Unpredictable Agents: The Making of Japan’s Americanists during the Cold War and Beyond 9780824890018

Citation preview

UNPREDICTABLE AGENTS

UNPREDICTABLE AGENTS The Making of Japan’s Americanists during the Cold War and Beyond

Edited by Mari Yoshihara

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2021 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21    6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yoshihara, Mari, editor. Title: Unpredictable agents : the making of Japan’s Americanists during the Cold War and beyond / edited by Mari Yoshihara. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2021] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021038767 | ISBN 9780824888848 (cloth) | ISBN 9780824890018 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824890025 (epub) | ISBN 9780824890032 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Americanists—Japan—Biography. | United States—Study and teaching—Japan. Classification: LCC E169.12 .U54 2021 | DDC 973.07/202—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038767 Cover design: William F. Temple University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 Mari Yoshihara

PART I

America, Japan, Okinawa 1 Memories of an Okinawan Americanist  21 Katsunori Yamazato 2

American Paralysis: Floating Homeland, Family, and Masculinity  37 Eijun Senaha

3

On Becoming an Okinawan and a Feminist: My Path to an Americanist Career  56 Ikue Kina

PART II

Family Ties 4 Learning “America” from the Mennonites  75 Yujin Yaguchi 5

The Land She Could Never Call Home Again: “America” in My Family History  88 Sanae Nakatani

6

Navigating the Sea of Fatherhood across the Pacific  104 Yohei Sekiguchi

PART III

Embodied Lives, Grounded Careers 7 The Accidental Mirror: The Shine and Shatter of My American Dream  121 Yuko Itatsu

v

vi     Contents

8

An Americanist from a Different Shore, and Gazing Back at Japan  137 Hiroshi Kitamura

9

Loneliness, Laughter, and Belonging: A Feminist View of an Asian in America  149 Naoko Wake

PART IV

Different Shores, Multiple Borders 10 An Accidental Historian: My Journey in Research on Japanese North American Community Activism  165 Masumi Izumi 11 An Americanist Who Sees the US from the Peripheries  185 Mariko Iijima 12 Making of a Transpacific Americanist via Latin America:

Myself Discovered through Immigration History  202 Yu Tokunaga

Contributors  219 Index  223

Acknowledgments The initial idea for this collection came to my mind during a conversation with Mariko Iijima and Lon Kurashige on a bus for a field trip to Chinatown in Locke, California, during the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in the spring of 2018. The seed of the idea then developed into a book project several months later through my conversation with Yujin Yaguchi during a weekend on O‘ahu’s North Shore. Masako Ikeda of the University of Hawai‘i Press has been consistently encouraging and gave me sound advice on how to turn the idea into an actual book. I am deeply grateful to the twelve authors who have contributed their essays, many of whom graciously undertook multiple rounds of revision per my request. I know that reflecting on and revealing their personal trajectories in this way has involved not only intellectual but heavy emotional labor for some. I thank them for trusting me through the process. The two anonymous reviewers for the manuscript gave thorough readings and constructive suggestions for framing and situating the project in a broader context, and their comments were especially helpful in developing my introduction. Lon Kurashige and Yujin Yaguchi commented on multiple versions of the introduction as well. Once again, my writing group—Elizabeth Colwill, Monisha Das Gupta, Cynthia Franklin, Candace Fujikane, Linda Lierheimer, and Naoko Shibusawa—gave me astute readings and warm friendship. Working on this book gave me the chance to think back on my own personal and professional journey to an Americanist career. I have lived with many forms of privilege, yet I also realize that I would not have entered the field or remained in this profession if I did not have the biggest privilege of all: the support and encouragement of many mentors, colleagues, administrators, and friends in both Japan and the United States. I will not list them here, not because I am oblivious to the importance of naming but because this book is not about me or my life. But I hope to return my debt to everyone in other ways. This book goes into production in the midst of the global pandemic of COVID-19, the mass movement for #BlackLivesMatter calling for an end vii

viii     Acknowledgments

to police brutality and anti-Black racism, and unprecedented violence ­accompanying the transition of power. Like all the contributors to this collection, I have spent the past several months in sober reflection about ­nations, borders, and mobility that I had long taken for granted, and in deep mourning for the ideals of “America” that drew me to this country and the field. Even as my stubborn faith in America continues to be challenged from multiple directions, I also find hope in the newly emerging forms of transnational solidarity, creative modes of sociality and activism, and the audacious youths who are determined to imagine and create a different world. The political, economic, and social conditions we live in today remind me that how we live is inseparable from what and how we study, teach, and write.

UNPREDICTABLE AGENTS

Introduction Mari Yoshihara

One is not born an Americanist, especially if one is not born an American; one becomes an Americanist. The twelve personal essays in this collection illustrate how those raised and educated in a country that was once a mortal enemy of the US have encountered “America” and how they came to dedicate their careers to studying it. The subject is one in which I have personal investment, and not only because I am one of them. My parents, both born in 1934, came from very different social backgrounds and grew up in different parts of Japan, my mother in western regions of Shikoku and Chūgoku and my father in Saitama just to the north of Tokyo. They would never have met were it not for the country’s postwar Americanization. As high school students, they both were avid readers of The Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young Japanese who liked to study English. The magazine had a “Y. C. Pen Club” section, where the readers seeking Japanese pen pals to correspond with in English placed their personal ads. Along with a number of young men and women in the US, the UK, and other countries who sent their profiles often accompanied by photographs, my mother sent simply her name, age (sixteen), and address to be printed in the March 1951 issue. She received many letters from all over Japan, and of the several men she exchanged letters with, one was particularly persistent. He eventually saved enough money from tutoring to visit her halfway across the country. A few years after he graduated from his university and started working for a company that exported electron microscopes, they married. Soon he was assigned to the company’s newly established New York office, and the couple lived in the city for several years. 1

2     Introduction

I was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan in May 1968. Less than a year after my birth, the family returned to Japan via a short stint in California. I was raised in Tokyo’s typical middle-class environment, going to the local public school and taking piano and ballet lessons. In 1979, my father was again transferred to California. At age eleven, I was uprooted from my familiar Tokyo neighborhood and thrown into a public school in Cupertino, not speaking a word of English. Two days after my first day at school was Halloween. My teacher told me to bring a costume for the lunchtime parade, so I brought a Charlie Brown outfit my parents bought for me at a nearby drugstore. In the school yard that felt to me big enough to reach the horizon, the children walked around in a circle, proudly showing off their costumes to the parents and teachers. I walked in the circle as a mute Charlie Brown, not knowing what Halloween was or what on earth was going on. In the following months, I learned English in my desperate attempt to function and fit into school life, while piano became an even more precious source of my sense of self as it did not require verbal communication. We lived in California for two and a half years, until we moved back to Tokyo in the spring of 1982. It was the year when Chinese American Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit, being blamed for the success of Japan’s automobile industry. That was my American encounter, which led to a life split between Japan and the US and my career as a scholar of American Studies. After my undergraduate studies at the University of Tokyo, I pursued my graduate work in the US, and upon earning my doctorate from Brown University in 1997, I landed a position in the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. The department—established in the wake of Hawai‘i’s statehood in 1959, at the same time as the neighboring East-West Center, the federally funded research and educational institute for promoting better understanding among the peoples of the US, Asia, and the Pacific—was searching for a specialist in US relations with Asia and/or the Pacific. Although its Asia-Pacific focus made the department unique among American Studies departments across the US, its faculty at the time were almost entirely male and white. That I was hired for the position reflected both the changing nature of the field and the demand from the students for a department responsive to those changes. I was the first of a new wave of hires that made the faculty composition much more diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. Although I used to think of my life path as idiosyncratic and my career as a matter of personal choice and sheer luck, it was precisely through

Cover of The Youth’s Companion (March 1951).

4     Introduction

“Y. C. Pen Club” section of The Youth’s Companion (March 1951), with the profiles of readers seeking pen pals to correspond with in English.

my training in American Studies that I came to understand that my birth, upbringing, and career were very much a product of US-Japan relations and the global economy of the time. Postwar Japanese youths’ fascination with English-language study; the yearning of Japan’s growing middle class for Western culture that seemed to promise upward mobility and sophistication; Japanese corporations’ entry into the world market and the growing number of Japanese expats overseas from the 1960s onward; American Studies’ increasing turn to Asia-Pacific that generated jobs in the area in the late 1990s—I was a predictable outcome of the combination of these elements of postwar transpacific entanglements. Japan’s quick transformation from a US mortal enemy during World War II into a junior ally following Japan’s unconditional surrender has been touted, often in problematic ways, as a model for US foreign policy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although such a narrative of the model ally elides the many fissures in postwar US-Japan relations, it is undeniable that American influence has helped forge Japan’s politics, economy, and culture and its standing in the world. It has also had a great

Mari Yoshihara     5

impact on countless lives of individual Japanese, including those like my parents who came of age during the immediate postwar years and those like me who were raised in the subsequent decades. People in postwar Japan have encountered and experienced “America” in a number of ways—through books and magazines, material goods, popular culture, foodways, GIs, missionaries, arts, political figures, celebrities, or business. As the Japanese public wrestled with a complex mixture of admiration and confusion, yearning and repulsion, closeness and alienation toward the US, Japanese scholars who are specialists of American history, society, and culture have been important interlocutors in helping their compatriots understand the country. They are often called upon to explicate American society and culture through the mass media on topics ranging from the presidential election and trade relations to sports and sex scandals. They also sometimes contribute their expertise to the government or industries. They produce research, write for and speak to the general audience, and teach students. In the scholarly literature, Japanese intellectuals engaged in the study of the US are often understood within the framework of Cold War liberalism and cultural diplomacy: those who benefited from the two nations’ investment in educational and cultural exchange as a tool for solidifying US hegemony in East Asia and securing Japan’s place in it. According to such a narrative, the Japanese scholars, who typically were raised in Japan and then went to study in the US, were trained not only in academic research but also in American values and ways of life and became effective proponents thereof. In other words, in their embrace of the US, they became “Americanists” in both profession and affect: they occupied the role of complicit agents in US Cold War liberalism. One of the most forceful among such critiques is historian Takeshi Matsuda’s Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (2007). The book traces the intellectual and institutional origins of American Studies in Japan to the US occupation forces’ cultural policy designed to make Japanese intellectuals and the general public peace-loving, democratic, and pro-American. It elucidates the instrumental role of the interlocked complex of US government agencies (such as the Civil Information and Education Section of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and the US Information Service), private foundations (most notably the Rockefeller Foundation), and leading Japanese universities in Tokyo and Kyoto in the development of American

6     Introduction

Studies in Japan, particularly Amerika Gakkai (Japanese Association for American Studies, hereafter JAAS) founded in 1946. Matsuda presents a sharp critique of individual scholars in Japan, whose careers have been fostered by US cultural policy and financial aid in the form of Fulbright and other publicly or privately funded scholarships, for having become complicit in the US Cold War order. As a consequence, according to Matsuda, these intellectuals have failed to bring a much needed critical lens to the US or Japan’s relations to it. For Matsuda, as Japanese scholars of America grew comfortable in their complacency and ignored the social and economic issues of contemporary relevance, the field of American Studies in Japan lost “much of its raison d’être—the role of cultural resistance as a moral critic.” The intellectual co-optation was symptomatic of Japan’s state of permanent dependency on the US, as Matsuda’s subtitle bluntly states.1 In many ways, Unpredictable Agents was born out of the strong reaction I had to Matsuda’s book upon its initial publication. On the one hand, I was in total agreement with Matsuda’s critique. Having received my graduate training in the US and having spent my whole career in American academia, I had long felt alienated by what I perceived to be the disconnect between Japanese scholars’ work and the US as I knew it. I felt this with special acuteness at the annual meetings of the JAAS and in the pages of its journal. I had become used to the vibrant tradition of political activism that undergirds the field of American Studies in the US, and I was confused by the seeming lack of political edge or contemporary relevance to much of the Americanist work by Japanese scholars. I thus nodded in eager agreement while reading Matsuda’s trenchant critique of the Japanese scholars’ failure to engage the real issues of the US, Japan, or the world at large. On the other hand, a part of me also felt stirring discomfort with Matsuda’s assertions. While I was fully convinced by the linkage of power and knowledge—my own scholarship has been profoundly influenced by various strands of Marxist-inspired cultural studies—I felt that his argument, built on structural analysis of US-Japan relations, does not adequately consider the actual human subjects involved.2 I found it difficult to accept the suggestion that these scholars were mere cogs in the machine of state-level cultural diplomacy. A totalizing claim of complicity did not seem to make room for the complex nature of agency. After all, the scholars Matsuda critiqued are intellectuals trained in critical thinking. Wouldn’t they have had some level of self-awareness of their relationship to the state endeavors as they pursued their scholarship through state funding?

Mari Yoshihara     7

Wouldn’t they have been exposed to, and even been involved in, social movements critical of the US’ and Japan’s policies, ideologies, and cultures? I would have liked to think so, especially given my own embeddedness in such structures, institutions, and genealogies of the field. Even as I understood that my own scholarly career was enabled by historical and structural conditions, I was certain that my thinking had been shaped by where I lived, with whom I studied and worked, and what I witnessed and experienced, more than by the foundation that funded my graduate study. If we are to critique not only the political economy of knowledge production but also the worldview, limitations, and failures of individual scholars, shouldn’t we look into the actual life experiences of these scholars? These are the questions that led me to compile this collection. On the one hand, this volume shares Matsuda’s structuralist approach to knowledge and power. In this sense, the word “Americanists” in this book gestures toward Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism.3 In Said’s classic book, the word “Orientalist” on a most basic level descriptively refers to one who possesses expertise and professes knowledge about “the Orient”; similarly, on one level, “Americanists” in this book are those who specialize in the study of the US. But much more importantly, Said used the term “Orientalists” to understand Western subjects who study, represent, and produce knowledge about “the Orient” from the position of power shaped especially by the history of European colonialism in the Middle East. In this sense of the term, the relationship that Japan’s Americanists have had with the US is quite different from Orientalists’ relationship vis-à-vis the Orient. Whereas Said’s Orientalists have and exercise power over the Orient, Japan’s Americanists are racialized minorities in the US context and subordinate subjects of US hegemony within global power relations, even as they enjoy a level of privilege and influence within their own society because of their class positions and institutional affiliations. Furthermore, many of Japan’s Americanists have studied in the US with American scholars and peers, unlike the colonial officials, missionaries, scholars, and writers who represented the Orient on behalf of, or in lieu of, the Orientals themselves. And yet, one of Said’s most important, and often misunderstood, points—that the Westerners engaged in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge about the Orient all share the positionality of “Orientalists,” regardless of their individual affinities or orientations—is critically relevant to this volume. As the essays illustrate, the positionalities and trajectories of Japan’s Americanists too have been conditioned by the

8     Introduction

structural context of geopolitics and economy—in this case, the Cold War and US hegemony in East Asia as well as Japan’s rise as an economic power. On the other hand, as should be clear from the title, Unpredictable Agents resists a deterministic account of complicity—that some have charged Said’s model of Orientalism with and that I find in Matsuda’s critique of Japanese scholars of the US—by focusing on the human dimensions of the intellectuals’ lives and careers. Scholars are born, raised, and educated in particular environments. They fall in and out of love. They choose schools and specializations for a variety of reasons. They land jobs in unexpected places. They raise families or opt not to have them. They move to places for personal as well as professional reasons. They make friends and find themselves. They engage in scholarship, teaching, and activism that are sometimes trenchantly critical of the US. Their relationships to “America” are shaped just as much by chance encounters and idiosyncratic circumstances as by historical contexts, social structures, and patterned relationships. “America” figures in a myriad of ways in these scholars’ lives, both personal and professional. To illuminate the textured experiences and affect that do not neatly cohere into a singular account, Unpredictable Agents features the personal narratives, rather than scholarly research, of the current generation of Japan’s Americanists. How did these individuals encounter “America” in the first place, and what exactly constitutes the “America” they have experienced? How did they come to be Americanists, and what does being Americanists mean for them? How have they chosen their particular areas of study, and what kinds of research and teaching have they engaged in? In short, what are the actual experiences of Japan’s Americanists, and what are their relationships to “America”? Do their stories affirm, complicate, or alter Matsuda’s claim of Japan’s permanent dependency and Japanese scholars’ complicity in it? By focusing on the personal stories of their encounters with, interests in, and relationships to “America,” the essays illuminate many important dimensions of scholarly enterprises and cultural encounters that are often hidden in academic writing. Even as it has become commonplace in many humanities and social science fields for scholars to disclose and reflect upon their positionality in relation to the subject, most academic writing typically does not bring personal experiences and emotions to the fore. I have therefore asked the authors to narrate their own stories of their paths to Americanist careers. Rather than recounting their lives in their entirety,

Mari Yoshihara     9

I have asked them to selectively focus on their perceptions, motivations, and aspirations they consider most central to their formation as Americanists. The essays can therefore be read as a collection of short memoirs and as a form of life writing. Many of the essays not only appeal to human interest but also are quite literary in nature, and thus should resonate with general as well as academic readers. For scholars of US-Japan relations, the essays also function as primary sources on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of postwar Japan and many modes and dynamics of transpacific encounters. They also illustrate the numerous axes of identity (such as religion, place, gender, and sexuality) and vectors of power (including but not limited to class, race, colonialism, and militarism) that shape the scholars’ relationships to both the US and Japan beyond the binary relations between the nation-states. Furthermore, for scholars of American Studies more broadly, I hope that Unpredictable Agents sheds light on the distant lands and seas that “America” has been part of—whether it was welcome or not— and that give birth to “Americanists,” as well as on the different shores from which scholars have arrived at the field. There is a rich genealogy of Japanese intellectuals’ engagements with America that long precede the Cold War. Among the earliest of such explorations was the Iwakura Mission, whereby the newly formed Meiji government sent the nation’s representatives on an eighteen-month study tour of Europe and the US in 1871. The youngest member of the tour was six-yearold Umeko Tsuda (1864–1929), who would later pave the way for a new era of women’s education in Japan. Other Japanese “pioneers” who traveled, lived, and studied in the US during the Meiji period include such leading intellectuals as Jō Niijima (1843–1890), who studied at Andover Theological Seminary and Amherst College; Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933), agricultural economist, diplomat, and educator who studied at Johns Hopkins University; and Kanzō Uchimura (1861–1930), a Christian evangelist and pacifist who studied at Amherst College. These Meiji leaders’ writings about America, both scholarly and personal, became an important part of Japan’s literary and intellectual history, and the institutions they founded and/or taught at—for example, present Tsuda University, Doshisha University, Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo—have served as important centers of American Studies in Japan long before the field was institutionalized as such. The man generally considered to be the founding father of American Studies in Japan, Yasaka Takagi (1889–1984), encountered the US through

10     Introduction

US-Japan cultural diplomacy programs in the 1920s and 1930s and was deeply involved in the activities of nongovernmental organizations such as the influential Institute of Pacific Relations. Those who studied under Takagi—like Hiroshi Shimizu (1907–1993), Kenichi Nakaya (1910–1987), and Makoto Saito (1921–2008)—all became leaders of the field in the postwar years and produced works on US history and politics that became textbooks for later generations of Japanese scholars. Such history underscores the converged interests of the state, nongovernmental organizations, and academia that enabled and shaped Japanese knowledge and scholarship on the US from its earliest stages. In the postwar years, however, the ideology of Cold War liberalism and the US goals of turning Japan into its junior ally produced cultural exchange programs of far greater scale than the prewar years. Together with other forms of cultural diplomacy—such as the tours of American artists, musicians, and writers, traveling exhibits, and the establishment of such institutions as CIE Libraries (later renamed American Cultural Centers) and the International House—scholarly exchanges constituted an important part of the cultural arm of US foreign policy. In collaboration with the US government, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a number of important American Studies seminars in Japan in which leading intellectuals participated. The government-funded Fulbright and Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) programs and scholarships sponsored by private foundations such as the Rotary Foundation and the Grew Bancroft Foundation became coveted avenues for ambitious Japanese and Okinawan students and scholars to study in the US during the early years of the Cold War. A great many Japanese scholars of American Studies who came to hold positions in leading universities in Japan and the US in the 1950s and 1960s—such as Yasuo Sakakibara (1929–2013), Nagayo Honma (1929–2012), Shunsuke Kamei (1932–), and Akira Iriye (1934–), just to name a few—were recipients of these scholarships. Their many writings that combine their scholarly insights with personal experiences and observations form a genre of Japanese writing about the US. As a young student, I studied with some of these scholars, and a number of contributors to this volume were also influenced by their writings in their early years as students of the US. Many of us are thus inheritors of the early genealogy of American Studies in Japan that Matsuda recounted. In the US, the social movements of the New Left brought about considerable changes to the institutional and intellectual life of the universities

Mari Yoshihara     11

from the 1960s onward, and American Studies became home to many scholar-activists charting new research and teaching in such allied fields as ethnic studies, women’s studies, popular culture studies, and media studies, along with history and literature, which were pillars of the field in the earlier years. The transnational turn in American Studies circa the 1990s, the growing number of Asian American and Pacific Islander, diasporic, and expatriate scholars in the field, and the shifting geopolitics and economy in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2000s have all contributed to the rise of the transpacific in American Studies.4 This shifting landscape of the field is signaled by the fact that the editorial home of American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association (ASA), has been housed at the University of Hawai‘i since 2014. In my role as the journal’s executive editor, I have worked at the front line of the field with a team of scholars based in Hawai‘i, the continental US, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The transnational and transpacific turn of American Studies is thus not abstract theory but is embodied in the actual practice of intellectual labor and knowledge production. In contrast, in Japan—even though there has been an important trajectory of Marxist thought both within and outside academia and some of the mass social movements of the 1960s took place in the universities and often involved violence—such movements did not translate into a drastic transformation of the field in the way they did in the US. To be sure, there are many scholars who have identified with the American and/or Japanese New Left, including Takeshi Matsuda himself. There have been many individual scholars committed to the study of racial minorities, women and gender, social movements, and so forth, and new research areas and scholarly organizations focusing on migration history, Black studies, cultural studies, and so on have emerged and grown. Yet, within the field of American Studies in Japan, the conceptual and methodological approaches have not seen a major sea change, and the disciplinary boundaries within the field have remained more or less intact under an area studies model. Furthermore, although the JAAS has developed a long-standing relationship with the ASA through public and private sponsorships, only a very small minority of JAAS members are involved in the ASA.5 Some Japanese scholars are active in US and international circles, but the scholarly activities of the majority of Japan-based academics remain within Japan—not in small part because they are mostly done in the Japanese language—and rarely engage an American or world audience. The authors in this volume, who regularly

