to stop en route in Vancouver. During the stopover, Father found a business opportunity, so the young couple decided to stay there. I was born not long thereafter, destined not to see San Francisco until more than forty years later.
Thus it was that I was brought up in Canada, being moved form city to city as my father went from one enterprise to another. But there were always books in English at home: Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Dumas, Charles Dickens, as well as popular books of the day such as the short stories of O. Henry.
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