Albert Saijo

Albert Fairchild Saijo (February 4, 1926 – June 2, 2011) was a Japanese-American poet associated with the Beat Generation. He and his family were imprisoned as part of the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, during which time he wrote editorials on his experiences of internment for his high school newspaper. Saijo went on to serve in the U.S. Army and study at the University of Southern California. Later he became associated with Beat Generation figures including Jack Kerouac, with whom he wrote, traveled and became friends.

Saijo's first solo collection of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, was published in 1997. A second collection, Woodrat Flat, was published posthumously in 2015. Saijo was also the author of The Backpacker (1972), a short book on backpacking, and coauthor of Trip Trap (1972), a collection of haiku written with Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch. His parents were Issei, first-generation immigrants to the United States.

His father, Satoru, was born in 1878 in Kumamoto Prefecture, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1900. He trained in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and served in Italy during the post-war occupation. While serving he contracted tuberculosis, which continued to trouble him for the following 20 years.

Funded by the G.I. Bill, Saijo attended the University of Southern California (USC) and earned a bachelor's degree in International Relations with a minor in Chinese. He entered USC's graduate program and began work on a thesis on the 1954 partition of Vietnam. Throughout his life Saijo remained in contact with those he had met at Heart Mountain, and relied on these connections for employment, housing, and religious instruction.

Relationship with the Beat Generation In around 1954 Saijo began to develop an interest in Zen Buddhism, and in 1957 he left USC and moved to San Francisco, where his interest in Zen and haiku brought him into contact with members of the Beat Generation. He worked at the YMCA in San Francisco's Chinatown, and attended courses delivered there by David Hunter of the Human Potential Movement, where he met Lew Welch; and through Welch he met Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and others. Saijo eventually moved in with Welch, Whalen, and others, and in 1959 led meditation at Snyder's zendo in Marin, California. Masatsugu argues that Saijo's emergent interest in his Japanese heritage, including haiku and Zen, and his involvement in the Beat Generation, "were enabled in part by the shift in racial discourse and the re-presentation of things Japanese in American society", as fears of a "Yellow Peril" receded and Japan became a Cold War ally to the U.S. At around this time Saijo also met Jack Kerouac, who was already an established writer.

Kerouac, Saijo and Welch took a road trip together from San Francisco to New York, during which they bonded over haiku and Buddhism, and composed poems as they went. On arriving in New York, they visited the apartment Ginsberg shared with Peter Orlovsky, where they presented Ginsberg with a wooden cross stolen from a roadside memorial in Arizona. The three men then spent the night at Kerouac's mother's house in Northport, where Kerouac remained as Saijo and Welch returned west. Trip Trap (1972) is a collection of haiku by Saijo, Kerouac and Welch, which describe their road trip, and invoke Gary Snyder, who was then in Japan, as a kind of guiding spirit. Along with Shig Murao, Saijo is one of only two Asian-American writers usually considered part of the Beat Generation.

The Backpacker Saijo's The Backpacker (1972) is a short book offering guidance on how backpackers can enter a spiritual psychedelic experience. The original edition was a mere 96 pages with a cover price of $1.95. which expanded the book to nearly 200 pages.

Outspeaks Saijo moved from Northern California to Volcano, Hawaii in the early 1990s. Six years later, when he was 71 years old, he published Outspeaks: A Rhapsody (1997), a lyrical memoir. His poetry in Outspeaks is written entirely in capital letters and punctuated with dashes, resembling the work of the poets of the Beat Generation, yet though his poems take a stream-of-consciousness form Saijo did not adhere to Kerouac's mode of spontaneous prose. and is grounded in the 1960s: Saijo writes "I CONSIDER MYSELF A CHILD OF THE '60S—IT WAS WHEN I BECAME A REBORN HUMAN".

In her review of Outspeaks in the alternative literary journal Tinfish, Juliana Spahr described Saijo as "a new [William] Blake". Rob Wilson identified Outspeaks as one example of poetry from the area surrounding the Pacific Ocean bearing the markers of two types of postmodernism: "writerly experimentation and textual play ... as well as the concerns of belonging to and expressing a distinct, particularized and limited model of identity, affiliated voice, sentiments of nationhood, and (post)colonial heritage". Wilson interprets Saijo's use of the plover as a signifier of "'ANIMAL CIVILITY,' living on edges and borders, embodying nomadic movement, improvisation, and risk, jazzy flights between solitary foraging and communal roosting: anarchic and poetic existence on a small budget."

In his article on Saijo's historical legacy, Masatsugu analyzes the poem "Bodhisattva Vows", which is included in Outspeaks. In his reading the poem concerns U.S. Orientalism and the burden imposed on people associated with "a racialized Oriental spirituality", but also points to the agency and complicity of the Asian-American subject. In Masatsugu's reading the poem represents the Bodhisattva "as a spiritual laborer with obligations devoid of the sentimental attachments often associated with more exoticized representations of Buddhism or Asian spirituality." Masatsugu describes the poem as ironic and humorous; he reads it as an expression of disdain and resignation at the Bodhisattva's role. He observes that the poem's short sentences, separated by dashes, "convey a sense of the accumulation of obligation in carrying out the vow", and its rendering of the text in all caps "both amplifies and flattens the prose, rendering the narrator's voice clear yet removed."

Death and legacy

Saijo died in Volcano, Hawaii on June 2, 2011. He was survived by his wife Laura, his sister Hisayo, and four stepchildren.

Woodrat Flat In December 2014 Tinfish Press announced it would publish a collection of Saijo's work from the 1980s and 1990s entitled Woodrat Flat, to be edited and introduced by the poet and activist Jerry Martien. In a review for Queen Mob's Teahouse Greg Bem described Woodrat Flat as "a firm but mindful book, one whole composed of many meditations ... a mature book, too, one that can justify its own worth, its own righteousness, and, adversely, its own meek way of cupping a spoonful of quiet here and there to be dripped over the illuminated absurd of the modern world."