12     Introduction

publish in English-language venues, present at international conferences, and/or teach in the US or elsewhere, are numerical minorities within American Studies scholars in or from Japan. Nonetheless, the faces of Japan’s Americanists have undergone gradual changes in important ways. The field saw a growing number of women, including the presidents of the JAAS: Kinuko Kubota (1978–1980), Hiroko Sato (1998–2000), Natsuki Aruga (2008–2010), Yuko Matsumoto (2014– 2016), Yuko Takahashi (2018–2020), and Yoshiko Uzawa (2020–2022). Scholars of Korean and Chinese ancestry have produced important scholarship and became key members of the association. Americanist scholarship and teaching are done in a wide array of institutions beyond Tokyo and Kyoto, ranging from Hokkaido to the north and Okinawa to the south. The scholars’ disciplinary affiliations became more diverse beyond the traditional fields of history, political science, and literature to encompass such fields as sociology, anthropology, and the arts, as well as interdisciplines like cultural studies, film and media studies, and gender and sexuality studies. More Japanese scholars have come to seriously consider the option of pursuing careers in the US or elsewhere rather than in Japan. Thus, while American Studies in the US and Japan have had very different genealogies, there are many more points of convergence between the two today than a few decades ago. The essays in Unpredictable Agents reflect both the interlocked web of politics, economics, and academics as well as the evolving contours of Japan’s Americanists. A number of authors have parents whose lives were profoundly affected by World War II who then later studied in the US to become academics; the parents’ lives have not only made various imprints on the authors’ sensibilities about America but sometimes directly influenced their choice of careers, fields, and destinations. A yearning, almost an obsession, for Englishlanguage study is shared by many authors across generations, animated by the romance of upward mobility and access to a bigger world that the acquisition of the modern-day lingua franca seemed to promise. Just like many of their predecessors, most of the contributors studied in the US with the support of public or private scholarships intended to foster international exchange and mutual understanding. The significance of historical and generational changes can be traced in the authors’ experiences and stories as well. Some authors have parents or grandparents who have worked in import or export industries nurtured by US economic policy and the American market. Indicative of Japan’s rise as an economic power in the 1960s–1980s, some lived in

Mari Yoshihara     13

the US or other parts of the globe at a young age because of their parents’ assignment as corporate executives or other professionals, which became an integral part of their personal development and character formation. Whereas those who were born in the 1960s and who lived in the US during the period of Japan’s affluence witnessed Japan-bashing and the resurgent discourse of “yellow peril” in the midst of trade frictions, those who came of age during Japan’s long recession and studied in the US in the post-9/11 global order experienced the reconfigured racism and xenophobia under the banner of the “War on Terror.” The twelve essays also highlight the diverse paths through which these individuals have come to be “Americanists” and the complex meanings that identity carries for them. The stories reveal the obvious yet often neglected fact that Japanese scholars neither come from the same backgrounds nor occupy similar identities solely because of their shared ethnicity and citizenship. The authors included here were born in the period ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s in different parts of Japan—from Hokkaido to Okinawa—and were raised in diverse familial backgrounds and cultural environments, which shaped their identities as “Japanese” and their encounters with “America” in quite different ways. Many of them reminisce about the material goods (toothpaste, toys, snacks) and popular culture (television shows, films, music) that signified “America” for them during their childhood; some of their families had Americans in their everyday social networks. The authors’ first physical travel to the US also varied: some visited on family vacations, some moved to the US for their parents’ jobs, whereas many made their own decisions to go study in the US. Almost but not all of the authors have a degree from one or more US institutions. But where they studied in America varies quite widely—for example, the flagship campus of a state university, a large land-grant university, a small faith-based college, a women’s university, a prestigious liberal arts college, a private research university—as does what they studied, ranging from international relations and history to literature and American Studies per se. Their choice of schools and fields often involved many more factors beyond scholarly interest and professional goals, including family connections and financial aid. As these scholars have immersed themselves in their academic pursuits in Japan, the US, and elsewhere, they have also lived their lives as daughters, sons, grandchildren, students, teaching assistants, professors, women, men, Japanese, Okinawans, parents, and spouses. They have rented apartments and bought homes, had children and lost parents,

14     Introduction

taught classes and graded papers, made friends and visited relatives, celebrated holidays and birthdays. All these experiences, some momentous and others mundane, were part of their “American” encounters. Through the stories, which are compelling first and foremost because of their particularities, a few common themes emerge. Illustrative of the importance of higher education in stimulating students’ academic interest, many authors write about their experiences in their Japanese alma mater that launched them onto the study of America. Their stories of their studies and mentors point to the various branches of American Studies genealogy in Japan, at institutions ranging from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Sophia University in Tokyo, Kyoto University and Doshisha University in Kyoto, and the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa. The authors also reflect on their experiences of studying in the US, whose choice of destination was often a product of interuniversity exchange programs or their parents’ or mentors’ personal ties. The authors write of their excitement, bewilderment, awe, and confusion upon arrival in the US, due to not only the amount and range of new materials they were exposed to but also the new style of learning and different ways of relating to their peers and mentors. They discuss their grapplings with what it meant to be a Japanese, Okinawan, Asian, foreign, nonwhite student of and in America—that is, studying the US while living in it as a racialized minority and experiencing various forms of racism, prejudice, and ignorance—and how their own thinking and feeling have evolved through various encounters with people, books, archives, incidents, places, or communities. Several of the authors also reflect on how their understanding of their gender and sexual identities were entangled with and shaped by their experience of living and studying in the US. A number of them write about their family and ancestors—fathers figure prominently in almost half the essays—as well as becoming a parent in the US and thus having children with US citizenship. While different parts of their identity and experience have been salient in different contexts, they have all been interpellated as Japanese and Asian as they live in and/or study about the US. In all these stories, scholars emerge as embodied beings living the reality of Japan, the US, and the world. To destabilize the premise of “Japan’s” Americanists, the volume opens with three essays by scholars from Okinawa: Katsunori Yamazato, Eijun Senaha, and Ikue Kina. Because they grew up—in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, respectively—on the island under US occupation that lasted two decades longer than on mainland Japan, these authors’ sense of themselves

Mari Yoshihara     15

and what “America” meant to them were intricately tied to the history of the Ryukyu Kingdom, Japanese colonization and annexation, devastating war on their own soil, the overwhelming presence of the US military, reversion to the Japanese state, and the ongoing conditions of militarization and its attendant violence. Their experience of US military presence on the islands varied, based on the place of residence, family occupation, and generation, but for all three of them, their relationship to the US has been no more complex than their relationship to their homeland and to Japan. In the next three essays, family ties play central roles in the authors’ encounters with, and interest in, “America” and their commitment to careers as Americanists. The three family stories are quite different from each other. Yujin Yaguchi was raised in a Mennonite community in Sapporo, and the missionaries’ faith, culture, and lifestyle were his entry to “America.” Sanae Nakatani’s interest in Japanese American history originated in her desire to learn about her family history, enmeshed in the history of Japanese emigration to and settler colonialism in the US. Unlike most other authors in this volume, Yohei Sekiguchi did not grow up in an environment where “America” was part of everyday life in any embodied form, yet his relationship with his father and the experience of becoming a father while studying in Hawai‘i have left distinct traces in his scholarly outlook. In all three narratives, the authors explore where they came from and where they are headed as they trace their “family” across the Pacific. The authors of the next three essays—Yuko Itatsu, Hiroshi Kitamura, and Naoko Wake—have lived in the US longer than many others, as they spent part of their childhood there, studied there multiple times, and/or have chosen to pursue their careers there. The essays reveal that their careers are grounded in the embodied experience of living in the US—in multiracial Los Angeles, a predominantly white university city in the Midwest, or a small college town in Virginia—and interacting with Americans and non-Americans in and out of academia. They trace the tales of personal and intellectual awakenings that were made possible through their American experiences and also discuss the significance of teaching students— from the US, Japan, and other parts of the world—in their understanding of “America,” their relationship to Japan, and their places in the world. The last set of essays is by authors whose encounter with “America” had a different entry point than that of most others. In contrast to other authors in this volume, two of the three authors in this section do not have a degree from US institutions: Masumi Izumi studied in Canada, and

16     Introduction

Mariko Iijima in the UK. Yu Tokunaga’s first study-abroad experience was in Costa Rica, and his Latin American experience and his career as a journalist covering immigrants in Japan oriented his interest in “American” studies in particular ways. These stories remind us of the importance of decentering the “US vs. Japan” binary often internalized by many of Japan’s Americanists and expanding our notions of borders, difference, and “America.” As diverse as they are, the twelve essays are not meant to be representative of the field of American Studies in Japan; nor is the collection as a whole intended to show any pattern in the historiography of the field. The authors were selected through my admittedly partial networks: some are my decades-long friends, some are colleagues with whom I have worked on various projects, and others are former students whom I mentored. They are varied in terms of their place of origin, family background, where they studied, and where they currently work, yet what the volume includes is far smaller than what it could not include. Contributions from both older and younger scholars would generate even more robust cross-generational dialogue on the field. There are also many excellent Americanist scholars from or in Japan working in such areas as anthropology, film and media studies, sociology, and visual and material culture studies who are not represented in the volume due to practical matters of prospective authors’ availability. Despite these limitations, I believe that Unpredictable Agents is an exciting and original contribution to understanding not only the multidirectional trajectories of American Studies in and from Japan but also of the many routes of transpacific mobility and exchange. I hope that readers will gain insight into the structural conditions that gave birth to the current generation of Japan’s Americanists and, more importantly, into the accidental encounters and self-designed paths that have shaped their lives and work. It is important to recognize that the authors’ encounters with “America” were enabled by historical, political, and economic conditions of US-Japan relations; yet it is just as crucial to note that their experiences and choices were never determined by them and that they have all continued to engage “America” critically, both in their scholarship and in their personal lives. Such a multidirectional look into scholars’ lives is especially important in American Studies, a field that has gained its strength through the analysis of the relationship between structure and agency, the hegemonic and the resistant, the political and the personal, America and the world. Together, the twelve essays in this volume illustrate

Mari Yoshihara     17

the complex positionalities, fluid identities, ambivalent embrace, and unpredictable agency of Japan’s Americanists who continue to chart their own course in and across the Pacific.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). In some ways, Matsuda’s study is reflective of what is often referred to as the Wisconsin School of US diplomatic history, in which he was trained. The school, represented most notably by such historians as William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and Thomas McCormick, generally used economic explanations for US expansionism and foreign policy and provided sharp critiques of the role of the US in the Cold War. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). On the transnational turn of American Studies, see, e.g., Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, eds., American Studies Encounters the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, eds., American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016); and Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). As of May 2020, of the approximately 10,000 members of the American Studies Association, Japan-based scholars make up the fifth-largest group after those based in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK, but at 91 members they are less than 1 percent of the entire ASA membership. There are 1,077 members of the Japanese Association for American Studies, which means that less than 10 percent of JAAS members are affiliated with the ASA. Although memberships in these professional organizations do not necessarily correlate with the activities of individual scholars, to some extent they reflect the nature of American Studies as a field and the orientations of Japanese scholars of American Studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Memories of an Okinawan Americanist Katsunori Yamazato

Who is it that can tell me who I am? —King Lear

She worked in the radar station on top of Mount Yae on the Motobu Peninsula, northern Okinawa. Located on one of the highest mountains on Okinawa Island, the radars eavesdropped on Chinese and North Korean military communications, or so I heard much later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She started working immediately after she finished junior high school, and I don’t know what kind of work she was doing on top of the mountain. She probably worked as a housemaid for American soldiers. That was the early 1950s, when we lived in a large thatched-roof house that my grandfather built, and she had her own room. Don’t go into your aunt’s room or she will get mad at you, my mother said to me. I was probably six years old at that time. One day, my uncle, who was about eleven years old, whispered to me that he knew his sister was hiding something good in her room. We sneaked into her room during the daytime when she was working on the mountain. My uncle knew exactly where it was and, opening a small box, took out a tube from under my aunt’s treasures. The tube was not unopened, my uncle apparently having opened it before. Not only that, but he had been doing something to it. He twisted open the cap of the tube and softly pushed the middle of it. A white substance came out of the mouth, and he scooped it with his index finger, put it on his tongue, and, as if boasting, sighed deeply. Then he pushed the 21

22     Chapter 1

middle of the tube again, this time very carefully and softer than before, and told me to take the white substance and put it in my mouth. I did, and in a couple of seconds, it melted and seemed to have disappeared into my mouth, leaving only a strange, indescribable taste. No substance left in my mouth at all, no substantial impact on my stomach either, but something icy and fiery eluded my keen hunger to chew, taste, and swallow it. My uncle was made to sit crying on his knees for about half an hour for licking up half of my aunt’s American toothpaste. My mother blamed her younger brother for tempting an innocent child into committing such a shameful act and so my aunt did not say anything to me, but I knew she was terribly unhappy about losing her American treasure. She had other small American treasures in that box, but the toothpaste was special, because everyone else was using tasteless tooth powder at that time. To my aunt, the tube, round and fat, represented a new culture, an advanced civilization, to be cherished and hoarded. My mother was laughing and said something about “Amerikaa” (that is, Americans or American things), pointing at the toothpaste tube flattened to half of its original size. That was the first time I heard the word, and I had not encountered any “Americans” yet. But I remember that I kept wondering, looking at my aunt glaring at her brother, what it was that slipped my grasp with a strange provocative taste that enticed me to follow and catch it.

The Bachelor Officers’ Quarters After returning to Okinawa from the communication corps of the Imperial Navy, my father worked in a concrete block factory in Urasoe Village near Naha City, providing blocks to rapidly expanding and strengthening American military bases. That is why we moved to Naha (and later to Urasoe) from the village near the beach at the tip of the Motobu Peninsula, leaving my grandfather, aunt, uncle, and another aunt younger than I in the thatched-roof house surrounded by fukugi trees (common garcinia, usually called happiness trees) that were two to three hundred years old, protecting the house from winds and seawater. We moved to Naha on the cargo bed of a dump truck from my father’s factory, traveling on Highway 1, which the Americans built along the west coast of the island. Coming from northern Okinawa, the asphalt road with no coral dust rising up was wide, without a median in the center, and shining in the sun. My friends in Naha knowingly told me later that it was built for American military airplanes to take off and land in case of emergency.

Katsunori Yamazato     23

Only two and a half hours from the old northern village by the sea, the landscape was radically different. I saw so many big American cars with yellow license plates and so many airplanes flying overhead—such roaring noises—that I felt the truck had driven my family into a different world. I went to elementary school and junior high school near an American military base in Urasoe full of tanks and trucks partially destroyed and soiled with red dirt. But “Amerika” was far inside the tall and long gray fence running along the base. It was a new world, just steps away, dominating my consciousness when I walked by the fence going to or coming back from school, but it was invisible for a schoolboy at home and forgotten during games and play in the alleys. One hot, humid summer, on July 4, the gate to the base opened, and we could go in and wander around inside. Everyone stood in a long line in front of a big warehouse to get a cup of ice cream. We went into the building several times to get more ice cream. I got three cups, ate one, and hid the rest in a cupboard intending to eat them later. I came back home one hour later and took out the cups. The cups were strangely warm, not icy, and bubbles were pushing up the lids of the cups. My sister said that my ice cream evaporated because I was greedy and did not share it with her. “Amerika” was disappearing. One day, “Amerika” suddenly became a reality. I started working as a paperboy delivering an American newspaper inside the base. From the time I was a ninth grader until I graduated from high school, I woke up at five thirty every morning to deliver newspapers. Rain or shine, I would ride an old bicycle carrying newspapers tied to the back of the bike. The newspaper was called the Morning Star, and because it was printed outside the military bases, the newspaper company hired Okinawan boys to deliver it. My route was the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (abbreviated as BOQ) on the military base now called Camp Kinser in Urasoe City. The motto of the newspaper was “Good Mornings begin with the Morning Star.” I could read this much and felt slightly uncomfortable seeing these words. There were flat-roofed houses and apartment buildings in the BOQ, and male officers and female schoolteachers lived there. The officers shared houses. Most of the schoolteachers lived in the apartment buildings. Almost every day, I went to the BOQ twice: in the morning, to deliver the newspaper, and in the evening, to collect monthly payments from the subscribers. I rarely saw the officers, however. The war was raging in Vietnam, and some of them suddenly disappeared. Standing on the hills inside the base, I saw

24     Chapter 1

big military aircraft returning one by one from the south to Kadena Air Base. Those airplanes flying through the dawn twilight could have been bombers, B-52s, returning from Vietnam. One morning around six, in the young schoolteachers’ apartment building, I ran into one of the teachers. She was standing naked in the hallway in front of her apartment, perhaps drying her hair after a shower in the morning breeze from the East China Sea or just relaxing, believing that no one would see her at that hour. But we saw each other, and she ran into her apartment and I ran down the stairs to the first floor, where I had left my rusty bike. An Okinawan man from the newspaper company came to my school that afternoon and told me that the office received a complaint from a subscriber in the BOQ. Did you really see her? Yes, I did. OK, then, how did you see her? What do you mean how did I see her? Did you peek or stare at her? No, I just came running down the stairs from the third floor, and then we saw each other on the second floor right by the stairs. She says you were staring at her from the other side for a long time. I don’t know, maybe she thought I was, because I didn’t know what to do when I saw her there, so I just paused for a moment in the hallway. No kidding? No kidding. OK, then. Be careful, anyway. He left without scolding me. I tried for a long time to understand what he meant by “Be careful, anyway.” One elderly schoolteacher lived alone with her bulldog in one of those flat-roofed houses. She would invite me to eat with her whenever she thought I had spare time for a “simple” breakfast. To me it was a luxurious American meal: a glass of orange juice, bacon and eggs, and bread with thick butter and jam spread on it. She would correct my English pronunciation, teach me the names of things, and ask me questions about what I was studying at school. She once gave me a fifty-cent silver coin, with a cracked bell on one side, telling me to buy a new cap. Boys at that time were proud of their “dirty and stinky” caps like mine, but for this American lady, my cap was intolerable. What could I do but listen to my kind and generous subscriber? One early morning, she again invited me to breakfast. Taking out a brown bag from her fridge, she said that she had brought back a “doggy bag” from a Chinese restaurant the previous night and that she was going to warm it up for me. A “doggy bag”? I saw her bulldog under the table, peeking up at me. I ate what she warmed up in her frying pan, but did not feel well all day at school. I was fifteen at the time, and it was only after

Katsunori Yamazato     25

I started majoring in English at college that I understood what she had done for me. Four young teachers shared a house next to the elderly teacher. Always cheerful and full of energy, they were ready to talk to me and listen to me. I carried a pocket Japanese-English dictionary in case I could not express myself in English. I looked up words whenever I got stuck, and they waited patiently until I found the word I was looking for. I was a senior in high school. What are you going to major in at the University of the Ryukyus? English, I guess. English? I majored in English too. Two weeks after the conversation, on June 5, 1967, they gave me a copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language with the message, “Best always from your American friends,” their names signed on the title page: Patricia Gurley, Joanne Endres, Barbara Sallee, Claire Gastonguay. I used it for four years at the university and took it with me to Hawai‘i and California, where I studied later. I still have it, fifty years later, all the pages turning brown and the prints fading, with so many long and difficult words that I diligently imprinted in my brain. I think I am one of the few Okinawans in my generation who saw things hidden from the eyes of those outside the gray fences. There was a white church on top of a hill, above the BOQ, surrounded by red oleander shrubs. Two people lived there, an American minister and his Japanese wife. The wife was always kind and smiling, but the minister looked sad and very thin, as if ready to melt into the shadowy corners of the church. A small building stood next to the church, the windows bright with light every morning by the time I got there to put the newspaper in the box. One morning I went into the building to use the bathroom and accidentally pushed on one of the doors of the building to get out. The door opened, and I saw several faces instantaneously turning toward me, the eyes above the white masks revealing surprise, even confusion. I could tell the men were Okinawans, and they were working over a patient. Or was it a body? The person was lying on a steely table, shining under the bright white light falling from the ceiling. My friends had told me that there were Okinawans who worked inside the military bases taking care of the bodies from Vietnam before they were sent back home to the United States. How long did I hold the door? Did I really see it? Was it just a dream or a fantasy? I met many Americans those days. It was often only a brief encounter, and I did not learn where they had come from or when they left my island.

26     Chapter 1

Before graduating from high school, I had to choose a major at the university. I could have chosen Japanese literature, but I decided instead to major in English. I had always wanted to be able to read the newspaper I delivered and to understand what was going on in the world. What are Americans saying about their war in Vietnam? Above all, I wanted to understand why the elderly schoolteacher invited me to breakfast, gave me the silver coin, and warmed up the contents of the doggy bag for me. Why did the four teachers sign their names and give me the hardcover dictionary? Why did that woman call the newspaper office for an accidental encounter like that? What happened to the officers who suddenly disappeared from the BOQ? I wanted to know who they were and why they came all the way to my island, crossing the Pacific and living at the BOQ.

