Teiko Tomita, Pioneer And Poet

Teiko Tomita, a poet and one of eight pioneer women featured in a PBS documentary produced to mark the state centennial last year, was 93 when she died last week after 70 years of living in Washington.

Tomita, one of nine children, emigrated to Washington from Japan after her marriage at age 23 to Masakazu Tomita. The two traveled to Wapato, where they farmed on the Yakima Indian Reservation and started a family.

In 1929, they moved to Sunnydale, where they operated a nursery until the outbreak of World War II. The family was sent to three internment camps in Washington and Wyoming during the war.

After their release, Tomita and her family returned to Sunnydale and she worked there as a seamstress until she was in her late 70s.

Throughout her life, she recorded her experiences - the difficulties of farm labor, the injustice of the internment, and the tragedy of the death of her 2-year-old daughter - in a poetic form called ``tanka.'' She used the pen name Yukari, which was given to her by the high school teacher in Japan who taught her the tanka form, 31 syllables arranged in five lines.

Tomita had been active in the Japanese Presbyterian Church for more than 57 years and was a member of Japanese Community Service and Seattle Tanka.

She is survived by four children, Kay Hashimoto, Jun and Joe, of Seattle, and Kiku, of New York City, 11 grandchildren and two

great-grandchildren.