Tomita and her new husband farmed on the
Yakima Indian Reservation. However, they lost the lease on the farm soon after Tomita's arrival. Masakazu worked as a foreman at a nursery in
Satus. They moved to
Sunnydale in 1929. In 1939, Tomita joined a tanka club in
Seattle. Some of her poetry was published in Japan. After the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, Tomita burned all of her poetry so that the
FBI would not assume that she had any loyalty to Japan. Regardless, she and her family were
incarcerated at
Tule Lake in
California and
Heart Mountain in
Wyoming as part of the enforcement of
Executive Order 9066. After she was released in 1945, Tomita briefly lived in
Minnesota, but returned to Seattle after the war and became a
seamstress. In 1967, Tomita was forced to relocate a second time when it was found that her home was in the buffer zone around the
Seattle Tacoma Airport. She moved to Seattle. Despite burning all of her poetry at the beginning of the war, she resumed writing while incarcerated at Tule Lake. She wrote poetry as a way to deal with the situations around her. Some frequent symbols that appeared in her poems include the
cherry tree and
sagebrush. She wrote poetry for the rest of her life. Tomita died on March 13, 1990. == Selected bibliography ==