“Return to the Motherland,” or Another Civil Rights Movement In 1968, I got accepted to the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of the Ryukyus. The first university in Okinawa, it was established in 1950, mainly by GHQ (General Headquarters) and the American military authorities in Okinawa. The US authorities gave scholarships to young Okinawan men and women to study at American universities, and those who wanted to study in the United States studied English hard to get a scholarship. In the department, I studied seriously with two professors who had received their doctoral degrees from American universities. They had written their dissertations on William Butler Yeats and Wordsworth. I liked reading Wordsworth because his poems reminded me of my grandfather’s thatched-roof house near the beach and the hills and fields at the tip of the peninsula, the Black Stream coming up from around the Philippines and sweeping across it every day from time immemorial before veering into the Pacific. But I was deeply attracted by Yeats’ poetry and Irish history, especially because the history of Ireland, long dominated by Britain, reminded me of Okinawa’s domination by Japan since the seventeenth century. My teacher, however, told us not to read Irish literature in facile comparison with Okinawan literature and history. We were meant to be academic, neutral, and objective, not to impose our Okinawan lenses and emotions onto Irish literature. His voice, though, trembled slightly as he read Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He began to read the poem in a cool baritone voice, and it was absolutely beautiful listening to Yeats’ iambic lines read by a scholar

Katsunori Yamazato     27

who had gained his BA, MA, and PhD in America. But as he read the third (and last) stanza, I could detect that he was trying to resist a strong emotional pull that almost destroyed his academic objectivity: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Yeats, Collected Poems, 39)

My teacher had lost many friends and classmates during the ground war in 1945. He and his family had evacuated to Kyushu before the American invasion, and after his return to Okinawa he saw his homeland devastated beyond words and heard of his friends crushed in the war, student soldiers— that is, teenagers—falling one by one in what later came to be called the “typhoon of steel.” Deep in his heart, he could not forget his friends and the Okinawan rural world they lived in before 1945, and he yearned for the kind of quiet peace that was similar to what Yeats had at his lake isle. Yeats had read Henry Thoreau’s Walden before he wrote the poem, and we can clearly feel and see the Romantic legacy in the poem. But I also felt in that poem Yeats’ yearning for Irish freedom, his internal turmoil as an AngloIrish writer, and, of course, his personal anxiety as a young poet. My teacher perhaps tried to get rid of his Okinawanness by reading Yeats, to be scholarly, to be “universal,” and not to be “tainted” by his indigenous inclinations. Okinawans in the sixties were resisting the undemocratic, semicolonial control of the Ryukyus by the United States. The rampant violence and crimes by American soldiers were witnessed and reported daily. Naturally, the leaders of Okinawan society, such as the schoolteachers’ union, political parties, labor unions (including the one organized by those working inside the military bases), and local newspapers demanded that the United States return Okinawa to the “Motherland”—that is, Japan. It was literally called the Return to the Motherland movement and was led by leaders who were born before 1945 and educated in Japanese universities and normal schools. They had a “motherland” or “homeland” to return to. But university students born after 1945 had no idea, except from reading about it in textbooks, about what it meant to be Japanese, because Okinawa had been cut off from Japan by the Treaty of San Francisco signed on September 8, 1951, and brought into effect on April 28, 1952, the day Japan restored its sovereignty. During the twenty-seven years of the American administration,

28     Chapter 1

Okinawans were treated as second-class citizens, their human rights were violated daily, and they could not choose their own governor. I was therefore an Okinawan or Ryukyuan (a term that Americans favored over “Okinawan”) and carried a passport issued by the Government of the Ryukyu Islands when I first went to Kyushu in 1965 as a saxophone player in a high school brass band representing Okinawa. The immigration stamp I got in my passport in Kagoshima simply said, “Returned to the Country.” What country? My country? Who am I? Hey, these Kyushu kids are speaking their local dialect with their teachers freely, while we are discouraged from speaking our own dialect and are seen by teachers as bad students if caught conversing fluently in our indigenous language . . . Even in the sixties, some friends hesitated to speak standard Japanese because they were not fluent in it. Struggling under the US military’s Cold War culture, Okinawan people yearned for freedom. Thus, the United States came to face two powerful civil rights movements in the 1960s—in Okinawa and at home. The Okinawan younger generation mostly demanded human rights, and elder leaders demanded the return of Okinawa to their motherland as well as human rights. Okinawa, a small island on the western edge of the Pacific, had been transformed from Japan’s southwestern fortress to an American outpost in the Cold War era, and American servicemen themselves sometimes called it “the Rock.” The small archipelago remained devastated and dreamless for many years in the postwar era, and yet it was the cherished homeland for Okinawans both at home and dispersed all over the world. In 1970, outside Kadena Air Base, the largest American air base in Asia, the United States saw the first postwar riot (the “Koza Riot”) against its rule. The University of the Ryukyus was modeled on American land-grant universities, and it was thus “adopted” for eighteen years by Michigan State University until 1968. The American military authorities in Okinawa declared that the university would teach democratic (“universal”) principles as long as they did not conflict with American occupational policies. This democratic institution of higher education limited students’ rights, deformed universal standards for higher education, and controlled university education with Cold War ethics of the McCarthy era. The university was controlled by the United States until 1965, but from July 1, 1966, to May 14, 1972, it was supported by the Government of the Ryukyu Islands. I entered this university in April 1968 and graduated from it in March 1972, during the brief period when the institution existed as what I

Katsunori Yamazato     29

call the “National University of the Ryukyus.” The university became one of the Japanese national universities on May 15, 1972, the day Okinawa was returned to Japan. One day in class in 1970, as we were reading one of Yeats’ mystical essays on the moon, I heard students demonstrating outside the window and brazenly asked my teacher if he thought perhaps it would be better for us students to join the demonstrators and demand human rights instead of reading an essay of Irish mysticism that might not be directly related to the social and political realities of these islands. The professor stared at me and said it was time for scholarly training, not political rallies. It was a deeply embarrassing moment for me. I felt he was quietly suggesting that I must not confuse somebody else’s slogans and words with what I might gain after reading difficult passages myself. Look for your own words that truly come out of yourself. His cold stare taught me to acquire patience and use my own words, not ideological slogans that some activists or politicians made up. English majors at the University of the Ryukyus were well aware that they should not participate in political rallies demanding the return of the islands to Japan or criticizing undemocratic (“imperial”) American policies in Okinawa. The most powerful man in the islands was a US lieutenant general officially called the high commissioner; Okinawans sometimes called him the “emperor” of Okinawa. He could veto any law that passed the Okinawan legislative house, called the Legislature of the Government of the Ryukyu Islands, or Rippoin in Japanese. It was whispered among students that he could cross out your name at the last minute from the list of college graduates to be sent to American universities with scholarships from the Department of Defense. A rumor spread that there were US military agents following students’ rallies and taking photos to be used later in screening the candidates for the scholarship. Are you happy just reading books and preparing for the scholarship exams and interviews in English? I imagined many English majors asked this question of themselves. Of course, though I wanted to go to America to study, to see the country, to understand who I was, and if fortunate, to see the schoolteachers who lived at the BOQ again, I went to rallies many times, joining the three thousand students from the university in the heated, swirling demonstrations on Kokusai Street, the main street in Naha, the capital of Okinawa. The scholarship was suddenly terminated in 1970, after Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato and US president Richard Nixon met in

30     Chapter 1

November 1969 and announced that Okinawa would be returned to Japan within two to three years. No need to educate Okinawans by using US dollars anymore. The Return to the Motherland movement lost its momentum and died, people dispersing, never coming back together even though some keen-eyed critics pointed out that nothing had changed and the US-Japanese political machine would continue to dominate the islands. It was unfortunate for those students who studied hard for four years or more to get a scholarship. I felt relieved in a way after I heard the news because I did not have to debate inside myself whether or not to apply for a military scholarship, explaining at the same time to unseen critics why I needed to go to the United States. I always had a strange yearning, an overwhelming power pulling me toward it. At the same time, I felt a strong urge to run away from it, feeling ashamed for hiding a guilt arising from choosing the world of the “imperial oppressors.” That was how many Japanese majors saw English majors, “behaving like Americans.” Some Japanese majors wore geta and noisily walked outside our classrooms, and some of us with dreams of going out of Okinawa to a “better” world ignored those Japanese majors who very often directed dark and pensive looks at English majors.

The Ryukyuan Theater Reading literature written in English, I sometimes wanted to use my own words to talk about Okinawa and myself. In 1970, I got back into Okinawan history and culture and started working part-time at an Okinawan theater in Naha that staged plays in the Ryukyuan language every day. Reading plays written in English (Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, for example), I felt I would not know who I was if I did not know anything about my own literature. I told the manager of the theater that he did not have to pay me because I just wanted to learn about Okinawan plays. The manager said that he liked my ideas and hired me immediately with pay— meager but more than enough for bus fare and a light meal. Every evening, I raised the curtain and brought it down by pulling two different ropes. My generation, born after 1945, most likely is the last generation fluent in Ryukyuan—that is, bilingual, speaking standard Japanese and Ryukyuan—with Japanese to be spoken at school and Ryukyuan to communicate with friends after school and with our parents at home. My parents did not speak Ryukyuan to my younger brother and sisters, so they could not speak it fluently, though they understood what my parents were trying to say.

Katsunori Yamazato     31

The audience that came to see the plays was mostly women, and they could sing with the actors whenever they sang famous songs on the stage. The audience sang together with the actors, so the whole house was filled with a communal atmosphere, natural and happy. One day, during a play, a bad samurai drew his sword and said to the handsome protagonist something like this: “Today is the last day for you in this floating world, for I shall kill you with this sword.” I was standing by the curtain and was aware of an elderly woman sitting in the front row. She was busily peeling an orange and simultaneously looking at the stage. As the bad guy got closer to the protagonist with his long sword, she suddenly stood up and came running to the edge of the stage, throwing her half-peeled orange and saying loudly, “You kill yourself, you SOB!” The whole house exploded with laughter. The audience clapped, and she looked deeply satisfied and proud, while the two actors on the stage stood stunned but helplessly trying to continue their actions, in which no one was interested anymore. I liked the theater. It reminded me of the world that I thought I was leaving behind. The theater was far away from the world depicted in the literature I read every day in class. I almost escaped into this half-forgotten Ryukyuan world—I did not have to worry about an Okinawa full of political turmoil involving the United States, Japan—now looming large again in my consciousness—and Okinawa itself. Listening to the songs and poetry sung and recited in the theater, I did not have to get nervous about trying to understand what was written in the books I was reading. And, above all, this was my world and my culture, and I thought I knew every word spoken on the stage. I worked at the theater for six months and immersed myself in the Ryukyuan language, singing Ryukyuan songs and reciting Ryukyuan poems (that is, ryuka) in thirty syllables incorporated in the lines the actors spoke on the stage.

The First Ryukyuan Americanist and His Successors The theater was a place full of information absent from the classrooms. One evening, the manager asked me if I had read Commodore Matthew Perry’s book on his expedition to Japan and Ryukyu. Perry stopped in Naha (“Napha”), the principal port of the Ryukyu Kingdom, before he sailed to Uraga near Edo, negotiating to “open” Japan. Dealing with the kingdom, Perry was aggressive and irascible. Basil Hall, a Scottish captain in the British Navy, had visited the Ryukyus in 1816 and spread romantic images of the Ryukyus all over Europe. Two Ryukyuans learned English

32     Chapter 1

from Hall’s crew, and it was one of their disciples who dealt with the Americans when they landed in Naha on May 26, 1853. Perry recorded in his book the words of a Ryukyuan interpreter-diplomat, Chochu Makishi (1818–1862): Gentlemen, Doo Choo [Ryukyu] man very small. American man not very small. I have read of America in books of Washington—very good man, very good. Doo Choo good friend American. Doo Choo man give America all provision he wants. American no can have house on shore. (Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 159)

Makishi had studied Chinese in Beijing for three years and had learned English as well from his teacher, who in turn had learned the language from Basil Hall’s crew. Hall had stopped in St. Helena on his way back to England and had met Napoleon there. He told the former French emperor that Ryukyuans did not have weapons, and Napoleon laughed, saying that no such society existed in the world. Perry brushed away Hall’s report on the Ryukyus as too romantic and nonsensical. Perry was aggressive, overbearing, and pragmatic in dealing with Ryukyuans. Makishi was fluent in Chinese, a lingua franca in East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, and could communicate in English as well, a rarity among bureaucrats in the Ryukyu Kingdom. Perry had brought with him Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884), an American scholar who was staying in Macao then. (Williams later became the first professor of Chinese and Chinese literature at Yale.) Makishi and Williams negotiated in Chinese, but when Perry’s demands became excessive, Makishi suddenly started speaking English directly to Perry’s officers. Williams had kept a secret journal during his visit to the Ryukyus. He was sympathetic to the Ryukyuans and wrote about Perry and the Ryukyu Kingdom represented by Makishi: It was a struggle between weakness and right and power and wrong, for a more highhanded piece of aggression has not been committed by anyone. I was ashamed at having been a party to such a procedure, and pitied these poor, defenseless islanders who could only say no. (Williams, “Journal of the Perry Expedition,” 13)

Perry had written to Secretary of the Navy John P. Kennedy that they should take the major ports in the Ryukyus for the use of American ships,

Katsunori Yamazato     33

and Perry and his sailors landed on Okinawa Island (“Island of Great Lew Chew”) to survey the land. Perry was also the first foreigner to enter Shuri Castle, bluffing the Ryukyuans with “two field-pieces” to open the gate. An American historian calls this “the first American occupation of Ryukyu” (Kerr, Okinawa, 3). After his unsuccessful negotiations with Japan, Perry returned to Naha. Williams knew that Makishi was interested in America. He had read about George Washington and American history. Makishi asked Williams about the United States. Williams teasingly said that Makishi should go to the country and see it himself. Williams wrote in his journal on July 27, 1853: He asked if the ship which came in this morning was the “Plymouth,” and if the steamer “Mississippi” was named from the State of Mississippi, and how many stars we had now in our flag. From these questions I saw that he had been reading the History of the United States given him, and then I asked him some more names and told him that he must go to America next year and see for himself. He demurred on account of the length of the voyage, etc., but perhaps the idea is not unpleasant to him. (Williams, “Journal of the Perry Expedition,” 73)

Williams discerned a desire in Makishi to leave his small kingdom to see a powerful country with an advanced civilization. But Makishi was not free to leave. He had a double function as an interpreter and diplomat for the kingdom. Because of this function, he had cutting-edge information on early modern European moves into East Asia and secretly helped Shimazu Nariakira, the lord of the Satsuma clan that had long controlled the Ryukyus since the 1609 invasion of the kingdom by Satsuma, in his attempt to purchase black ships from France. After Nariakira’s sudden death, Makishi was taken to Satsuma to assist the clan in negotiating with European countries. But on his way to Satsuma, he threw himself overboard and disappeared into the Black Stream. It is said that he was mentally unstable from imprisonment and torture by Ryukyuans for collaborating with the Satsuma clan and thus rising in rank too quickly with Satsuma backing. Makishi was the first Ryukyuan/Okinawan Americanist who read about and studied the United States in order to deal with Perry and his crew. American Studies in Ryukyu/Okinawa seems to have originated with Chochu Makishi in 1853 with the arrival of America’s black warships. Many Okinawan young people went to the United States after 1945,

34     Chapter 1

receiving American military scholarships and studying in the country, earning advanced degrees in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Unlike Makishi, they were free to leave these islands and experience a wider world, eagerly seeking opportunities to explore the modernity that they yearned for so much. My teacher taught me how to read Modernist poetry, focusing on Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Before he went to the United States on the scholarship, he learned colloquial American English while working as a bartender on a military base near his hometown after he graduated from high school. Who could not call him an Americanist? An internationally known Yeats scholar, Okifumi Komesu passed away in 2015 at age eighty-three. His family invited me to his study in 2018 when a public library in his hometown decided to collect and display his books and manuscripts and the librarian asked me to help him. In Komesu’s study, besides books on English and American literature, there were numerous books, in Japanese and English, on the war in Okinawa. Professor Komesu had once told me that a war is a fierce clash of cultures; strategies and weapons reflect the cultures of the forces that attempt to destroy each other. He perhaps intended to write a book about the war in which his friends perished miserably as student soldiers. Cherishing their memories and seeking his own inner peace, he read all those books, wishing to understand the history, culture, and society that led to that horrible ground war in 1945, which Americans called the Battle of Okinawa. While publishing books, articles, and essays mainly on Yeats, Irish literature, and Okinawan culture and literature, he studied the depth of American culture as well and understood America far better than anyone else in the Ryukyus. Dr. Komesu declined conferment of a decoration from the Japanese government for his long and brilliant service as a professor of English at the University of the Ryukyus. When I asked him why, he just said that he did not deserve it. He was thinking of his friends and classmates who fought in the intolerable summer heat and the drenching rain and died. Surely, he was a deep Americanist who continued to study all his life the entity called America. I still hear his voice begin to tremble, reading the third stanza of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and asking perhaps deep inside himself what it means to be an Okinawan. Thoreau, who influenced Yeats in writing the poem, once wrote in an essay that “the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom” (Thoreau, “Walking,” 606). But, unlike Concord, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century, in Okinawa the

Katsunori Yamazato     35

landscape has long been occupied and enclosed with gray iron fences in the central part of Okinawa Island, and it is very often impossible to saunter through the subtropical woods or the fields that beckon people to their sacred dream world. Walking over the fenced military grounds in Okinawa without permission will mean trespassing and is “punishable by Japanese law.” I see Professor Komesu standing alone on the gray pavement in a city in the United States, struggling not to allow himself to read Yeats emotionally but still unable to resist hearing “in the deep heart’s core” the sound of woods and waters in his old Okinawan village long gone after the war.

Identity and Okinawan Americanists The summer of 1945 marked the historical moment when Perry’s dream— that is, the US occupation of the major ports of Okinawa—was finally realized. That dream took almost one hundred years to become a reality—and now in the twenty-first century what we may call “the second occupation of the Ryukyus” seems to last forever. One of the military air bases that Japan had built was rebuilt by Americans to be the largest air base in Asia, which we see in Kadena. For many Okinawans born after 1945, groping for one’s identity became one of their most conspicuous traits. They had to see themselves in a triangle relationship involving three agents—Okinawa, the United States, and Japan. Okinawan identity continued to be unstable because it was and is generated through three lenses—Okinawan, American, and Japanese. The three lenses never gain a fixed focus, each seeking its own advantageous focal point. Or perhaps it is safe to say that Ryukyuan/Okinawan intellectuals have continued to waver between the political and cultural forces that control them. Chochu Makishi, the first Ryukyuan/Okinawan Americanist, perhaps sought an unwavering focal point of his sense of identity, and when he despaired in doing so—torn between political powers— he threw himself into deep water. I kept wondering about the Americans I met delivering newspapers at the BOQ. Who were they? Where did they go? But I later realized that they were also asking silently, Who are you, bringing newspapers to us so early in the morning? I think I became an Okinawan Americanist to know who I am, to understand the Americans I met, and to be able to explain the history and culture that have generated this reality that we—Okinawans and Americans alike—face and live in now. I keep trying to imagine as well what sort of self-image Chochu Makishi had before he perished in the sea.

36     Chapter 1

What kind of future did he envision for Ryukyu? What did he think of America? Even now, Okinawans can only say “No!” as in 1853, but it has become an emphatic “No!” unlike the polite, weak responses Makishi had to resort to. For many Okinawans and Okinawan Americanists, however, “America” still seems baffling, “icy and fiery,” ever eluding their keen hunger to chew, taste, and swallow it.

Note King Lear, act 1, scene 4, line 220.

Works Cited Kerr, George H. Okinawa: The History of an Island People. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1958. Perry, Commodore M. C. Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan, 1852–1854. 1856. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” In Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Brooks Atkinson, 537–632. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Williams, S. Wells. “A Journal of the Perry Expedition to Japan (1853–1854).” 1910. In Ryukyu Studies since 1854: Western Encounter, Part 2, edited by Patrick Beillevaire. Reprint, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002. (Citations refer to the journal’s reprint, included within Ryukyu Studies.) Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 1933. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1956.

CHAPTER TWO

American Paralysis Floating Homeland, Family, and Masculinity

Eijun Senaha

“Americanist” is a puzzling, ambiguous word. For me, to be an Americanist is like contracting paralysis, a sense mostly of numbness and sometimes of pain and yearning, for America. I do not remember when my paralysis started. I know I have inherited the lesion from my father, who, for love of his homeland, his family, and his own manhood, embraced America. Although I resisted such a pursuit, America was literally omnipresent when I was born, and the nature of an Americanist was already intrinsic to my existence, like a disease. America is a part of me, and I cannot tell my story without America. I am not entirely American, but I am thoroughly an Americanist. I would call myself a second-generation Okinawan Americanist. I was born in Okinawa under the US occupation and grew up there to witness Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972. I am always caught in a triangulated identity: Okinawan, Japanese, and, strangely enough, American. It is absolutely impossible to tell my personal history of this puzzling identity without discussing the political history of Okinawa’s relationship with America. My story is also closely related to that of my forerunners who studied in the US from the 1950s to the 1970s under the US-sponsored educational program called Beiryu (shortened Japanese for “Study in the United States”) for Okinawans. I followed my predecessors to the United States for ten years in the late 1980s and the 1990s, first as a student and then as an assistant professor,

37

38     Chapter 2

until I returned to Japan in 1996. During that decade, I experienced a strong sense of dysphoria, both against American normativity and against the first generation of Okinawan scholars, who, despite knowing that they were being used in service of US politics post–World War II, admired America, willingly embraced and were even brainwashed by its ideologies, and sought to become mainstream elites. Though I was soaked by such circumstances, I confronted them in my mind. This caused me to fall into paralysis.

Ryukyuan Americanist Okinawans lived through a series of political turbulence under American influence and became ambivalent Americanists with both affection and antipathy. Under the occupation by the US Army in 1945, the so-called Okinawan Civilian Administration, founded in 1946, was in reality a puppet administrative organization under the US Army. It preferred to use the name “Ryukyu” rather than “Okinawa.” The former had a long history as an independent kingdom, and the US Army encouraged the use of the old name to foster Okinawans’ self-esteem and distinct identity, while the latter was a disrespectful name meaning “a rope floating in the ocean,” given by the Japanese government. The floating history of the islands did not change after the war. The Ryukyus came under the rule of the US government until their return as Okinawa Prefecture to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 by the Okinawa Reversion Agreement. During this occupation period, the US government spent $7,401,000 to send 1,045 young Okinawans (including those from the Amami Islands, which were returned to Japan in 1953) to US colleges and universities from 1949 to 1970 as scholarship students. This is how “Beiryu” started: funded first by the US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR), originally aided by GARIOA (Government Appropriation for Relief in Occupied Areas, 1949–1952), and then as the Fulbright program starting in 1952, the year the Treaty of San Francisco (Treaty of Peace with Japan) came into force, until 1970, two years before Okinawa was returned to Japan. These were carried out by the Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, Army (ARIA) in 1960, which had been called ARI in 1957 and then RIA in 1959. Beiryu was only one of a few opportunities for the select young elites of Okinawa. The program was a better choice for them than the Okinawan emigration policy that first sent twenty-six migrants to Hawai‘i in 1899 and then more than twenty thousand migrants, mostly to Central and

Eijun Senaha     39

South American colonies, by emigrant ships until 1973. The Okinawan elites took Beiryu examinations and, if successful, were taken to the United States first by military boats in the 1950s and then by military aircraft in the 1960s. In the preface to A List of U.S. Government-Sponsored Okinawan Students: 1949–1970, published in 2001, Mikio Higa, then president of the GARIOA Fulbright Alumni Association of Okinawa, briefly looks back at the history of Beiryu. He introduces the Golden Gate Club, founded in 1952 and named after the Californian bridge the young Okinawan students saw with unforgettable excitement when they entered the US port of San Francisco. The club was founded for the purpose of nurturing lasting friendship among the alumni and for the development of Okinawa. Higa concludes his preface by saying: Whatever the intentions of the US government may have been, it should be highly valued that the Beiryu program did contribute to the development of human resources of Okinawa. In fact, I believe that those who were sent to the US and studied there have played significant roles in the various fields of Okinawan politics, economy, and education. (Translation mine)

The Beiryu returnees’ future was promising not only for their own personal and professional development but also for Okinawa as a whole. The US military regime provided Okinawans with the American dream after they had experienced Japanese colonialism, which had destroyed their history, dignity, and opportunities since the Meiji Restoration until the end of World War II. My father was one of the first generation of Beiryu scholars. He was born in 1928 in a small village called Yambaru, north of mainland Okinawa. His family descended from a clan that served the Ryukyu Kingdom in Shuri, which governed the islands for five centuries. The Meiji government of Japan, however, forced assimilation of the Ryukyus and ended their tributary relations with China in 1872. The Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished and became a Japanese prefecture with the new name “Okinawa” in 1879. Through this destructive colonialism, my father’s ancestors were forced to move to the remote village of Yambaru. In his honorable family tradition, this moment remained in great infamy then and in years to come. He was born as the responsible first son of a big family of seven brothers and sisters. He considered it his duty to regain the family honor and proudly carry on the bloodline. As a result, paradoxically, during World

Cover of Welcome to Students from the Ryukyus pamphlet, US Department of the Army, August 1957.

