To provide a better understanding of Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables, I encourage students to conduct a brief research into the harsh lives of Japanese-American in the United States in the twentieth-century.  After 1885, the United States allowed Japanese immigration, but that stopped with the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924.  Many of these first Japanese immigrants were unmarried men, who saved their earnings and sent back to Japan for “picture brides” – brides that they knew only through pictures and scant exchanges of letters.  Many of these Japanese women led isolated and unhappy lives in the American West; domestic violence was not uncommon.  Many of the married couples were incompatible, but tried to conceal their problems from their children.