Eijun Senaha     41

War II he became a patriotic Japanese. When he was an agricultural high school student, he decided to join the Tekketsukinotai, a troop of Okinawan boys aged fourteen to sixteen, hoping to be a national hero of Japan. Fighting in service of the imperialists who were once his ancestors’ enemies seemed incomprehensible to my postwar sensibilities, but such Japanese nationalistic fervor was common among Okinawans during that era. One day, he was visited by his father at his high school. They made a promise to meet again on the battlefield while fighting for the country, but it was the last time they ever saw one another. My father failed to join the military because of an accident and survived, while his father fought in the war and died on Ie Island. My father still emotionally remembers the day they met for the last time, when America was their common enemy. After the war, under US occupation, he again paradoxically chose to embrace what had been his enemy nation—this time, America. He became a high school teacher, got married, and entered the University of the Ryukyus in 1954. He then applied for the Beiryu program to study in the US. He obtained this opportunity as many as three times, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and earned a BA, an MA, and a PhD in English. His American dream started in 1957 as an ARI student, or a Fulbrighter. A twenty-two-page orientation pamphlet, Welcome to Students from the Ryukyus, was distributed to sixty Okinawan students upon their arrival at Mills College in Oakland, California. The pamphlet starts with a brief greeting by Major General C. K. Gally, reproduced on the official letterhead of the Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Civil Affairs and Military Government. The general concludes: “It is my hope that you will be rewarded by an increased appreciation, not only of deeper mutual understanding and friendship, but also with new ideas for the future advancement, leadership and guidance of the Ryukyuan people.” This statement is followed by several elaborating notes by military officials welcoming the newcomers to the United States and reminding them of their duties as students in the program. The first is titled “The Army’s Exchange of Persons Program,” written by Fritz G. A. Kraemer, then acting chief, Public Affairs Division Office of the Chief of Civil Affairs and Military Government. Kraemer explains: The Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is the largest, comprises a strategic archipelago in the Western Pacific between Japan and Formosa. The Government of the United States provides economic assistance,

42     Chapter 2

administrative guidance and civil information and education services to the people of the Ryukyus through Congressional appropriations under the title “Administration, Ryukyu Islands (ARI).” These funds are administered by the Department of the Army through the High Commissioner of the Ryukyu Islands. Stateside guidance and support are provided in Washington through the Office of the Chief of Civil Affairs and Military Government of the Department of the Army. The Exchange of Persons Program, initiated in 1950, involves both national leaders and students in a long-range task of developing, in the Ryukyu Islands, a genuine understanding of the concepts of democratic thought and action and individual liberties and human rights. . . . The primary objective of this program is to provide an opportunity for leading Ryukyuans to study and observe the progress being accomplished in another section of the world in political, industrial, agricultural, educational, social and other fields in order that they may be better prepared to make the maximum contributions to the further development of their islands. In the process, the creation of good will between the people of the Ryukyus and the United States contributes immeasurably to the program’s over-all effectiveness, and both Ryukyuans and Americans can learn of the best that the other’s civilization has to offer in ideas, techniques and philosophies to the benefit of all. (US Department of the Army, Welcome, 1)

Insisting that the program’s functions include the development of “understanding, friendship, trust and common interest relative to the United States,” Kraemer adds, “This requires that the Ryukyuan people have a clear understanding of the aims and motives of the United States” (ibid., 2). The young Okinawans’ mission was clearly more politico-militaristic than academic. The next message in the pamphlet is by Joseph S. Harbison, acting chief of the Civil Affairs Branch, and is titled “The Ryukyuan Student Program”: Sixty Ryukyuan GARIOA students will spend the academic year 1957–58 in thirty-seven colleges and universities in the United States. The Exchange of Persons Program of the Department of the Army has stressed the education of the youth of the Ryukyus in the belief that you young people may then be better prepared to lead in all phases of life in your homeland. In addition you will have a better

Eijun Senaha     43

comprehension of the role of your homeland and may appreciate the problems confronting it—whether those be economic, social, or political. Study in the United States of America should promote a real understanding of the friendship and trust that we have in you and your compatriots. . . . In close coordination with the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyus, the Department of the Army is responsible for policy, planning and program development. You may be assured that the Department of the Army is aware of its responsibility for you while you are in the United States and deeply interested in your activities. (Ibid., 4)

The message makes it patently clear that, as part of the United Nations trust territories, Okinawans were direct subjects of American policies. They were under the supervision of the land of the free. The rest of the pamphlet is filled with thankful English reports written by Okinawans who had completed the Beiryu program. As expected, there were no negative comments that might have spoiled their imagined relationships. Samples of “Comments of Former Ryukyuan Students” read as follows: Student A: I enjoyed the cheerfulness, kindness, and frankness of the American people very much. And I think I learned more about the way of life from various points of view. I am convinced that Christianity is the backbone of this country. (Ibid., 6) Student B: In my opinion, I feel that international understanding and friendship are the basis on which world peace can be built. Therefore, I think close contact with other peoples and leading to mutual understanding and friendship is the basic aim. . . . I feel that the exchange of the students is the best way to fulfill the aim of the personal exchange programs. Many students acquire a realistic view of America through direct personal contact, but some, I found, have a hard time adjusting to American ways of doing things; with the result that the students get the negative concepts of America. I believe it is important to have some help from the American students. (Ibid., 7) Student C: Among the numerous merits I have had in the United States, I feel the most priceless is earned by actually living as an individual in the

44     Chapter 2

community of the United States. It is the life led by myself as if I were one of the fellow men of America, but not as a foreigner. (Ibid., 8)

The students were thankful to have been given chances to become pure Americanists and raised few questions about US policies during the Cold War period. Many historians have demonstrated that the US created its image as an ideal nation of democracy and freedom to contrast itself to the Soviet Union. Okinawan students experienced such ideals and firmly believed in them. The US continued to develop this self-image a few years after the Korean War ended in 1953 with armistice, and the tensions of the Cold War prevailed over the world. At the end of the pamphlet are a list of US addresses of Ryukyuan ARI students of 1957–1958, a roster of schools, a list of five regional offices of the Institute of International Education (IIE), and a map of the US. My father is listed as the only undergraduate student transferring from the University of the Ryukyus to be relocated to Central Missouri State University at Warrensburg to study “Teaching of English Language and Literature.” My father originally wanted to major in agriculture in order to contribute directly to the development of Okinawa, but his advisers suggested British literature, because it was then considered more central in the study of Anglophone literature than American literature. He agreed to study British literature but remained an Americanist at heart. Strongly influenced by American culture and ideology, he mythologized his future in his own American dream. He wrote an essay titled “America! America!,” which was included in Essays: Golden Gate, published by the GARIOA Fulbright Alumni Association of Okinawa in 1987. The essay was named, with the addition of a second exclamation point, after a poem, “America, America!,” written by Delmore Schwartz in 1954. My father learned it at the orientation held at Mills College, which Okinawan students attended before leaving for their respective destinations across the United States. The poem starts as the speaker declares his optimism toward America after World War II: I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights of above it, the lights, the stars, and the bridges I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic —of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it to new America.

Eijun Senaha     45

Born in Brooklyn in 1913 to Jewish immigrant parents, Schwartz was said to be “preoccupied with the international—and particularly the transatlantic—nature of American identity throughout his life” (Runchman, “Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis”). The Mills College instructor introduced this poem, expecting those Okinawan students to become Schwartz’ transpacific counterparts. My father’s “America! America!” recollects his time in the US across three decades: 1957–1959, 1967–1971, and 1976–1977. Looking back on the United States in the late 1950s when I studied abroad, I think that it was a time of America’s very good old days. Racial discrimination against black people was still carried out in barbershops, restaurants, churches, and so on, but the civil rights movement was moving forward, and three black students were already admitted to the campus. The university was a very good place for education, and both professors and students seemed to respect “a gentleman’s education” as a motto. Every student was properly dressed and had enough manners as a gentleman and a lady. The gentleman’s education was thorough even in dormitory life. Three meals were provided every day, and evening dinner was taken in the large dining hall. Entering in slippers and T-shirts was not permitted. When all students finally arrived at the table on time, the student representative gave thanks to God with a prayer of gratitude. Every day was a continuation of the feast for me, who had been made to eat only bad things from the wartime to postwar, and any nostalgia for Okinawan local dishes was nonexistent before the bounty of delicious American dishes. One of the things that surprised me when I came to America from premodern Okinawa was the custom of “ladies first.” I behaved like a knight as I learned the spirit of chivalry from medieval British literature, and I came to serve a lady properly. America in the 1950s had won World War II, and the boys returned from the battlefield and the girls from the military factory to the workplace and the home, respectively. It was not yet a stable period, and, as a result, conservatism became stronger. I would say that the gentleman’s education was reflected in this atmosphere. In the late 1960s, I was given the opportunity to study in the United States for the second time. I had to then correct the image of

46     Chapter 2

the American university that I had in my mind because the Vietnam War changed student life a lot. That elegant Genteel Tradition that I saw in the 1950s cast no shadow during that time. It was seemingly not able to distinguish between man and woman. The dining hall in the dormitory changed into a cafeteria, and we did not offer any prayers to God. The custom of ladies first was also disappearing. The campus was becoming noisy. However, even on that disturbed campus in the late 1960s, classes were never interrupted and there were no obstructions. The students’ academic freedom and rights were fully respected and guaranteed. Even though various student movements were flourishing, a rigid academic atmosphere was sustained. In the 1970s when I returned for the third time, the campus was returning to calm. There was a tumult in another sense in the country: People were celebrating the 1976 bicentennial of American independence. It was a time of rejoicing for the past and the future. I was fortunate to study abroad in the 1950s, 1960s. and 1970s in the United States. During that time, I was able to witness the political, social, and cultural transitions of the United States with my own eyes. I experienced dormitory life with American students and homestay with an American host family, and I was able to learn American culture in many ways by being in contact with a lot of people. I would like to thank the United States government, the Japanese government, and the University of the Ryukyus for their support and cooperation. (GARIOA, Essays, 154–162; abridged translation mine)

His positive recollections are filled with appreciation for the US and its culture. He does not write about topics that he believed he ought not to discuss in public, such as religion and politics. He once told me that in the 1950s, during a Warrensburg dormitory dinner, a supervisor delivered a speech about the impropriety of discussing said topics. He observes this lesson to this day. However, he was not entirely detached from his family’s legacy. He reflected on his own history, drawing comparisons with British Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), on whom he wrote his dissertation. Wordsworth must have been an appealing character for my father personally: the poet lost his father at a young age, spoke of his romantic love for his homeland in his nature poems, and established himself as Great Britain’s poet laureate (1843–1850) in the Victorian era of the bildungsroman.

Eijun Senaha     47

My father’s life in Okinawa resembles the poet’s in England. He has told me that he chose Wordsworth because the poet’s early childhood environment, surrounded by nature in the Lake District, reminded him of his own country life in Yambaru. Wordsworth was also my father’s role model, as the poet’s social rise made him a strong believer in the Victorian value of success. In fact, Wordsworth was not recognized as a Romantic nature poet when he became a poet laureate and conservative in the Victorian period. During the world wars in the twentieth century, the poet became a masculine symbol of British patriotism. I believe it was my father’s identification with Wordsworth’s traumatic memory of his father’s death more than nostalgia for country nature that drew him to Wordsworth. Just as Wordsworth achieved social success and national recognition, my father, after receiving his degrees, returned to Okinawa and attained academic positions as a university dean and president, and the Japanese government eventually recognized his lifetime achievement with the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight. The title of my father’s dissertation was “Japanese Responses to Wordsworth’s Concept of Nature, 1871–1975.” It was about Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji period, who were influenced by Wordsworthian ideology and contributed to the development of Japan’s literary movement. The poet’s early misfortune and later success was a typical bildungsroman of Victorian England that inspired Meiji men of letters. My father’s dream was to follow Wordsworth and return to Okinawa by making his American dream come true. As he often says, “Tigers leave their hide when they die; men leave their name.”

Okinawan Americanist My upbringing was quite a contrast to my father’s. Though born as the first son and raised under the strong influence of Okinawan experiences as well as American presence like my father, I did not admire America as he did. I did not have any special feeling toward Japan either. When I entered university, I became quite an antagonistic Americanist. Growing up during the period of American counterculture movements and influenced by their revolutionary ideas, I was suspicious of American orthodoxy. Yet America was always with me, just as Okinawa was. I could not help the obsession with the America created within myself. I lived in central Naha and did not know much about what inhumane things the US military and military personnel were doing against Okinawans

48     Chapter 2

in other areas near the US military bases. Instead, I used to hear stories about the horrors that Japanese soldiers inflicted upon Okinawan civilians during the war. America was not my enemy but rather something I fantasized about. When I was young, in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw Americans only a few times a year. When I saw them in restaurants, they were dressed very well. I did not think that the living standards of Okinawans were extremely low, but I knew that the lifestyles of American people on the other side of the military fence were beyond description. When my parents took me to their country home in Yambaru, I could feel nothing but envy as we passed the fenced military bases, which were immensely huge, with runways and military facilities, and had residential areas lined with pretty houses, especially when they were decorated with Christmas lights. It was like seeing Disneyland from the outside. As I grew up, I learned how the American administration and people dominated Okinawans with the Agreement under Article VI of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America. This agreement was concluded in 1960 along with the JapanUS Security Treaty. When I was smaller, I was not mature enough to take this condition in any serious way, for I seldom saw Americans in my neighborhood. Gradually, I learned that some of my friends’ parents worked for the American military and were better off than local workers. I often saw classmates whose fathers were obviously not Okinawans but Americans, and they were raised by single Okinawan mothers. They often became the target of bullying simply because they looked different. Okinawans used US currency, and when I went to Kagoshima to meet my mother’s brother, we obtained passports issued by USCAR. I felt myself foreign in the floating ship from Okinawa to mainland Japan. I myself was adrift and in a daze. It was the time of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), and Okinawa was considered the United States’ strategic keystone of the Pacific. The war not only was under way in Vietnam but also was very much part of life in Okinawa, with the noise of military aircraft and frequent crimes by military personnel victimizing Okinawans. In 1959, during a flight training, a US Air Force jet fighter crashed on Miyanomori Primary School, killing 17 and injuring 121 pupils and citizens. In such a situation, my mother was my hero. She was teaching at a local elementary school and was involved with anti-American movements like many Okinawan teachers. They used to participate in protest demonstrations against US occupation and fought for the reversion to Japan. My

Eijun Senaha     49

mother also took care of everything for the family. It was like a matrilineal family, as my father was absent studying in America. Looking back at it now, despite her activist enthusiasm, I think she really was pursuing at the bottom of her heart a traditional, tranquil family, a family that consists of a legally married couple of a man and a woman, along with children who are officially registered and raised by the parents. My suspicion was confirmed when she confessed in her eighties that her life was opposite to such a “normal” life. She was raised by her single mother living with an elder half brother. Her biological father was a married man in Naha, and her brother’s father was, he assumed, someone from mainland Japan, who temporarily boarded in their village as one of the technical advisers to develop a sericultural industry there. When my uncle told me this, I finally understood why my grandmother hated mainland Japanese so much. My mother and grandmother had good reasons to mention little about their family history. The war changed their lives for the worse and made them more fearful. My mother never mentioned what had happened to her during the war, speaking only of the hardship that she endured while taking care of her mother during air raids as her half brother was sent to an island in the South Pacific. One of the episodes she told me about once was especially horrifying: When she was at home with her mother after the US military landing, American soldiers surrounded her house and started to look inside, obviously searching for something or somebody. She said she instinctively felt it was not a legitimate military mission and screamed for help to her neighbors. I have no way to know what happened to her afterward, but she appeared to have enough reason to hate American soldiers after that incident as much as my grandmother hated Japanese. I believe her participation in protest demonstrations was accelerated not only by her public mission but also by her personal anger against Americans. It is still a mystery, therefore, how my anti-American mother got along with my proAmerican father. That was probably part of an Okinawan way of life. After my father returned home in 1971, a year before Okinawa’s reversion to Japan was accomplished, my mother was starting to put a period to her own personal struggle. Public demonstrations were ending their mission, and she was beginning to enjoy domestic roles more than politics. I imagine she finally obtained “home” in a traditional sense, a place of peace with parents, children, and grandmother living together, which she had long yearned for, since she dreamed of becoming a dressmaker as an innocent girl.

50     Chapter 2

As a teenager, I was on my own. I was not much interested in politics. I only remember that classes were canceled on May 15 of 1972, the day of reversion, which made my friends naively happy. I remember it was raining, and I felt strange, almost fake, when I saw the Japanese yen my father brought from a local bank in exchange for US dollars. Nothing really changed much until 1978 when the so-called 730, meaning July 30, took place: automobiles were now driven on the left side of the road rather than the right. The original direction of headlights was awkwardly adjusted by sealing them with a temporary tape, and many moved their steering wheels from the left to the right side of the car. It was a momentous event, and people went out to witness the moment at midnight. I rode my motorcycle around and enjoyed the frenzy by driving on both the left and right sides of the street. I was a curious observer. Gradually, my father became my new hero. He claimed on every occasion that English was the best gateway to success. As he earned a PhD in English and was teaching at the University of the Ryukyus, his international experiences resulted in his observation of an insular outlook on the islands. Likewise, people in Okinawa, with little idea about mainland Japan, entrusted their future to America, so English was the best tool to realize their dream. Thus, I entered the University of the Ryukyus and majored in English. I took his classes and was especially impressed by his class on British Romanticism. It became the foundation for my graduate studies in the US. My father was replacing my mother as my role model. When I completed the undergraduate program, I went to America and earned an MA and a PhD in English, as my father had. I also received scholarships, as my father had. Although my path may appear to have followed his, I came to a crossroads and gradually swerved from his course. The first opportunity was a one-year full scholarship from the Rotary Foundation for my master’s program. The purpose of Rotary International, founded in Chicago in 1905, was to provide “humanitarian service” as opposed to indebtedness to the US Army, as my father experienced. I became one of the first Okinawan Rotary Scholars representing the OkinawaTokyo District in 1986. District Okinawan clubs had been integrated with Tokyo counterparts in 1974, symbolic of the new relationship between Okinawa and Japan. However, an aftereffect of prior relationship still existed. One of the Okinawan Rotarians gave me a piece of advice before the final interview in Tokyo: “Don’t give them any eccentric answers.” I could not understand what he meant, but he was quite nervous and serious. He

Eijun Senaha     51

continued, “If they ask you, for example, ‘What does patriotism mean to you?,’ just say something orthodox, like ‘It means love for your home country.’ ” Nobody in Tokyo asked me any such questions. I guess there existed a wary tension among Okinawans against mainland Japanese. Then the Okinawa Human Resources Development Foundation provided me with a two-year loan scholarship for a PhD program. Established in 1982, it had a mission similar to that of the GARIOA and Fulbright programs, as it was originally only for Beiryu and was a gateway for Okinawans to succeed. To study abroad with this scholarship was a status symbol that promised a bright future with financial advantage like the US-sponsored education programs. It has since been renamed the Okinawa International Exchange and Human Resources Development Foundation and aims to develop international exchanges with various countries. Unlike the Beiryu, it is not financially dependent on the US and offers more diverse choices for those who want to study abroad. In America, I seemed to give different impressions to those encountered, depending on the way I introduced myself to people of different backgrounds. In general, when I said, “I’m from Japan,” people welcomed me and expressed their admiration for the Japanese economy and technology. Some Chinese and Koreans did not hide their hostility and even ignored me, because of the colonial history that lasted until the end of World War II and whose legacies still remain. When I said I was from the Ryukyus, many Asian friends sympathized with me. They appeared to identify with the hardship that the colonized Ryukyuan people went through under Japanese domination. Surprisingly, quite a few Japanese thought Okinawans were Americans. They thought Okinawans spoke English. When I told older Americans that I was from Okinawa, they fondly talked about their time stationed in Okinawa. They all said it was a good time and that Okinawans were very nice and kind. James Dicky (1923–1997), a past writer in residence at the University of South Carolina known for his novel Deliverance, which was made into a movie in 1972, was also stationed in Okinawa in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He once said, “Lying face up on the aircraft during the break and looking up at the Okinawan blue sky, I felt myself freed from the ruins of the war disasters. The Okinawan blue sky was beautiful and peaceful.” He didn’t mention much about the reality of the Okinawan land and its people and tried to keep positive. I also met many Okinawan “war brides,” women who, by the 1945 War Brides Act, moved to the US to live with the servicemen. This interracial

52     Chapter 2

marriage was legal but was not welcomed by many Americans then. While 50,000 to 100,000 Japanese women took advantage of this exemption act by 1960, so did approximately 400 Okinawan women every year, though there is no official record left. Several studies say that the war brides were despised back in the homeland and in the US. Etsuko Takushi Crissey also records Okinawan GI brides’ ambivalence, saying that “they were more troubled by feelings of guilt than by worries about moving to a foreign country” (Okinawa’s GI Brides, 106). During my time in the US, I thus found myself made of floating, fragmented identities. I learned that I was made of Japanese, Okinawan, Ryukyuan, and American selves. I also learned that my paralyzed identity was entangled with my father’s patriarchal belief. Like my father, I was born as the first son, and my father used to tell me of the importance of the family name. My father’s favorite phrase about tiger hides and men’s names always echoed in my mind. That was probably the very reason I chose English as my major, applied to the Beiryu program, and had no hesitation in choosing to study nineteenth-century British literature. He was my guiding light and my role model for manhood. He was pleased to learn that I was following his academic career, through which I would serve the family and reclaim our name. I did so during my MA program. I studied at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. One of the reasons I chose that university was its location between my father’s alma maters, Central Missouri State University and the University of Kansas. He was happy to know my roommate was from Warrensburg, and some of my father’s advisers still lived in Lawrence. I lived in Kansas City because of the sense of security coming from my father’s connections. It was more an emotional than intellectual choice. I moved to Columbia, South Carolina, to pursue a doctorate at the University of South Carolina. During the coursework, I still followed my father’s wish in a general sense. However, as my interest grew toward social minorities, I changed. I took courses on Romantic women writers and poetesses, and on novels and prose about working-class people. Nineteenthcentury Britain was not like what my father explained to me in the classroom at the University of the Ryukyus. American professors were not much interested in mainstream literature but were finding new historical perspectives of marginalized people. William Wordsworth, who romanticized his early childhood in a revolutionary way and turned into a conservative as a national icon in his later life, did not appeal to me at all. I was

Eijun Senaha     53

going the opposite way from my father and was concerned with the misfortune of women rather than the fortune of men. I wrote my dissertation about the real, non-romantic lives of women who suffered from patriarchy, like birds in cages, and tried to free themselves but in vain. My interests were now directed to class, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual minorities. This was the beginning of my stepping out of my father’s shadow. America, however, continued to haunt me. After I taught at my alma mater for a year, I found a position at Hokkaido University. Its origin goes back to the Sapporo Agricultural College founded in 1876 as the first degree-granting university in Japan. It is also known for William S. Clark’s farewell words “Boys, be ambitious,” spoken as he was leaving Japan. Clark, who had been appointed as the third president of Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1867, had later been invited to serve as Sapporo Agricultural College’s vice president (foreign adviser). Hokkaido University was also one of the Seven Imperial Universities before World War II. The university represents not only Japan’s colonialist history but also an American presence and a Victorian value of masculinity. When I received an offer from the university, my father was much more content than I because of its name and history. My professional career looked unexpectedly fulfilling to my father. People, especially the academicians at literary conferences, say, “Like father, like son,” praising us for both being professors of nineteenth-century British literature. My father simply looks grateful for the compliments, while I feel reluctant to admit them. *** Homeland, family, and masculinity: these are intricately woven threads of my life story. So is America. The more I think about America, the more I feel numbness, sometimes pain, and other times yearning for America. It is a feeling mixed of hope and despair, or resignation, that makes me a carrier of American paralysis. Anyone who knows the word “America” can become an Americanist. It is a performative beacon that makes you feel as if your dream can come true. Delmore Schwartz, a descendant of the Old World, gave words to such feeling in his “America, America!” In “L’Envoi” (1925), Ernest Hemingway wrote about the confined King George II of Greece, concluding that “like all Greeks he wanted to go to America” (181). The king was an Americanist like other Hemingway characters who idealized America, only to be disappointed.

54     Chapter 2

So were the Japanese, Ryukyuans, and Okinawans. Shin-ichi Hoshi (1926–1997), a sci-fi short story writer, published Meiji, Father, and America in 1975. It is a biography of Hoshi’s father, Hajime Hoshi (1873–1951), who, strongly influenced by Victorianism, graduated from Columbia University and became an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry and then a politician. One of his favorite books was Self-Help (1859), by Scottish author Samuel Smiles (1812–1904). The book has been called “the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism” and advocated the virtue of self-help in the time of survival of the fittest. When Hajime ran for public office, he delivered speeches based on his sense of justice as inspired by Smiles during his stay in America. He lost the election, but his son Shin-ichi was proud. Unlike his popular stories, this biography is filled with serious as well as nostalgic tones. It is a book about a Japanese Americanist written by his son in memory of his beloved father. When I was in high school, my father was studying Samuel Smiles and asked me if I had read Meiji, Father, and America. I said yes and suggested that he read it, because, in a sense, it was my father’s story, as someone who tried to contribute to his homeland and family and fulfill his manhood. One does not choose to be an Americanist but becomes an Americanist. Those who are in love with America or haunted by its presence are in essence Americanists. Whether one is part of the mainstream or marginalized, one cannot escape being an Americanist as long as we live in this world where America is omnipresent. It is not simply a matter of the choice of an academic field either. I believe that an ontological commitment, both conscious and unconscious, makes one an Americanist who becomes a transnational router of “Americannesses.” In my case, I am admittedly constrained by America. Recently, however, I find my obsession has been made of my own history with my homeland, family, and masculinity, as well as resistance to all these intrinsic properties. This causes American paralysis, which does not appear to disappear. I am also, in Mari Yoshihara’s words, an unpredictable agent.

Works Cited Crissey, Etsuko Takushi. Okinawa’s GI Brides: Their Lives in America. Translated by Steve Rabson. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. GARIOA Fulbright Alumni Association of Okinawa. Essays: Golden Gate. Naha: Hirugi, 1987. Hemingway, Ernest. “L’Envoi,” In Our Time. 1925. In The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Scribner, 1987.

Eijun Senaha     55

Hoshi, Shin-ichi. Meiji, Father, and America [Meiji, Chichi, Amerika]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1975. Runchman, Alex. “Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘International Consciousness.’ ” IJAS Online, no. 2 (2010). https://www.jstor.org /stable/26234259. Schwartz, Delmore. “America, America!” In Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz. 1954. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1989. US Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of the Civil Affairs and Military Government. Welcome to Students from the Ryukyus. Pamphlet. Washington, DC, 1957.

CHAPTER THREE

On Becoming an Okinawan and a Feminist My Path to an Americanist Career

Ikue Kina

In October 1995, I was in Pennsylvania as a PhD candidate in English at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), having completed coursework and getting myself ready for a qualifying exam. I had written my MA thesis on Emily Dickinson and extended my interest to US women’s literature and feminist theories in the PhD program. By the time I completed my coursework, I determined my broad focus to be on US women’s literature, especially literature and feminist theories by and about women of color. As I developed my expertise in American literature and critical theories, I thought more often about what it means to be an Okinawan and a woman. Literary trends in the 1990s that gave rise to the voices of US women of color, as well as theories on postmodernism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism, all contributed to my choice of dissertation topic on Native North American women’s storytelling, which eventually led me to theorizing a symbiotic relationship between America and Okinawa. The year 1995 was a turning point for me not only as an academic but also as an Okinawan and a feminist. In 1995, I was studying for the qualifying exam with my classmates who were also taking the exam. One morning, an Ethiopian classmate who had immigrated to the US in the 1970s asked me if I knew the details of the incident that had happened in Okinawa a few days before. He knew I was from Okinawa. The news caught his attention perhaps because he as a Chinua Achebe scholar was more politically alert to Okinawa’s colonial situation than I was; or he 56

Ikue Kina     57

was just looking for another evidence for criticizing US imperialism and white supremacy. The news he brought me was horrifying: a twelve-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl was abducted and gang-raped by three US military servicemen. He also told me that the incident had led to eighty-five thousand enraged local Okinawans mounting an intense protest against the US military and the Japanese government that allowed the US to build what seemed to be permanent stations on its land. Born in Okinawa, I grew up constantly feeling the shadow of the US military in my life even though I was raised in the capital city, where direct contact with the US military was almost absent. The incident in 1995, however, affected me so much that I couldn’t see it as just another reason for an antimilitary rally, which I had been so familiar with since my childhood through media coverage. For the first time in my life, I deeply despised the fact that Japan was hosting the US military on my home island. It was also the moment I realized what it meant to have my home under colonization. My graduate education certainly contributed to theorizing what US military presence meant to my life as an Okinawan. IUP was a state university in a small town called Indiana, located in western Pennsylvania about a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh. When I started the MA program in 1991, the graduate English program at IUP was trying to expand student enrollment by accepting a larger number of international students. Therefore, my classmates were not only multiethnic American students from different states but also international students from such countries as China, Taiwan, Korea, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. The international, multiracial, and multiethnic environment fostered by the admission policy embodied US multiculturalism in the 1990s and enabled me to encounter many students from different cultural backgrounds. As a small program with enrollment of about forty graduate students, the IUP literature program had an atmosphere in which all of us were welcome to speak out in classes and no one was made to feel marginalized or left out. After hearing about the incident in Okinawa from my Ethiopian friend, I hurriedly shared the terrifying news with another classmate from Puerto Rico. I was sure he would be able to understand my fury, as we were learning about our homelands from each other and sharing the predicaments of having our home islands militarized by the US. I expressed my anger against the governments of the US and Japan, explaining to him how they had been taking full control over Okinawa and depriving indigenous

58     Chapter 3

Okinawans of their rights of self-determination. I also told him how Okinawa’s history of militarization was simultaneously a misogynist history with a series of sexual assaults committed by US servicemen against local Okinawan women. Since the end of World War II, for twenty-seven years under US rule until 1972, Okinawa had witnessed the sexual assault and murder of many women, whose bodies had been dumped on the streets, in ditches, and amid dark green subtropical bushes. I kept telling him how this victimization of a twelve-year-old girl was an epitome of all the sexual violence that Okinawa had suffered throughout our colonial history and how I felt challenged as a woman from Okinawa. When I finally finished my long lecture, he, who had been listening to me silently yet attentively, asked me calmly: “So how is the girl doing now?” Today I still remember the tone of his voice and my embarrassment. I was embarrassed because his question made me realize there was something missing in my enraged speech. I think my friend saw that my story lacked compassion for the girl. My story, or political agitation, may have even marginalized the rape victim. It took me at least ten years to digest my embarrassment, which has continued to affect my thoughts as an academic to this day. His question became a turning point, reassuring me of my commitment to the local Okinawan community, especially as an Okinawan woman academic engaged in research on US culture and literature. In addition to my friends from my Pennsylvania years, countless people I encountered in Okinawa and in the US forged my ethical, political, and professional awareness. The process of my becoming an Americanist has been synonymous with the shaping of my personhood as an Okinawan and a feminist.

Growing up in US-Occupied Okinawa I was born in Okinawa in the 1960s, when Okinawa was still under US rule. My memory about the US presence in Okinawa is, however, vague and fragmented. At the time of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, I lived in Naha, where contact with the US military personnel was limited. Still, I remember running to a nearby candy store with US coins in my pocket. I also remember people driving on the right side of the road until the driving lane was changed to the left in 1978 to follow the Japanese traffic law. If I had lived in the “base towns” in the central part of the island, where local people shared physical and psychological spaces with Americans in their everyday life, I would have paid more attention to American

Ikue Kina     59

people, US military bases, and the reason for their presence in Okinawa. However, growing up in Naha, I had had the least interest in them. To me, the guarded entrance gates to the military bases surrounded by fences, the colorful English neon signs, and American passersby that signaled you were moving through the base towns were remembered only as a nostalgic landscape. I would watch them going by through the window of a station wagon my father drove as he took my brother, cousins, and me up to the northern part of the island to spend a summer holiday on the beach. The US military existed in my life only as a backdrop and never came to the foreground in my memory. Nevertheless, those impressions stayed at the edge of my memory and never went away completely. The US overshadowed my father’s life as well. He was a mechanic working on one of the US bases in the central part of Okinawa until he left the job to marry my mother and started his own business selling and repairing electric appliances. He was a taciturn man and did not tell us much about himself and his life. He died of lung cancer when I was twenty-one. He would help me with junior high school English grammar, but I did not know why he was so knowledgeable about it. I also did not know where he got a used English typewriter when I told him I needed it in college, and why he was good at typing in English. These small mysteries were solved when a middle-aged Filipino man showed up at my father’s funeral and told us that he used to be my father’s coworker on the base, that my father stood up for him when he was bullied by other coworkers, and that the last time he saw my father was when he gave my father a used typewriter. As a child, the US mostly remained a silent Other in my mind because I had no means of communicating with it. It was either a nostalgic landscape or part of my memory of my father. The US was both familiar and mysterious to me. The idea of studying the US never dawned on me in those days, but the US was no longer the silent Other as I gradually acquired English-language skills.

Americanized and Indigenized at the University of the Ryukyus I earned a BA in English at the University of the Ryukyus (Ryu-dai), a national university in Okinawa. Ryu-dai was founded in 1950 as a land-grant university with an Americanized curriculum created through guidance of the faculty members sent from Michigan State University (MSU). Majoring in English had not been my first choice as a high school student. I was going to become a Chinese calligraphy artist because calligraphy was one of

60     Chapter 3

the few things I thought I was good at. I, however, decided to follow my “life plan” of a teenager and study English first. I believed that language learning should be done in college when my brain was young, whereas I would be still able to practice calligraphy when I get to retirement age. I chose to go to Ryu-dai not only because my family couldn’t afford to send me to the universities outside Okinawa but also because I heard that all the professors in the English Department at Ryu-dai had earned their degrees in the US, which was unusual in Japan. Most senior professors at Ryu-dai, even those from research fields other than English or linguistics, studied in the US as grantees of American scholarships—for example, the one through GARIOA (Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas) between 1949 and 1952 or a scholarship through the Fulbright and other programs that were sponsored by the US after 1953. Many of the literature professors I met at Ryu-dai were products of US colonization, so to speak, yet they had transformed their position from colonized subjects to cultural agents. The classes of these US-educated professors were demanding, adopting the teaching methods they experienced in the US. They used the same textbooks that were studied in US universities; for example, the Norton Anthology volumes were used for the year-long sophomore literature survey courses. My classmates excelled in the classes because many of them were already very fluent in English. Part of me regretted my rather spontaneous choice to major in English. I was about to give up, but one professor encouraged me to keep on working. He told me that he had worked as a bartender at a restaurant on the military base in order to practice English and eventually won the scholarship that enabled him to receive higher education in the US. I changed my attitude after a while and decided to follow the excellent examples of my professors and began to focus on improving my English. As a sophomore, I decided to spend a month in Hawai‘i to practice English. The travel was a gift from my grandmother. She had saved a humble amount of money every month since I was born so that she could buy me a coming-of-age-day kimono. It had been her dream to dress me in a beautiful, custom-made kimono. However, when the day came, her spoiled granddaughter refused to wear a kimono and, instead, wanted to buy a ticket to Hawai‘i. For me, choosing an air ticket to fly out of Japan over dressing myself in kimono was my way to practice the idea that I’d read about in The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, or in the books by

Ikue Kina     61

Japanese feminists who had introduced “feminist studies” in Japanese academia. My feminist challenge was not against my grandmother but against masculine Okinawan and Japanese society that never allowed women from my grandmother’s generation to be free. I am sure my grandmother was very disappointed about my sudden rebellion, but she eventually accepted my request in the hope that the money would serve my education and happiness. Hawai‘i made my first experience of American culture different from what I had expected. My host, Rose Chang, was an immigrant Chinese who had an American-born son and a Hawaiian daughter-in-law. Mrs. Chang lived in Kailua and her son and his family lived in Kaneohe. I asked myself what kind of “authenticity” I was looking for by coming to Hawai‘i. The place-names did not sound like English names and the people looked different and spoke with different accents. I was wondering whether Hawai‘i was really a state of the US. I eventually lost touch with the Chang family, but the one-month experience in Hawai‘i was the first time for me to question who an “American” is and what it means to be “Americanized.” The college education at Ryu-dai not only Americanized but also indigenized me, helping me become aware of my cultural and intellectual heritage. The core English curriculum at Ryu-dai consisted of linguistics and literature, and for the first two years in college I wished to go to graduate school to study linguistics. A linguistics professor took us to do field research in the northern part of Okinawa Island, where older people still spoke the indigenous Okinawan language, and we learned how to collect data from their discourses. I gradually realized that the language my grandparents spoke every day was dying and that scholars believed it should be preserved. The experience of studying my own language and colonialism as an undergraduate helped my graduate studies of Native American writers’ struggles to tell their stories between two languages: their indigenous language and the language of the colonizers. As a junior, I realized literature had more answers than linguistics to the questions I had about colonialism and the declining indigenous languages. It did not take me long to choose to study literature written in English after taking literature courses at Ryu-dai, such as Professor Eiki Senaha’s British Romantic Poetry, the lectures on W. B. Yeats by Professor Okifumi Komesu, and American Poetry taught by Professor Katsunori Yamazato. Their lectures were compelling to the minds of young Okinawan

62     Chapter 3

students who aspired to leave the small island to work in a larger global society because they not only imparted their knowledge of Western culture but also demonstrated what it meant to them as scholars from Okinawa. Professor Senaha, for instance, taught us that Tumai Ahkah, a popular Ryukyuan (Okinawan) opera first staged in 1910, could be considered an Okinawan version of Romeo and Juliet, pointing out the universal elements in both stories: a tragic ending of the lovers, whose families were in a hostile relationship. Professor Komesu, on the other hand, would criticize an easy comparison between Ireland and Okinawa, though Ireland and Okinawa shared a similar political and cultural marginality in their relationship with a larger state power: Ireland with Great Britain and Okinawa with Japan. Professor Yamazato’s lectures on Gary Snyder and American poets also helped us understand how place shapes our identity. While he taught us a postmodern ecocritical perspective that countered such modernist ideologies as Eurocentrism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, monoculturalism, and anthropocentrism, he underscored the significance of contemplating our relationship with home and its natural environment. Teaching American poetry as an expression of a sense of place and selfhood, he reminded us that our ultimate purpose in studying American literature was to find out who we were through exploring who Americans were. These professors’ classes made me think of my identity as an Okinawan. Before taking their classes, I had not questioned my identity. I had believed I was Japanese because I had a Japanese passport. Their lectures, however, destabilized that fixed idea. They helped me question nationality as a representation of one’s cultural identity. Becoming more self-conscious about my identity as a woman and an Okinawan, I became interested in the lives of other women, such as women in the US. I wanted to know, for instance, how their literature expressed their resistance against masculine ideology in US society and how they were different from Okinawan women. Thus, I decided to fly from Okinawa to the US again.

As an Exchange Student at MSU In the 1980s, Japan was in an economic bubble. An increasing number of Japanese business personnel were assigned to oversea branches, often accompanied by their families. The national project of internationalization was primarily conceived to respond to the global market economy, and the Japanese Ministry of Education encouraged Japanese youths to study abroad. Some of my English-major classmates at Ryu-dai were studying to

Ikue Kina     63

become Japanese-language teachers to the foreign students in Japan or to teach Japanese overseas. Others were studying hard to win the ministry’s ten-month scholarship to study at MSU. I was lucky to receive that scholarship and left Okinawa in August 1989. The passengers on the Northwest Airlines flight, then operated from Okinawa via Osaka to Detroit, were mostly US military service personnel and their families. The vast campus of MSU, located in East Lansing, Michigan, was exactly as Professor Komesu, a graduate of MSU’s PhD English program, had described it to me. The campus boasted the beautiful Red Cedar River flowing through it, along with the colorful autumn leaves all over the campus, which were absolutely fascinating to the eyes of someone from a hot and humid subtropical island. In Michigan, the sun shining on the red and yellow leaves was soft, unlike the scorching sun in Okinawa, and the breeze that made the leaves fall and dance felt much cooler. It was also the first time for me to see falling snow, walk on the snowy ground, and feel my cheeks melting as soon as I entered an overheated building. I would walk back to the dormitory with other students after an evening class. The snow that covered the ground we were walking on was enchanting, especially under moonlight. It snowed heavily in Michigan during the winter, but the cold, crisp, and bracing air felt good to me, as I was so used to warm, relaxing subtropical weather in Okinawa. The intense atmosphere in Michigan and time constraints urged me to work harder. I would stay up late at the study lounge in Landon Hall, the dormitory for undergraduate students. The assignments were so overwhelming that I would spend a lot of time during weekdays down in the basement fighting off sleepiness by drinking soda that was said to have more caffeine than coffee. Among the six courses I took in two semesters, two courses—Survey of American Literature, and Research Writing— made the most lasting impression on me because these courses helped my understanding of the American way of “diversity and inclusion” both as a theory and a practice. The survey course met for fifty minutes four times a week: lecture on Monday through Wednesday and discussion with a teaching assistant (TA) on Thursday. I remember this particular course, not only because the level of the lecture was much more advanced even though it used the same textbook we used in Okinawa, but also because I found it interesting that the course was divided into four or five discussion sessions taught by TAs on the fourth day every week. I signed up for the session with a female TA

64     Chapter 3

because I was interested in women’s literature. Women’s literature did not yet seem to be a legitimate research field in British and American literature in Japan in the 1980s, and we had no female professor of literature at Ryudai. I was curious about how women would teach literature. When I saw a TA, a woman, came into the classroom in a wheelchair, I was struck and wondered if Japan or Okinawa would create an opportunity like this for young women, let alone for people with disabilities. I also learned how American society was trying to address the issue of “diversity” in the Research Writing course, taught by a TA working on his degree in education. We wrote essays and journals based on assigned readings of two textbooks that took very different positions about education in the US: E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988) and Multi-Cultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind (1988), edited by Rick Simonson and Scott Walker. These textbooks introduced me to the term “multiculturalism.” While both books proposed education that builds common knowledge for all Americans, Simonson and Walker criticized Hirsch’s idea of “common knowledge” for being whitecentric. Simonson and Walker’s criticism signaled that the US went through a cultural transition, which was linked to the country’s fear of losing its superiority in the global economy. During the time I was at MSU, because of so-called Japan-bashing, Japanese-made automobiles on the streets of Detroit were burned. Bashing suggested that the US regarded Japan as an economic threat as Japanese products were gradually taking over the American market and created a trade deficit between the two countries. While the US was under threat of Japan in an international and economic context, white supremacy in the US was also being shaken in the domestic and political context. The 1991 incident of police brutality against Rodney King, an African American, indicated increasing racial conflicts or so-called culture wars, which, along with an economic recession, made US society less stable and more violent. The growing fear and insecurity of the US as a nation and of its socially dominant groups might have meant that the power of the dominated was increasing. Though I understood that anger demonstrated by racially underprivileged groups against white supremacy was a positive way to demand justice, coming from the island where people prioritize peace above all else, I personally found it difficult to see anger as a productive force. My refusal to express anger might have been a reflection of my lack of confidence. I unintentionally embodied the stereotype of shy, pleasant,

Ikue Kina     65

easy-to-get-along-with, and dependent Asian women, though I was always outspoken and known as a tough girl in Okinawa. Throughout my graduate years, I struggled to break the stereotype imposed on me. It took me a while to finally feel comfortable being myself in the US, and I would not have been able to reach that stage without my encounters with women who became my role models.

Encountering Women Role Models in the US In May 1991, I came back to Okinawa from my ten-month study at MSU. I taught English part-time in a high school for a while and gained a chance to come back to the US again as Okinawa Prefecture’s scholarship student. I researched the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and found Dr. Karen Dandurand, an Emily Dickinson scholar, on its faculty. She was recognized for her discovery of four additional poems by Dickinson that were published during the poet’s lifetime. Learning that the program had a Dickinson specialist, I decided to apply for IUP. My Pennsylvania years were crucial for my developing a sense of independence, freedom, and responsibility. My growth was guided by women I encountered during this time and who became my role models. Dr. Dandurand, who later directed my MA thesis on Emily Dickinson, was my mentor and academic role model. I first met her when I visited her in her office to ask about the state of Dickinson criticism, because I was assigned to write an essay on a critical history of Dickinson. Dr. Dandurand was taller and bigger than I expected, but she put her hair up just like women in Dickinson’s days. She looked like a big Emily Dickinson in a sweatshirt and jeans. I explained to her what I was assigned to write in that particular course; I also told her that I wanted to write papers on women’s literature in the future but did not know how to go about it. She listened to me, nodding in assent and occasionally throwing in a loud “uh-huh,” and added: “Any paper could be feminist as long as it addresses the works by woman authors.” She was also known as one of the founding editors of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, which specialized in American women writers from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Besides criticisms and book reviews, the journal also reprinted stories and poems that were originally published during those periods. The journal was contributing to reconstructing the history of American women’s writing. Dr. Dandurand neither criticized nor made moral judgments on women from the period. In

66     Chapter 3

fact, she would support any women from any period, because she respected women and valued their connections with each other. I understood that women’s community or collectivity could counter modern ideology built on patriarchy, hierarchy, and competition. I found it might be a way to resist male dominance without expressing anger and hatred. For about two years starting in 1995, I worked for Dr. Dandurand as her graduate assistant and an editorial assistant of the journal. People working at the department office, where I was also working, would make fun of me because I was the only one who used an old typewriter to prepare letters and envelopes for Dr. Dandurand. Though email was a prevailing means of correspondence in the US in the mid-1990s, my boss refused to use that technology because she did not trust it. In the same way, she would tell me to go to serials shelves in libraries rather than to databases on computers because, according to her, the machine does not always have complete information. I would go through every single issue on the serials shelves to collect titles of new articles and books about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women authors. I soon realized that she was often correct and that she had discovered Dickinson’s unpublished poems in the massive piles of archival documents that had been left unattended at the Houghton Library at Harvard. My American classmates would complain about her nit-picking and anachronism in her teaching of bibliographic methods, but those qualities were what I admired about her and made her my academic role model. I had another role model who also acted like a Victorian woman. Mrs. Beatrice Houck was my landlady of German descent living in an old Victorian-style house in which I rented a room. When I visited the house for the first time, a woman who looked to be in her seventies answered the door. I told her that I had come to see the room for rent. She said, “Hold on. I’ll call my mother.” I was confused because I thought she must have been the “old landlady” that I heard about from my friend who referred me to the place. It turned out that the lady who answered the door was the landlady’s daughter who lived in Virginia and happened to be visiting her mother, and that the landlady, Mrs. Houck, was in her nineties. I was amazed that she lived all by herself at that age. In Okinawa, her family would have been considered unkind because people in their eighties and above were expected to live with their children. Mrs. Houck had lived alone ever since she lost her husband when she was in her forties. Her daughter from Virginia seldom came up to Pennsylvania to check on her. When Mrs. Houck had difficulty going upstairs, she gave up two of the

Ikue Kina     67

three bedrooms upstairs for rent to female college students like me, but Mrs. Houck never moved to Virginia to live with her daughter. As I lived with her, I gradually understood why she did not have to live with her daughter. She was actually not alone; every morning, her church friend in the neighborhood came to check on her; the family next door ran errands and did chores for her, such as mowing the lawn and checking the furnace. She also had someone come twice a year for housecleaning. She was perfectly capable of managing herself and her space. She was also socially active. One morning, she was unusually busy baking ginger cookies and I asked her if she was having guests. She answered, “Boys will come visit me this afternoon.” When I came back from the library that afternoon, I found three “boys” in their seventies or eighties sitting around the table in the living room and playing bridge with her. Mrs. Houck was open and fun to talk to. She had never been overseas, but she was always interested in my stories about Japan and Okinawa. Mrs. Houck and I helped each other and enjoyed each other’s company like good friends. Since I was so used to the Japanese and Okinawan attitude about seniority, I had to adjust my attitude toward Mrs. Houck, who wanted, not hierarchy, but mutual respect in our relationship. Living with her, I also had to revise my understanding of American individualism. It may have been individualism that enabled her choice to be independent, but her independence—and freedom—was also supported by nonfamilial communities such as the church and the neighborhood. I learned that the US had its own form of community. However, the most important thing I learned from her was that one must be mature and confident in order to trust and accommodate others and form intimacy with them. Another role model I encountered during my years in Pennsylvania was an Okinawan woman, my relative who happened to live near Pittsburgh, a two-hour drive from IUP. Misako Smith, or Aunt Misako, was a distant relative on my mother’s side. She was from Ishigaki Island in Okinawa and moved to Pennsylvania after she married a Polish American soldier who was stationed in Okinawa. Aunt Misako invited me to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year with the Smith family. She was not only a smart housewife and a great cook but also a wonderful storyteller. Misako told me about her life before and after she moved to the US. As she was a seamstress when she met her husband, John, in Okinawa, she got a job in a sewing factory after they moved to the US, worked very hard to buy a house, and also studied English by watching TV. With her

68     Chapter 3

positive outlook and competitive character, she eventually achieved her goals: a house and an excellent command of English. She was so proud of the daughter she gave birth to at the age of forty-two and paid all her attention to her education. Her daughter was chosen to be valedictorian of her high school, which made Aunt Misako very proud. When Aunt Misako met John in Okinawa, she already had a son from her previous marriage. John was a customer at a tailor’s shop where she was working as a seamstress. It did not take long for John to fall in love with her, a friendly and witty Okinawan lady about seven years his senior. In Okinawa during the 1960s, the suits custom-made by skillful Okinawan or Japanese seamstresses were popular souvenirs for the US soldiers. Knowing that she had a young son, he bought her a futon set to keep him warm and would buy other things that the son would like. After John was sent to Vietnam, he would send his entire salary to her every month, and Misako saved all of it without spending a cent until he came back to Okinawa. But she told me jokingly, “I married him only because he promised he would buy me a big diamond ring.” They left Okinawa in the early 1970s and started a family in West Virginia, where her son was bullied at school. Enraged, Misako would storm over to the house of the bully. She told me that she was so furious that she did not mind pouring out all her words in Japanese. She could not speak a word of English then and determined to learn English so that she could protect her son. By the time Aunt Misako turned seventy, she had survived three surgeries, for breast cancer, heart disease, and spinal caries. She stayed calm and strong each time, even when she lost her son in his forties. Aunt Misako’s chronicle in the US provoked my imagination about how she survived in US society as an Okinawan woman, especially as she had not even completed secondary education. On the border between Okinawa and the US, and perhaps being treated as nobodies in both societies, Aunt Misako, like other Okinawan women in the US, had struggled to maintain her dignity, protect her family, and make others happy. Her life and experience made more sense to me as I studied women-ofcolor feminists, such as Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, Native American theorist Paula Gunn Allen, and Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. Their discourses taught me how women of color empowered themselves in women’s communities by reconnecting with the land and recuperating their sense of self-worth. I felt that such Okinawan women embodied the womanhood for which women-of-color feminists urged others to pay more

Ikue Kina     69

respect. Encountering these women shaped my resolve as a feminist academic to connect women with different experiences and make their lives and existence more visible. The encounters made me more conscious about standing amidst different kinds of knowledge and values—namely, developing my border consciousness that challenges the binary thinking that separates academia from non-academia, practice from theory, and texts from authors.

Feminism with Border Consciousness I came back to Okinawa in April 1996. While still working on my dissertation on Native North American women’s literature, I began teaching the English language and American literature to Ryu-dai students as a fulltime instructor. It was the year after the rape of a schoolgirl by US servicemen, and a smolder of anger was still very present in the Okinawan community. The protest under the leadership of Governor Masahide Ota was directed against not only the US military but also the Japanese government. Governor Ota was a survivor of the Battle of Okinawa, the ground battle that sacrificed two hundred thousand lives on the island, and the experience made him a radical leader devoting his life to demilitarizing Okinawa. I noticed that the currents of multiculturalism and postcolonialism had reached Okinawa as indigeneity gave a new logic to Okinawa’s attempt at demilitarization. I, too, began contributing opinion pieces to the local magazines and newspapers, articulating how militarization had victimized the women in Okinawa. I also hoped to illuminate the conscious and unconscious bias against women in Okinawa. The conditions in Okinawa reminded me of “borderlands,” a critical frame that Gloria Anzaldúa reconceptualized in her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera. In Borderlands, the term “borderlands” primarily refers to the US-Mexican border and connotes a battlefront where a number of Mexican, South American, and Mexican American women are exploited, assaulted, and killed every day. I found Okinawa under US military rule and cultural colonization shared “borderness” with the US-Mexican border. What did the women on the border feel when they were abducted, raped, and killed, having no one to hear or see them? Anzaldúa’s depiction of borderlands spurred my imagination about the terror, sadness, and anger of the victims and reminded me of my Puerto Rican friend’s question, “So how is the girl doing now?,” when he heard about the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl.

70     Chapter 3

At that time, I had no one who understood me. I had no friend in Okinawa with whom I could share my feminist thoughts until I met an Okinawan writer, Tami Sakiyama, in 2003. Sakiyama was one of a very few published Okinawan woman writers, and she had been nominated twice for the Akutagawa Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Japan. She was self-conscious about what it meant to speak as a writer and an Okinawan woman. She was also very careful not to allow critics and editors to orientalize her works as “written by an Okinawa writer.” She despised literary critics—not necessarily critics of her work—who analyzed the literature with buzzword critical theories. She would sometimes tell me that my language revealed a lack of thoughtfulness and imagination for others. Her mind was always with the least privileged people in society, as her novels tell stories about women who were marginalized in the Okinawan community and whose existence was largely invisible. Sakiyama, who chose to remain on the margins of Japan’s literary circle, often said to me, “Kina-san, you must be aware how much power and privilege you have in the Okinawan community.” She warned me that people with privilege were often blind to their own privilege and insensitive to the pain of those without the same privilege. She encouraged me to extend my imagination to marginalized, invisible women in Okinawa and other places in the world, just as Anzaldúa addressed concerns about the women on the borderlands. She pushed me not only to “analyze” and “explain” the pain of the raped schoolgirl but also to “feel” the pain she had to go through. In Sakiyama’s mind, women who are given no name are equally important as other women. While “borderlands” envisions vulnerability in the marginalized space, it also represents critical strength in its embrace of ambiguity and difference. Anzaldúa’s thoughts also confirmed what I had been speculating: that a double consciousness, or a sense of in-betweenness, frees us from binary oppositions and generalization. The residents of “borderlands” are “illegitimate” and invisible people, and the knowledge of them had not been legitimized in academia. Multiculturalism, as soon as it is institutionalized in academia, excludes stories of the people who do not belong to any categories or who belong to multiple categories at the same time. Inspired by Sakiyama, I became clear in my professional goal and my commitment to the future of the Okinawan community. I needed to develop a practice that does not analyze or label people and their experiences and to move beyond the binary thinking intrinsic to modern ideology. My answer was being a

Ikue Kina     71

feminist Okinawan Americanist. Embracing diversity, the feminist thoughts I learned in the US could contribute to my academic practice to create a more vital community than the community that US military and colonialism continue to destroy.

The Path Continuing In April 2016, a young Okinawan woman was brutally raped and murdered by a former US military serviceman who had retired from the military and continued to work on base as a civilian after he married an Okinawan woman and had a child. The victim’s body was found in the woods in the northeastern part of the island three weeks after April 28, the day she was last seen walking on the road. The area where the rapist abandoned the corpse was well known to him because of its proximity to the US military drill range, while the local residents seldom set foot in that area. According to unpublished information given by a local journalist, the corpse was already decomposing from exposure to the hot and humid air of the Okinawan summer, bit off in part by wild animals, while it was left undiscovered for three weeks. The journalist also told me that the damages on the body indicated that the rapist probably had a strong hatred of women. Why did the criminal want to destroy her? The sadness I used to have for this recurrent question has been transformed to anger. I am angry. Seventy years after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan, US military bases are still in Okinawa, patriarchy is still pervasive in Okinawan indigenous tradition, and misogyny perpetuates male violence in Okinawan society. I do not know where to end my story because I do not know when my struggle will end. The story had already begun a long time before my birth, with the story of my grandmother who was born in 1913 and was not even able to complete elementary school because of penury, and with the story of my mother, who survived the bombardment in the Battle of Okinawa. My story is a piece of hundreds and thousands of stories of Okinawan women historically accumulated on this island. I would never have had to go through this struggle if the US had not been a colonial and military power in Okinawa. However, it is also true that I would never have known how to get angry or how to fight if I had not gained knowledge and experience in the US, where I encountered a coalitional network of women across borders of difference.

CHAPTER FOUR

Learning “America” from the Mennonites Yujin Yaguchi

To me, “America” means American missionaries and their children, as well as their religion and language. My childhood is a tapestry of all kinds of colorful activities at the Mennonite church in Hokkaido—weekly Sunday services, Sunday schools, Bible study, Easter and Christmas services, summer church camps, and winter ski trips with church members. There are always American missionaries at these events. I am close friends with their children: Amy, Jon, Michael, Mark, Christal, Jay. We attend Sunday schools together and escape the long and tedious sermon, often playing outside. Some of the children live near our house and I play with them almost every day, visiting their house for long hours. We speak to each other in Japanese. But I am aware that they also speak a different language—English—and they come from a different country, the United States. They switch to English when talking to their parents and occasionally go back to the United States on their parents’ furloughs. When they graduate from the local elementary school, they invariably proceed to “American School” rather than attending a Japanese junior high school. They never stay in Japan after finishing secondary school. Instead, they all return to the United States to go to a Mennonite college. I know all of this by age ten. To me, these Mennonite missionaries and their families are America. What they do, what they speak, and what they eat are America. I am fascinated with the colorful board and card games like Life and Uno that my missionary children friends have. I like Twister. I am convinced that Americans have better games. I also like what they eat. The missionaries have an oven in their house, and I love the home-baked cakes with thick icing, 75

76     Chapter 4

cinnamon rolls, and chocolate chip cookies. My mother also starts making cookies, using recipes she got from the missionary wives, and I am very happy. I think Americans have the best sweets. I also enjoy mashed potatoes and applesauce, so mother starts making them for me at home. To me, the English language is also America. It is the language my American friends speak with their family. It is also the language my father, who studied in the United States before I was born, uses when speaking to his American friends.

Summer 1976 (I) It is my first time in the United States. My father is going to study American poetry at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo for nine months, and my mother and I have come along. He has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), making it possible for him and his family to come and live in the United States. We land in Los Angeles on a Pan-American Airways Boeing 747. I am so excited. Before moving to Upstate New York, my father wants to travel to several places in the west to interview some poets. We first go to Tucson and then to Berkeley. Then we get in a car and go on a long ride to meet with a man named Gary Snyder. My father has met this poet back in Japan. “Snyder-san,” as my mother calls him, now lives in the mountains of Northern California that he calls Kitkitdizze. We are driven there by my father’s former teacher from his university days; he is an art professor living in Berkeley. We go deep into the mountains in his station wagon. It feels very far from Berkeley. My father tells me that the only direction we have is the poet’s skimpy handwritten map on which he had scribbled, “In case you are captured, eat this.” I don’t understand what that means. We get lost several times. After asking around for several times and getting out of the car and hiking for a while, we finally reach the destination. It feels like complete wilderness to me. I have never walked among so many tall trees. Snyder-san has a Japanese-style house in Kitkitdizze. He lives there with his Japanese wife and two sons about my age. There are also some other guests staying there. They all have very long hair. The house looks different from any of the houses I know back home because we don’t really have traditional Japanese houses in Hokkaido. His is more like the houses in Kyoto that I have seen on TV. Indeed, I am told Snyder-san lived in Kyoto before returning to California.

Yujin Yaguchi     77

The place is wild and primitive. My father proudly tells me that Snyder-san embraces simple living and rejects modern civilization. There is no electricity or running water. There is no kitchen—just a huge steel pot over an outside firepit, around which we sit and eat. There are incredibly large gadflies everywhere. There is no flush toilet. There is no shower—just a sauna. If you want to get into the sauna, you have to manually pump buckets of water from a nearby well and chop wood to boil it to get enough steam. After people come out of sauna, they saunter around outside completely naked. They happily walk exposed under the bright California sunshine. My mother is dismayed. That night, we stay at an old Zen temple near Snyder-san’s place, owned by his friend who had been trained as a Zen Buddhist priest in Japan. The temple once stood in Kyoto and was taken apart and brought over to the mountains of California. The whole setup is very scary—it’s pitch dark everywhere. The dank spacious interior of the temple and the smell of incense are frightening. And terribly strange. Why do they want this kind of Japanese stuff here in California? No one I know in Japan lives like this anyway, including my American missionary friends. This isn’t the Japan I know.

Summer 1976 (II) When we arrive at the airport in Buffalo, we are met by Mr. Bender, a pastor from the local Mennonite church. We stay with the Benders for several days. Mr. Bender owns a Christian bookstore in town. He and his family live in a very spacious house with a large lawn. He owns a small tractor to cut the grass. I have never seen a machine like this and never imagined someone could own a tractor for mowing the house lawn. Incredible! I love cars and I am so thrilled to get a chance to ride the tractor. Mr. Bender’s church is small by US standards but seems huge to a child used to tiny congregations in Japan. Every member is white, and most are of Swiss-German background with names like Bontrager, Hershberger, Lehman, Yoder, and Zehr. They dress simply and some women wear a white covering on their head. They are very kind to us, always inviting us to Sunday lunch and evening dinners after the Bible study. I love the homemade pies served with ice cream and start to gain so much weight. I feel very comfortable and welcomed among them, as they remind me of the missionaries I know in Japan.

78     Chapter 4

After a few days at the Benders, my father tells me we will be meeting the owner of the house he decided to rent during our sojourn in Buffalo. The owner is a professor at SUNY Buffalo who is going abroad on a sabbatical leave. When he shows up, my parents and I are stunned to see him. He is a Black man. Mr. Bender and his wife also seem taken aback. He brings along his wife and son and they are also very Black. I have never seen Black people closely in my life, let alone spoken with any. They seem like nice people and I quickly befriend the boy. The family lives in a white working-class neighborhood in the town of Tonawanda, just outside Buffalo. It is a two-story white clapboard house with a living room and a narrow kitchen as well as two bedrooms on the first floor and an attic that serves as storage on the second floor. There is a small lawn with a magnolia tree that bloomed beautiful flowers in the spring. No need for a tractor for this lawn but, to my delight, there is a machine lawn mower. I love pushing it around until my parents have to stop me from doing so. The house is simple but seems very large to a boy from Japan. Initially, it feels strange to be living in a house where Black people had lived. The house came furnished, so we use their furniture, pots and pans, plates, utensils, washer, blankets, sheets, and everything else. My mother, who had never met a Black person before, seems to be having a harder time getting used to the idea. But after a while the house and its space begin to feel like ours.

Fall 1976 The first day at Brighton Elementary School in Tonawanda, I speak almost no English and understand nothing. I am the only non-American student. All my classmates are white, and they are friendly but loud. I have no idea what my classmates are doing when they put their right hand over their chest and start chanting to the American flag. We don’t have Japanese flags in classrooms in Japan, and I’d never experienced anything like this. I later learn that this is called the Pledge of Allegiance, though I still don’t understand what “pledge” or “allegiance” means. I learn the words anyway and start doing the same. I show off my English at home by reciting this, but my father looks chagrined. We also sing a song every morning called “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” After a while, I learn the song completely by heart. Mrs. Brownell, my homeroom teacher, seems quite happy and I am happy, too, because I want to please her. But I have no idea what the lyric means.

Yujin Yaguchi     79

On the first day of school, after singing this song, we have an art class. We are supposed to draw something. But I don’t understand what Mrs. Brownell is saying. I try to figure out what I am supposed to do by observing my classmates’ drawings. In Japan, we were always given a theme— human figures, plants, something in the classroom. We were also told to use a certain kind of materials—watercolor today, pencils another day. But I can’t tell what I am supposed to draw and how I am supposed to do it. Some kids are drawing colorful flowers, others animals, still others are giving finishing touches to what look like houses and cars. Some are drawing something so fantastic that I can’t even tell what they are. They are using crayons, pencils, magic markers, and whatever is around in the room. I don’t know what to do. Time is running out, so I decide to draw an image of a Pan-American airplane we boarded to the US, using a set of crayons. I am convinced Mrs. Brownell will be unhappy. But she smiles broadly and tells me it is “good.” I soon discover I am considered a math whiz by my classmates, simply because math class in Japan was more advanced at the time. I had learned everything my American friends were learning at least a year earlier. So Mrs. Brownell arranges for me to go see Mr. Toledo and Miss Helen during math hours. In retrospect, I understand Mr. Toledo was a special education teacher who usually worked with children with variety of mental issues. But I have no idea who this nice man is or why he is so willing to help me. I love him anyway because he reads books with me and helps me understand English. Miss Helen was, I later realized, a speech pathologist. She works with me patiently every week so that I can pronounce words correctly. We work very hard on vowels—the type of sounds that do not exist in Japanese such as “dog,” “law,” “cat,” and “lit.” I repeat after her many times until I can produce the right sounds. I soon learn the names of my classmates and where they live. They have family names like Collins and Borkowski. In this predominantly Irish and Polish working-class neighborhood, there are so many kids with “ski” in their name that when I join the Cub Scouts, my den mother starts calling me “Eugene Yaguski.”

March 1987 On my way to Goshen College in Indiana, I decide to stop in Hawai‘i to visit a friend I got to know in Sapporo. She is from Hilo and was an exchange student at my father’s school for a semester. I stay with her family

80     Chapter 4

for about a week. She shows me around—the volcano, Akaka Falls, and other beautiful parts of the island. Her father is of Chinese descent and her mother is, I am told, a Japanese nisei—I learn that this Japanese word has a certain meaning among Japanese people in the United States. My friend is really sweet and nice, but I don’t quite know what to make of her identity. She looks very Japanese to me. She even knows some Japanese words. Once when we are discussing “loaches,” she says she does not know what they are. I tell her they are like small eels. She then says, “That’s dojo, isn’t it?” What kind of an American knows the Japanese word dojo? But she doesn’t really speak Japanese. She doesn’t know much about Japanese culture either. Yet her family eats rice for supper every evening, unlike the American missionaries I’ve known in Japan. And she knows dojo. Who are these people? Why are there so many Asians in Hawai‘i? They are so different from the missionaries I know in Japan or classmates I had in Tonawanda.

June 1987 There are no Asians around. I am the only Japanese student on the campus of Goshen College, a Mennonite college located in northern Indiana to which I have transferred from Japan. Except for some international students like me, practically everyone is white, just like the church members I met a decade earlier in Buffalo. Again, they have similar surnames, coming from their Swiss-German back ground. There are several John Yoders on my dorm floor alone. But even with a name like Yaguchi, I don’t feel out of place at all. I actually feel very comfortable because the overwhelming majority of the students here come from Mennonite families. When we sit next to a stranger at the cafeteria, we play the “Mennonite game.” We start asking each other about his or her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and great-uncles and -aunts. There is a high chance that you are related to that person because the Mennonites are such a small and tight-knit community. For me, obviously this is not the case, because I come from Japan and I don’t have any Mennonite relatives in the US. But still, the likelihood of my new friend having a family or relative who knows my father is very high because he attended a Mennonite seminary in the 1960s and is a well-known member of the church in Japan. He has even represented Japan at the Mennonite World Conference. Any Mennonite with the slightest connection with Japan would know my family name.

Yujin Yaguchi     81

I feel like a part of the community at Goshen College. I am practically adopted by a Mennonite professor there, Dr. Wilbur Birky, and his wife, Fanni, who have spent some time in Japan and known my family very well. Wilbur and Fanni are my parents in Goshen. I go to church with them and spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with the Birky family. I feel so at home with them and I don’t think much about race or ethnicity—it’s the Mennonite Church affiliation that matters here. Some non-Mennonite students complain about how marginalized and isolated they feel on this campus and how deeply turned off they are by the “Mennonite game.” It’s not a game, they say, but a test of exclusion. Some international students are particularly bitter about this. My friend Muhammed, who is from Ethiopia and is a Muslim, tells me he is not very happy here. I try to sympathize, but it’s hard for me to understand why these non-Mennonite students are even here. It’s difficult to understand the challenges many of my new non-American friends have escaped from to come to a school in the US. I have a Palestinian classmate, but I have zero understanding of what being a Palestinian means. I become very close friends with students from Belize, Haiti, and Honduras, about which I knew virtually nothing when I was in Japan. They are critical of the “U.S. empire,” but I don’t quite understand what they mean.

Summer 1989 After graduating from college, I decide to work for a Japanese company in Columbus, Indiana. Business is going well for many Japanese companies, and they are opening factories and establishing branches all over the Midwest, including in this small working-class town. The town looks and feels like the music video of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” which is about Seymour, Indiana, only half an hour’s drive from where I am. It is almost entirely white, and people seem very proud of their own town and their nation. I suppose one could say it’s a “redneck town,” a phrase I learned soon after I arrived in Goshen. There are many pickup trucks and motorcycles here. I am told that’s what young people want to do after high school—get a job at the local factory and buy a big truck or a Harley. I didn’t really know such people in Goshen’s Mennonite community. On the surface, the Japanese are welcome here because they bring jobs. But the feeling seems lukewarm at best. One day, my Japanese boss decides to visit the local chamber of commerce to say hello, and I go along to translate for him. The young white man who meets us is friendly. He

82     Chapter 4

says in a jolly way, “I understand the challenges you guys face because I have this, too,” and shows his hand to us. I notice his index finger is missing. For a moment, I do not understand what he means and get quite flustered as I struggle to translate. Only after a while do I realize he is equating his deformity with being Japanese to say that he understands and sympathizes with us. We are, in his eyes, “abnormal” beings in this town, a deformed presence. But he kindly says we should not worry because people are accepting enough. When I somehow manage to translate the message, the boss says, “Thank you,” and energetically shakes the man’s hand. The Japanese presence here signifies the decline of American manufacturing. There is a struggling American engine factory in town that is laying off many people while the Japanese are opening state-of-the-art plants. In fact, the Japanese are expanding their presence not only in the Midwest but everywhere—Sony just bought Columbia Motion Pictures and now Mitsubishi is buying the Rockefeller Center. It is reported that all the major hotels in Waikiki are now Japanese-owned. The Japanese are so successful that they are considered a threat to the US economy and culture now. Some Americans decry this as the “second Pearl Harbor.” The company I work for is located at the edge of the town. After dark the area feels abandoned. One day, we get a phone call after business hours. I pick up the phone because that was my responsibility as one of the few English speakers in the company. I hear a male voice saying, “Japs ought to get out” and “Japs will be killed.” We contact the police. More calls keep coming, but little can be done. Then I start getting strange messages left on my answering machine in my apartment. I hear several men laughing and yelling into the machine, “You sound like a fag!” I also get stopped by the police for no obvious reason as I am driving to work. A middle-aged white male officer says he didn’t like the way I was driving, but I have no idea what I did wrong and he doesn’t really explain. I am quite shaken. I am no longer shielded by the cozy family-like atmosphere of the Mennonite campus, and suddenly I become quite conscious of my racial identity as a young Japanese man in the United States. *** The above episodes show how heavily my encounter and early relationship with the people and culture of the United States were informed by my place in the American Mennonite Church. And this affiliation with the church

Yujin Yaguchi     83

was largely defined by my father. Although he has spoken and written quite a bit about his conversion and life as a Mennonite in Japan, until recently I had not fully reflected on its significance, mainly because I have drifted away from the church over the last quarter century as I pursued my academic interests as an American Studies scholar. For this chapter, however, I decided to interview my father in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of not only him but also myself in the larger context of US-Japan relations. *** According to my father, the loss of Japan in the war against the United States in 1945 was a shocking revelation. He was twelve years old at the time and living in a small rural village in Miyagi Prefecture. He had been taught and believed that Japan was on its way to a grand victory. He had no knowledge of the United States or Americans except that he wanted to kill them. His world came shattering down after the war, as he realized that everything he had believed in was proven wrong. He remembers quite vividly the very first time he saw real live Americans. One day in the fall of 1945, a notice was issued by the local village government that members of the US military were about to arrive. There was an airfield nearby that had been used by the Japanese Army, and Americans were coming to take over the area. The villagers were told to lock their doors and remain inside. Americans could be dangerous, they were told, and the women and children must be protected. My father was inside his house, but through the cracks of the walls he was able to see the faces of the young men in uniforms and square caps. He was very impressed to see their prominent noses and handsome faces. They were nothing like the monstrous images of Franklin Roosevelt and other Americans he had been shown by adults during the war. He soon became comfortable with these men and started following them around with his friends. Some were rude, but many were quite friendly, saying hello to the local children. He faked his age and eventually managed to secure a part-time job at a nearby American military base and began to do chores. The Americans paid him a dollar a day, a large sum for a young school boy of a single mother who was working several jobs to scrape together a living in a depressed village of a war-torn country. He tidied rooms and moved things around for Americans. He was even trusted

84     Chapter 4

to clean and wipe weapons. During this time, he also learned some English, which triggered his lifelong fascination with the language. He began listening to the newly launched English-language radio program called Come Come Everybody. He also discovered the American Forces Radio Network (AFRN) and became a faithful listener. He excelled in English in high school and ended up studying English literature at a local private university. Upon graduation, he became an English teacher at a public high school in Hokkaido. In the late 1950s, my father was assigned to teach at an evening high school in Kushiro, a port town on the northeastern coast of Hokkaido. Kushiro had been bombed by American air strikes in July 1945, which killed more than two hundred men and women in the area. The memories of the attack were still raw at the time. Despite his interest in the English language, my father, though not from Kushiro, says he also had lingering anger at Americans for killing many innocent civilians during the war. It was in this town of Kushiro that he met a Mennonite missionary, Ralph Buckwalter. Buckwalter was one of the first missionaries the Mennonites had sent to Japan in 1949. After getting language training in Tokyo, the missionaries headed mostly to the south, Kyushu, and to the north, Hokkaido, where Christian missions had not concentrated in the past. In Hokkaido, they scouted remote rural areas to find a new population who had limited, if any, knowledge of Christianity. In 1951, Buckwalter started a mission in Kushiro, where very few Americans had ever lived. It was not difficult for my father, an English teacher, to meet with an American in this small city. But he was initially skeptical of this missionary because he could not forgive Americans for killing so many Japanese. He assumed this missionary had been a member of the US military during the war. How could anyone who claimed to be a follower of Jesus be involved in the killing of so many Japanese? How could anyone from the United States preach peace, coming from a nation that dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To this criticism, Buckwalter had an answer that took my father by great surprise. The missionary told him that he had been a conscientious objector and was engaged in alternative service during the war. Moreover, he had decided to come to Japan after hearing a lecture by Takuo Matsumoto, a Japanese scholar who toured the US from 1948 to 1950 to share his experience of the bomb in Hiroshima. My father admits that at the time he did not even know the concept of conscientious objector or the political system that allowed such a status.

Yujin Yaguchi     85

Neither did he know that some Americans were critical of Harry Truman’s decision to use the new weapon. According to my father, this encounter with Buckwalter and the revelation that some Christians refused to participate in the war because of their faith defined the direction of his career as a lifelong Mennonite pacifist and a literary scholar of the United States. He began attending Buckwalter’s church regularly and was eventually baptized by him on Easter Sunday in 1958. He soon left his job as a high school teacher and went to a graduate school in Tokyo and then, with the financial support of the Mennonite Church in the US, attended a Mennonite seminary in Goshen, Indiana, for three years. By the time I was born, he had returned to Hokkaido to assume a teaching position at a private university in Sapporo, where he served as a professor of American poetry and biblical literature for more than three decades. Somehow he managed to reconcile his passion for contemporary American poetry (including the works of Snyder and other beat-generation poets, many of whom had different religious sensibilities) with his equal passion for pacifist Christianity. He became a core member of the Mennonite church in Hokkaido. He refused the idea of hiring a full-time minister, arguing that it was senseless for small and financially strapped congregations in Japan to do so. Instead, he served as a lay minister and prominent leader of the local Mennonite church, along with the American missionaries. At its peak, there were about five hundred Japanese Mennonites in more than ten churches throughout the island. I remember that my father was involved in virtually every aspect of the church—from preaching on Sundays to leading Bible study sessions to offering ministerial counseling sessions to presiding over weddings and funerals—which meant everything in our household revolved around the needs of his congregation and others. There was not a single Sunday when we did not go to church during my childhood. Nothing was more important than committing himself to the Mennonite faith and community. *** My father’s life story may seem rather peculiar, but, at the same time, in many ways it fits a certain pattern of lives of many post–World War II Japanese scholars of the United States—growing up hating the US during the war, finding their world shattered as a result of the defeat, discovering

86     Chapter 4

America under the occupation, and wanting to find out more. The story of my father’s religious conversion in postwar Japan and how that affected my childhood and youth shows a profound impact of the war against the United States and the subsequent American influence on Japan. In our case, “America” entered our lives through the Mennonite Church, greatly influencing the way we lived and thought, most directly in the form of my father’s spiritual commitment to the nonviolent pacifism of the New Testament and my early familiarity with the United States as well as my subsequent academic education. But being immersed in the Mennonite faith in my early life did not entirely determine my career. There were also other factors that shaped my relationship with the United States. The rise of the Japanese economy and the trade friction between the two countries opened up a job possibility for me at a Japanese company in Indiana. My decision to pursue graduate degrees in American Studies and my passion for teaching American culture and history in Japan stem from many other factors, not least of which was my interest in cultural studies theories of the 1980s and 1990s and a concern for understanding the political and cultural dynamics of globalization. As I reflect on my life, however, it is clear that my academic career in many ways has been an attempt to unlearn what I had normalized about America in my early life and to critically reflect on the various cultural dynamics that were part of that normalization process. Perhaps the most challenging for me was reevaluating the meaning of race. Everyone I met from the United States until I went to Buffalo was a white person. I learned to equate the United States with whiteness from my interactions with missionaries and their families. The whiteness of the United States was rendered so natural that I still remember vividly the sense of dismay at meeting a Black family whose house we would rent during our stay in Tonawanda. Additionally, because every American I met as a child was a Mennonite, I possessed no knowledge of religious/ethnic diversity in the United States. Only in retrospect have I come to understand different ethnic backgrounds of the people I met during my childhood. Because my identity was so firmly lodged in the Mennonite culture, I also lacked awareness of my own identity as an Asian in the United States. Consequently, I felt unmoored and confused in Columbus, Indiana, where I was no longer a part of the Mennonite community and was simply regarded as a Japanese in that politically conservative white working-class town.

Yujin Yaguchi     87

Initially, I did not really question my Mennonite background and how that mediated my relationship with the US, because this anomalous identity just seemed so natural as I was growing up. Only later did I start exploring that question, within the larger historical geopolitics of the time—the impact of the US-led occupation of Japan, the influence of the Cold War and the US attempt to “Americanize” Japan, the history of American missionaries in East Asia, the power of the American empire over the Pacific, among others. My recollection of the time with Gary Snyder can now be framed in the longer history of American fascination with the Orient, but it took a while for me to see what seemed to be such a bizarre personal experience in a more contextualized way. One’s scholarly trajectory cannot be reduced to a search for self-identity. Posing research questions, engaging in research and writing, and publishing the results are a professional endeavor, not a personal soul-searching. Yet I realize that through every American Studies topic I searched for answers in the past twenty-five years or so, I have gained a clearer sense of who and what I am and how I was formed as an individual and a scholar.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Land She Could Never Call Home Again “America” in My Family History

Sanae Nakatani

Born in 1983 and raised in Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan, I was an ordinary child as far as I was concerned. But there was one thing I thought set me apart from other kids, and that was my grandmother. I used to look forward to visiting her—she had a Betty Crocker cookbook and a variety of American kitchen tools for baking cakes and muffins for us. Every year around Christmas, Hershey’s chocolate, Jell-O, and Swiss Miss arrived in a package at her home in Kyoto. I always enjoyed the foreign scent they brought into the living room. There was also a foreign elegance in my grandmother’s manners that none of the rest of my family had. My parents told me that she was born in the US and had in-laws there from whom all the Christmas goodies came. When I told my friends that my grandmother was born in the US, they were curious to know more about it. Having an American connection seemed to add special value to my otherwise mundane existence. Everything American was better and cool—that was the message we received from TV shows and magazines we consumed. Growing up in the countryside in the 1980s and 1990s, we rarely encountered Americans in our daily lives but were inundated by American culture. We watched Japanesedubbed Full House episodes before going to cram schools and frequented a clothing chain called Big American Shop. Even though American popular culture had seeped into every aspect of our lives, no one in my family but my grandmother seemed to have particular interest in the country. My parents were more interested in the UK. 88

Sanae Nakatani     89

My father, who was an economics professor, took a sabbatical in 1995, and we spent a year in London. My parents’ curiosity about British culture, and nostalgia for it when they returned home, was projected on their bookshelves. Because I had no command of English at all, my London days were a struggle. I managed to learn only basic English expressions and was far from fluent when I returned home. Still, the experience let me have a head start on studying English in junior high school. In 2002, I moved to Tokyo to attend Hitotsubashi University. One of the reasons I chose Hitotsubashi was that it had an attractive study-abroad program funded by its alumni association. I wasn’t the kind of student who had clear academic goals when beginning my college career, but I had a strong desire to study abroad. Living in London and becoming a foreigner forced my twelve-year-old self to realize that the world didn’t revolve around me, and taught me that so much complicated reality existed outside my small universe. Now that I was a college student, I felt I was better equipped to see the outside world more clearly and find my role in it. Although many of my friends and professors looked to non-Western civilizations for a deeper understanding of the workings of the post–Cold War global order, I hadn’t broken away from the old tradition of looking upon the UK and the US for enlightenment, an attitude that had been largely reinforced among many Japanese over decades after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Since I figured I had already seen much of the UK (which I hadn’t), I gravitated toward the US—the other anglophone giant. America seemed to be everywhere in various forms of consumer products, while I felt I knew almost nothing about it except for its popular culture. I also wanted to know more about the country that my grandmother came from. The US that I began to learn about at the university shattered the rosy image of what I thought to be the freedom-for-all country. My professors illuminated the history of the US, which was founded on the blood and sweat of indigenous, slave, and immigrant populations. Learning about Asian immigrant groups in particular changed the way I saw my relationship with the US. Before taking these classes, it hadn’t quite registered with me that my ethnically Japanese relatives in the US were in fact “American.” This was an adjective that I had only associated with white celebrities who appeared in Full House and Hollywood films. It finally made sense to me that my relatives and their ancestors were part of the US fabric, although they and their immigrant peers didn’t always get due mention in textbooks. Learning about a nonwhite aspect of US history

90     Chapter 5

made me realize my tangible personal connection with the country and further stimulated my interest. Incidentally, this was around the time when my Sansei relatives began excavating their roots so they could pass down their family history to the next generation. Like many others in their cohort, they felt responsible to learn about their parents’ generation, which was rapidly aging, and document whatever was possible about what their predecessors went through in order to give a better life to their children. My relatives came to my grandmother to learn about her story. On this occasion, I also began listening to her more closely to make sense of how she was born American and how my family ended up in Japan. *** My grandmother’s story starts with how her parents left Japan for the US and eventually built a new life together. Eikichi Okiyama,1 my greatgrandfather, was twenty years old and a student at Waseda University in Tokyo when he caught “emigration fever” in 1908. This was the time when various guides to migration appeared and touted great economic opportunities in foreign lands across the Pacific. Emigration offered not only a dream of economic success but also a convenient excuse to avoid the draft when Japan was rushing to increase its imperial influence over neighboring Asian countries, lest Western powers take them all. Forsaking his student life, which was funded by his elder brothers, he left for the US. Immigrant journalist Kazuo Ito, who befriended Eikichi, recorded his youthful effervescence upon his arrival in Seattle: “Okiyama . . . was sporting his Waseda college cap and strolling Japantown in a leisurely manner.”2 From Seattle, Eikichi went north to Anacortes and took a ferry to Roche Harbor, San Juan Island, near the Canadian border. He got a job at Roche Harbor Lime Company, where a colony of about one hundred Japanese laborers had already been established. The job of quarrying limestone and putting it in barrels, which paid a dollar to a dollar and twenty-five cents per ten-hour workday, was so grueling that Ito lasted only a month. Eikichi did not tell his daughter that he engaged in the physical labor and only spoke of his later role as a foreman at the company. It was at Roche Harbor, it seems, that Eikichi met his future wife’s father. According to family legend, my great-great-grandfather Otokichi Nakanishi snuck into a coal storage area on a cargo ship departing Kobe for

Sanae Nakatani     91

the US around the turn of the twentieth century. He was covered with soot when he got caught off the West Coast. After being deported to Japan, he went through official immigration procedures for the second attempt to enter the US, and this time he was granted permission. As he became acquainted with Eikichi at Roche Harbor, Otokichi introduced the promising young man to his daughter Chiyo, who remained in Kyoto, Japan. Chiyo and Eikichi—my great-grandparents to be—soon began writing to each other frequently. Eikichi left Roche Harbor for Seattle in 1916 and established his hotel business, which thrived thanks to the booming World War I economy. Meanwhile in Japan, Chiyo met one of Eikichi’s elder brothers, who was sent to Kyoto to check her out. After their meeting, Eikichi heard from his brother that Chiyo’s way of serving tea and dishes did not conform to manners at all. How she walked and dressed herself was not to his liking either. Having received the unenthusiastic review, Eikichi wrote to Chiyo that she was not allowed to join him in the US until she underwent sufficient training to be a respectable lady and wife, studying English, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and etiquette in Tokyo. He made this decision with regret, he said: “I am waiting and praying that you will arrive in the US as soon as possible, craning my neck. You must be like that too. However, I personally strongly disagree with the idea that I let you come here as a barefaced country bumpkin that you are now.” Eikichi added that he was also unhappy with Chiyo’s looks (it is unknown whether he found that out through photos or through his brother’s report). Since she had grown up by the sea and had a dark complexion, he instructed her to apply twice a day the French facial cream and the American powder that he was shipping to her to lighten her skin so she wouldn’t be an embarrassment when they walked arm in arm down Seattle’s streets. Despite Eikichi’s arrogant remarks—apparently it never crossed his mind that his daughter would somehow get hold of his blunt letters and give them to his great-granddaughter for close examination—Chiyo embarked on a transpacific voyage in 1917 to be united with the man she had never met in person. Their first child, my grandmother, was born in 1919. *** Having heard from my grandmother how her parents put down roots in Seattle, I became curious to know more about the background of the story

92     Chapter 5

and made Japanese American history my focus of college study. This led me in 2004 to participate in a one-year study-abroad program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where various Asian American Studies classes were offered. There, I met a second-generation Taiwanese American girl who had signed up to be matched with an exchange student with similar interests. Because she knew that I was curious about immigrant communities, she showed me Monterey Park, where she grew up, and her church and brought me into her circle of Asian American friends. One day, she told me she was writing an essay on Monica Sone’s memoir titled Nisei Daughter. The book is about the life of a Japanese hotelier’s daughter growing up in Seattle’s Japanese community before and during World War II. My friend picked the book for her essay assignment because she was also a second-generation American and interested in what her Japanese counterpart had been through more than half a century ago. She said that the generation gap, and the feeling of getting caught between the parents’ and the children’s cultures, was a theme that hit close to home for her as an immigrant kid. She suggested that I read the book as well. Not having room for reading anything more than required class material, however, I didn’t read it at that time. When I finally got around to reading Nisei Daughter some time later, my grandmother told me that Monica Sone, the book’s author, was her childhood neighbor and that she believed the Mr. Kato in the book was modeled after my great-grandfather. Illustrating Skid Row, where she grew up, and unique individuals who inhabited the area, Sone spends more space on detailing Mr. Kato than on any other character outside her family. She writes that Mr. Kato “operated the hotel across our back alley” and was “a prominent and respected figure in the community who always seemed to know what to do in a crisis.”3 This, according to my grandmother, fit the description of her father. Especially notable was the fact that his hotel was at 214 First Avenue South and shared Nord Alley with Sone’s hotel, which was at Occidental and Main. Other parts of Mr. Kato’s description further buttressed my grandmother’s conviction. There is a scene where Mr. Kato comes to the rescue when Sone’s father is falsely charged for selling illegal alcohol by corrupt police officers who demand bribery to clear the charge. My grandmother believed that her father had a successful business, spoke relatively good English, and held various community leadership roles, all of which helped him gain respect from his peers and act as a liaison with the outside world. So, for her, the hero who saved the poor Japanese fellow

Sanae Nakatani     93

My grandmother with her mother and brother in front of their Grand Central Hotel at 214 First Avenue South, Seattle, in the early 1920s.

from the evil hands of the police could not have been anyone but him. Regardless of whether Mr. Kato was my great-grandfather or not, reading Nisei Daughter gave me a glimpse of the environment my grandmother grew up in and taught me how proud she was of her father. Also, believing that my ancestors played a part in inspiring Sone’s story—one of the most well-known works in the field of Japanese American literature—assured me that I had a legitimate reason to pursue Japanese American Studies. No longer did I have to worry about how to answer the frequently asked question: “Why Japanese American Studies?” After I finished my one-year study-abroad program at UCLA and said good-bye to my friends, I went up to Seattle to see my grandmother’s sisterin-law before I headed back to Japan. One day, she gave me a tour of the family grave site and the University of Washington campus, which most of my Seattle relatives attended. Subsequently, she dropped me off near downtown so that I could explore the area on my own. After a quick peek at the Pike Place Market, whose liveliness my grandmother fondly reminisced about, I walked in the opposite direction from the waterfront and looked for First Avenue. My great-grandparents’ Grand Central Hotel with a “nice lobby,” “free bath,” and “200 rooms all modern” used to stand on 214 First Avenue South, according to the hotel’s letterhead that my grandmother had

94     Chapter 5

carefully kept. It was a few blocks down from Pioneer Square. Maybe few people associated the “Pioneer” with Japanese workers. But I projected my great-grandparents on it and felt a tinge of pride and excitement as I strolled down First Avenue. *** Graduating from Hitotsubashi, I enrolled in the Area Studies program of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo, where I was introduced to the world of American Studies. I studied alongside students working on stimulating interdisciplinary projects that they had developed while studying abroad, which made me consider going to a US graduate school. After three and a half years at the University of Tokyo, I secured the funding for the first two years of my study abroad. With that, I packed my belongings in two suitcases, canceled my cell phone service, and left for Honolulu. I enrolled in the PhD program of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) in 2009. Studying in Hawai‘i gave me a new perspective on the US and Japan. I was surprised at how critical my professors and friends were about the American past and present. They condemned imperial inequality and racism throughout American history that cast long, dark shadow on today’s social issues. They taught me to look at the history of my own country from an angle that I wasn’t used to, however unpleasant it might be. At UHM, I was confronted with a view on Japan that challenged my presumption. Japan mostly came up in World War II course readings, and it was portrayed as an evil empire that stole the lives, lands, and resources of those with less power. Even outside the classroom, there were many occasions when I was made to face Japan’s imperial past. I met Pacific Islanders whose last name was Matsutaro, a Japanese male given name. Getting to know them led me to imagine the encounters of the Japanese and local people on the islands and their lasting impact on the course of their lives. I had never really thought about Japanese immigrants—including my ancestors—as colonizers, but this experience turned around my perspective. I was introduced to the notion of settler colonialism in classes, which shed new light on my understanding of Japanese immigration to the US. I learned that immigrants were incorporated into the existing racial hierarchy and exploitative capitalism as they arrived, and reinforced those institutions

Sanae Nakatani     95

in their ascendance in a white-dominated society. Putting their migration in perspective, I saw my great-grandparents as settlers, who envisioned the US as a promised land abundant with opportunities and resources waiting to be claimed. In his letter to his wife in the mid-1910s, my great-grandfather stated that Japan, with limited land and jobs, was not capable of supporting its growing population and that the proud Japanese citizens should cross the Pacific Ocean to increase their chance of success. He even wrote about his ambitious plans to build a “new Japanese empire” in South America with his brothers when the time was ripe for it. His and his comrades’ confidence and optimistic prospect of conquering what they deemed usable land must have inspired young people in small villages in Kyoto and beyond to get out of there and try establishing a better life overseas. Their descendants—including myself—are beneficiaries of the economic opportunities they grabbed, the opportunities that the indigenous population and other marginalized groups could have accessed had it not been for the immigrant competitors from Japan. Living in Hawai‘i and learning its history taught me how to locate and see myself in the dense web of settler colonialism. I learned that Hawaiians’ lives and rights were severely curtailed under the social system controlled by settlers. There was not only a grave economic disparity between the Hawaiian and settler populations but also a racial hierarchy within the settler population, which further complicated the issue. A Filipino American friend pointed out to me that all custodians who worked at our dormitory were Filipinos, while those in managerial positions were Japanese. Japanese immigrants constituted the dominant workforce on Hawaiian plantations in the early twentieth century, and their descendants gradually improved their socioeconomic standing through their active participation in politics. Now that Japanese Americans assumed higher positions in Hawai‘i’s society, Japanese nationals, myself included, could also benefit from the privilege that the ethnic group had established in the society. The Japanese network that encompassed Japan and Hawai‘i was part of what made it possible for me to study at UHM. When I was a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, my adviser Professor Yujin Yaguchi, gave me an opportunity to meet my future UHM adviser, Professor Mari Yoshihara, who was his longtime friend. They both lived and studied in Japan and the US and established a transnational scholarly network, which I could tap into in order to get detailed information about the UHM program before applying.

96     Chapter 5

Being a Japanese student in Hawai‘i, I had advantages I would not have had, had I been to a school in the continental US. I was blessed by the opportunity to connect with a third-generation Japanese American couple, who were friends with another professor I knew in Tokyo. The couple cherished their Japanese friends in their effort to maintain their ties to their ancestral land, and they took me in like their own daughter. Through them, I got to know people of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds whom I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet had my social network been limited to the UHM campus. Like my family in Japan, my Hawai‘i parents found my studies of Japanese American history and culture meaningful because the subject was relatable for them in various ways. With more cheerleaders on board, the tough journey of getting a PhD seemed more feasible than before. *** I had always been interested in my family history, which gave me the reason to enter the field of American Studies, but I didn’t focus on it in my studies at UHM. I couldn’t see how a personal story with only obscure information at hand could become a research topic. Thus, for my dissertation, I decided to research well-known Japanese American figures on whom both primary and secondary sources were readily available. The Los Angeles-born artist Isamu Noguchi was one of them. Being mixed-race and raised outside Japanese American communities, he had little contact with his co-ethnics growing up. Nonetheless, when the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor and the US government removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast as “a military necessity,” it kindled his awareness as a Nisei. He decided he wanted to help his people who were going through this tormenting experience, even though he was exempt from the incarceration thanks to his New York residency. Through his connection with John Collier of the Bureau of Indian Affairs—which administered the Colorado River Indian Reservation, on which the Poston Relocation Center was built—Noguchi arranged his way into the camp. His purpose was to organize arts-and-crafts programs inside the barbed wire to raise the detainees’ morale and create a democratic atmosphere there. Within a couple months of his arrival, he was already seeking his way out, as the confinement and harsh weather wore him out. Adding to the burden was his inability to connect with the Japanese American detainees,

Sanae Nakatani     97

who had utterly different perspectives on camp life—theirs were primarily centered around survival and reestablishing what had been torn away from them—and his realization that promoting democracy under forced incarceration was preposterous. I was drawn to Noguchi because his life was distinct from the standardized account of Nisei’s experiences: that they climbed the educational and social ladder in mainstream society despite the internment and prejudice. Noguchi defied any attempts to categorize him in one way or another and only loosely maintained his relationship with Japanese American communities after the war. My grandmother’s story might not have been as dramatic as Noguchi’s, but hers was also different from the common narrative about Nisei. Although I did not make my grandmother’s story per se the subject of my dissertation, I thought that by looking at individual Nisei’s stories and telling them without generalizing, I could contribute to drawing a more diverse profile of Japanese American lives where stories like my grandmother’s could be included. *** My grandmother’s life was full of twists and turns. At the age of seven, she was sent to live with her mother’s side of the family in a small fishing village on Northern Kyoto’s Tango Peninsula. She thought that the ostensible reason for her parents’ sending her there was to give her a proper education to be a respectable Japanese girl, but that the real motive was to get rid of one mouth to feed. In the evening of March 7, 1927, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake suddenly and violently shook the ground when a Buddhist memorial service was taking place at her grandfather’s home. Everyone at the service ran out of the house and fled for safety. When they returned convinced that there would be no more big tremors, they heard the crying voice of a girl who had been left behind. The girl was my grandmother, and she had been left in the dark not quite understanding what had happened and without anyone to turn to for help. This experience taught her to stand on her own two feet, not expecting others to protect her, which was an important lesson in navigating her way through the greater turmoil that was to come. My grandmother finished primary and women’s schools in Kyoto and in the mid-1930s came home to Seattle and attended grammar school with younger classmates and then high school, which made her a Kibei, a Japanese American who went to Japan to receive education and then returned

98     Chapter 5

to the US. Just about the time she finished high school and was finally getting accustomed to her American life again, Japan beckoned her back. One year before the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese celebrated the 2,600th anniversary of Emperor Jimmu’s founding of the Japanese Empire. Her father was invited to attend the Conference for Japanese Living Overseas held in Tokyo, organized as a part of the celebration of the anniversary, on behalf of Seattle’s Japanese immigrant community. My grandmother and her mother decided to accompany him. After a brief stay, the parents headed home for their hotel business, but my grandmother extended her stay. She told me that she enjoyed playing around, going to theaters, and seeing her relatives. Her stay became so prolonged that her brother wrote her to hurry back home. As US-Japan relations deteriorated, she heard that the last ship from Yokohama to the US was departing. She managed to board Tatsuta Maru on December 2, 1941, but one morning as she woke up in her cabin, she realized that the sun had risen from the opposite side. The war had broken out, and the ship had made a U-turn.4 She said everything looked normal when she made it back to Yokohama—it didn’t feel like the country was at war. Major bombing raids were yet to begin when she was on her way back to the old fishing village. When she returned to her childhood home, her women’s school teacher matched her up with an educator, and they got married in 1942. Staying with her extended family and not having anywhere else to go, she did not have a say—I suppose—in the arranged marriage. In the next five years, they had three children, the middle one being my father. As my grandmother was forced to turn from a young, carefree single Nisei woman into a mother of three Japanese children in this tumultuous period, her family in Seattle was also suffering from a nightmarish turn of events. *** In the summer of 2013, as I was browsing the artist Isamu Noguchi’s records during his time in the Poston camp as part of my dissertation research at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I decided to request my ancestors’ data files as well, to look closely at how their internment experiences were officially documented. My Sansei relatives had already made photocopies of the data and shared them with us, but I also wanted to put in a request, a right I wanted to exercise as one of their descendants.

Sanae Nakatani     99

The writing at the bottom of the photo translates as Yawata Maru Maiden Voyage, Koki 2600 Showa 15 October. “Koki 2600,” which means the 2,600th anniversary of Emperor Jimmu’s enthronement and the foundation of Japan, and “Showa 15” are both equivalent to “1940.” My grandmother is sitting in the second row from the front, fourth from the left, with many other Japanese Americans traveling from Seattle to Yokohama.

In contrast to how other members of the family had thin files with scarce information, my great-grandfather had a lot of information in his file. The documents recorded that he was apprehended by the FBI on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack and taken to the Department of Justice detention centers in Fort Missoula, Montana, and in Lordsburg and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Having been a part of the delegation that attended the Japanese Empire’s 2,600th-anniversary celebration and toured military headquarters in Japan and Manchuria, he had an obvious deep connection with the enemy country, which gave the US government a reason to swiftly round him up. The rest of the family were sent to the Minidoka camp. Like many Issei men, my great-grandfather told his daughter that he rather enjoyed being in the camp. He said that it was like “leisure” for him to be able to play baseball with his peers and try a new job as a mail carrier, getting a break from the busy, demanding work as a hotel operator that had barely spared him time to rest ever since he embarked on the business. But

100     Chapter 5

the documents that his family left and were filed by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) told a different side of the story. After the first hearing at Fort Missoula, my great-grandfather was denied parole. The Alien Enemy Hearing Board interrogated him about the money he sent to his daughter in Kyoto, the four hundred soldiers’ comfort bags that the Japanese Association of Tacoma, Washington, sent in his care for the 2,600th-anniversary celebration of Japan, and what he did during his stay there. His answers didn’t clear him of suspicion of collaboration with the Japanese government. Meanwhile, his wife and sons desperately pleaded for his transfer to Minidoka. His son sent a letter on May 24, 1943, to District Attorney Charles Dennis in Seattle from St. Louis, Missouri, where he had resettled: “I shall be graduating from Washington University in a few days, but there is no rejoicing in my heart. My thoughts are constantly on my parents, who are separated.” He continued, It seems that the internee may be paroled should any of their sons volunteer for the combatant force. . . . If there is still a possibility, I would gladly enter into the services to help my country and to have my parents together. . . . I would like to say that my father is completely innocent and that he would cause no disturbance if he should be allowed to return to the relocation center. I am willing to stake my life on this statement.

At this and other points, my great-grandfather’s white allies such as a public school principal and a banker who had known him from early days also wrote petition letters attesting to his loyalty and devotion to public service. In the fall of 1943, my great-grandfather was paroled and permitted to move to Minidoka. On the letter of authorization that he had to carry with him on his travels, he was described as “Age, 55; Height, 5′1½″; Weight, 140; Hair, white; Eyes, brown; Three pin moles inside right ear”—as if he were a criminal. The FBI investigation records on my great-grandfather described him as “a member of Jikyoku Iinkai (Committee of the Crisis), a committee of the Seattle Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Japanese Association of North America, formed at the time of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War to combat anti-Japanese feeling and disseminate Japanese propaganda,” and reported that his notes obtained at his arrest indicated his “strong feeling for Japan.” To get out of the camp, however, he had to prove

Sanae Nakatani     101

otherwise. In his application for discharge from parole, dated August 3, 1945, and addressed to Edward J. Ennis, Director of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit, he mentioned, “During my stay in Seattle I did all I could to assist in the Americanization of those older Japanese with whom I came in contact. When I came to this country I intended to remain and I have done all that I could to live up to the American traditions.” He asked for permission to return to Seattle and his hotel business—a wish that had been previously denied. To emphasize his longtime effort to Americanize himself, he added that he had joined the Presbyterian Church prior to his entry to the US and that he encouraged his two sons who volunteered for the army “to assume their full responsibilities as citizens of this country.” Between the two empires before they went to war, he had tried to find a way to maintain his standing on both sides; in what looks like his speech manuscript for a Japanese American audience confiscated and translated by the FBI, he purportedly stated: “Trust the [Japanese] government and stay till the end, taking your responsibility as emigrants, and work towards the preservation of understanding between Japan and America.” But when he was forced to choose between the two, he opted for the country of his sons. This meant that my grandmother, whom he never mentioned in the application letter, would forever be isolated from her parents and brothers. *** Seventy years after my ancestors went through the toughest times of their lives, I was flipping through the faded documents in the peaceful reading room of the National Archives, where I was given access to resources equal to that of other visitors who were sitting around me and minding their own business. I wondered how challenging it must have been to live in the US, where different races working side by side was not the norm. I had mixed feelings about all I was seeing; while my chest tightened as I learned about the extent of the curtailment of rights and freedom that my ancestors had faced, I was amazed by the profound details of their lives, especially my great-grandfather’s, that I got to know for the first time reading through court hearing transcripts and FBI reports. I also wondered how many millions of people had their interned forebears’ files and personal stories stored at this institution. Before arriving in Washington, DC, I stopped in Los Angeles, Detroit, and New Hope, Pennsylvania, for my dissertation

102     Chapter 5

research on Japanese American communities and individuals. Tracing the trajectories of their experiences, and at last being reunited with my ancestors’ handwritten documents, I felt I was a part of the Japanese American diasporic network. I felt a new meaning and responsibility in studying, writing about, and taking part in Japanese American historiography. My career as an educator owes much to my great-grandparents’ getting out of Japan and planting themselves in the US. My grandmother was bilingual as a result of her transnational upbringing; she trained my father in English, which enabled him to do his sabbatical in London and gave me an early exposure to the language. Presently I teach English as a second language while I continue my research in American Studies. English as a cultural capital has been developed and passed down through generations of my family and has given me an advantage in my career building in Japanese society, where the importance of learning English is almost uncritically embraced. I need to constantly remind myself that I have been a participant in and a beneficiary of English imperialism while I willingly appropriate the language to push my boundaries, just as my ancestors did. When Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan into a worldwide contestation of military power and commerce in 1853 and the country embarked on a dramatic reform of its system to catch up with the West, many Japanese with means of mobility refused to just stay where they were and wait helplessly for an uncertain future to unfold. My great-grandparents were among those who exploited the novel opportunities that the two countries’ connection presented. Even though my grandmother lost touch with the American state, her diligent letter writing, in which she took after her parents, never let her family ties spanning the ocean diminish. Through times of hope and despair, “America” had, and continues to have, a special place in my family history.

Notes 1

2

My great-grandfather went by various first names. Many official documents spell his name as “Iikichi” or “Yeikichi,” and he liked to call himself “Yeihan” later in his life, but in this chapter I call him “Eikichi,” the Roman transcription of his original name. Kazuo Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura [Sequel to North America one hundred years cherry blossoms] (Seattle: Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura Jikko Iinkai, 1972), 86.

Sanae Nakatani     103

3 4

Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 38. Commander Toshikazu Omae had summoned the Tatsuta Maru’s captain to the Ministry of the Navy to give him a box to be opened when the clock passed midnight on December 8. The box contained about a dozen guns and an order to swiftly make a U-turn. The Tatsuta Maru was “scheduled” for a round-trip to the US in order to feign normality and camouflage Japan’s intention of waging war. For more information, see Boeicho Boei Kenkyujo Senshishitsu [Ministry of Defense, National Institute for Defense Studies, Office of War History], Senshi Sosho: Daihonei Rikugunbu 3—Showa 17 Nen 4 Gatsu Made [War History Series: Imperial General Headquarters, Army, Part 3—Through April 1942] (Seiun Shimbunsha, 1970), 112.

CHAPTER SIX

Navigating the Sea of Fatherhood across the Pacific Yohei Sekiguchi

When I was a PhD student at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM), my father visited me and my family. With a newborn baby, my wife and I were starting a new life in a small one-bedroom apartment in Honolulu. One day my father and I went to Walmart to buy a cheap sofa. On our way back, I was chatting with our taxi driver, who suddenly pointed at a darkcomplexioned pregnant woman walking with grocery bags in her hands. He said: “Look, here’s one more welfare kid coming.” For a moment his remark didn’t make sense to me. But I got angry as soon as I understood what he meant—women of color and their children are fatherless and thus burdens for American citizens. The driver’s words upset me greatly, for sure. But what embarrassed me much more was my own paralysis: I couldn’t do or say anything to this racist—and sexist—man. I had some good excuses: I didn’t have time to do anything because the taxi arrived at my apartment soon after this happened; my English was not good enough to speak back; most importantly, my father would have been worried if I had started a big quarrel with the driver. But still, I felt so helpless. It still haunts me. Did the taxi driver suggest that in spite of our racial difference—he looked white—we shared the same class status and social norms because I was accompanied by my father? How would my father feel about his comment—seemingly, he did not notice any tension between us, due to his lack of proficiency in English—if he understood what was happening? Would he be disappointed to find that I did not “act like a man”? What should I have done as a father? 104

Yohei Sekiguchi     105

The subject of my research is American fatherhood. I often discuss in my classes the stigma frequently attached to single mothers and fatherlessness in contemporary American society. But if I cannot raise the issue with the taxi driver, what’s the point of my being an American Studies scholar? I’m still seeking an answer to these questions, but after I talked about this experience in my classes, I came to think: maybe I chose this profession to share such an embarrassing moments with others. This chapter is part of my attempt as such.

Longing for My Father In my recollection of my childhood and adolescence, my father is almost always absent. This is not to say that he was a deadbeat father. Neither was he toxically masculine. Born a baby boomer, my father was a typical Japanese salaryman (he was an engineer at NTT, the national telecommunication company); he was very stoic and loyal to the company. I was born in Tokyo in 1980. In my early childhood, my family moved a few times when his company transferred him. When I was a third grader in an elementary school in Tokyo, my father was transferred to Tsukuba city, about a two-hour drive from our home. He went by himself to live and work in Tsukuba, and afterward he was transferred to different cities—Yamaguchi, Osaka, and Nagoya—every three years or so. He worked away from my family for more than ten years, and I saw him only several times a year. I missed him a lot. I liked to play baseball with my father—he had been a baseball player in ­college—and it was disappointing not to have him around when I played games on Sundays. Every time my father told me that he would have another transfer, I hoped that he might come back to live with us. But he did not. As a teenager, I sometimes hated him for not being there when I needed him. I can now better understand his situation: in Japan it was not unusual for men of his generation to work at the expense of their families. My family was not unhappy, because my mother constantly and sincerely cared for us. Yet I was young and simply wished my father were with us more. My father was a typical Japanese man—he was reticent, looked emotionless, and never explained his situation to me, no matter how I needed it. So I made a promise to myself: I would not become a father like him. I would not become a salaryman like him, and I would stay with my family. When I graduated from elementary school, I even declared I would become a company president because I guessed that a company president was not transferred anywhere.

106     Chapter 6

Finding Mr. Keating Fast-forward to 2000, when I entered the University of Tokyo. I chose the university for two reasons. It is one of the top universities in Japan, and it has a unique system of making students declare a major after completing a two-year liberal arts education. Before entering this university, I knew that I was interested in the humanities and the social sciences; I had better scores in mathematics than in English, but I didn’t want to become an engineer like my father. After the first two years, I chose the English Department among many different options. This department has played a crucial role in Japan’s intellectual history since the Meiji period. Soseki Natsume, one of the greatest novelists in Meiji Japan, graduated from and taught at this department. Throughout his scholarly and literary career, Soseki struggled with the significance of Western civilization and envisioning Japan’s position within the modernizing world, and his intellectual legacies have deeply influenced those who came to the department after him. Not a small number of graduates of this department have become scholars of English and American literature, but I was not aware of such an intellectual tradition when I chose this department. I was interested in this department mainly because the English-Japanese translation class I took in my second year was quite eye-opening. This class was offered by Professor Motoyuki Shibata, a renowned translator and scholar of American literature who taught in the English Department. As of 2019, he has translated more than 150 English books into Japanese, including major works of Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Mark Twain. In his Introduction to Translation class, Professor Shibata taught us how our choice of one word can change the whole meaning of a story. “Translation is a losing battle,” he said again and again. “Every translation is mistranslation, but how you lose the battle is very significant.” In his class I learned how bridging two different languages and cultures can be fun as well as challenging. Furthermore, I learned a lot from his teaching style. Despite being a celebrated professor, he was highly approachable and loved teaching. His class was very popular, and more than a hundred students took his class; he gave detailed feedback on every student’s weekly paper, commenting on the student’s choice of words and suggesting an alternative. The first time I

Yohei Sekiguchi     107

submitted my handwritten paper, Professor Shibata immediately returned it to me and asked me to rewrite it, making a clearer distinction between periods and commas. I was astonished—I had not even imagined that a professor would care about such small details, especially when he had more than a hundred papers to grade. This episode taught me a lesson: God is in the detail. It was not very easy to attend to small details every week—I often had to work through the night to write a paper—but it was rewarding. The papers he returned were filled with his scribbled comments and suggestions—I always looked forward to reading his comments even though I was scared of them. I was rarely praised in the class, but I felt rewarded when I was. Perhaps this kind of interaction was what I had expected from my father. Professor Shibata changed my life course: he was my Mr. Keating. He was so different from my father: turning his work into a source of pleasure, he embodied the kind of freedom I had long yearned for—unlike Japanese salarymen, he often came to class in a flannel shirt and blue jeans. At this point I did not think about becoming an academic. I simply enjoyed the process of learning. I felt as if I suddenly became a cool person just because I was close to such a cool professor. Until then I had no interest in American literature and culture. I was not very good at English. I had no international friends with whom I could speak in English. The United States was almost absent from my precollege life. Aside from some rock music and baseball players, the US meant nothing to me. While my sister eagerly watched many episodes of Full House and Growing Pains—which were quite popular in late 1990s Japan, especially for the younger generation—I did not see the appeal. In retrospect, my lack of interest in the United States might have reflected Japan’s economic and cultural power in the late twentieth century. I loved eating McDonald’s hamburgers, but because my grandparents brought them every time they came to our house, I stopped eating them. I found them too greasy and incongruous with my Japanese taste. The United States for me was not an object of fascination or abhorrence, as it was for older generations; American culture was just there. During my first couple of years at the University of Tokyo, I was interested in Latin America. I studied Spanish as a second foreign language. As I studied at the University of Tokyo, I realized that my English skills were not as highly developed as those of other students, some of whom had learned English while living in foreign countries. Suffering from an

108     Chapter 6

inferiority complex, I found that studying Spanish seemed more promising: Spanish was a minor language in Japan, and there were not many students who were proficient in it. I studied in Mexico City for one year with a full scholarship from the Japanese and Mexican governments in 2003. Established in 1971, this scholarship exchanges a hundred students annually for the purpose of promoting grassroots understanding between Japan and Mexico. I mostly took Spanish classes at the language school of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I learned a lot more outside the classroom. In Mexico, everything was new and thrilling to me; spicy smells from taco stands, pastel-colored buildings, Metro vendors peddling everything, little children on the street begging for food and money. The huge gulf between haves and have-nots forced me to think about my privilege as a Japanese. When I came back from Mexico, I stopped over in Los Angeles for a few days. I visited a friend who was studying at the University of California, Riverside. This was the first time I set foot in the United States. At this point I was already an English major, but my interest in the US was halfhearted at best. During the whole trip I spoke Spanish rather than English. I strolled Olvera Street and ate some tacos, complaining how they were different from authentic ones I had in Mexico. My world pivoted around Mexico, not the United States. However, my interest in American culture slowly bloomed because of Professor Shibata’s class and his personality. I also started to read American novels translated by Haruki Murakami. I loved reading Murakami’s novels in my high school days. Bridging Japanese and American cultures, his works were very different from those of other Japanese writers. His major works were being translated into English in the 1990s, and I felt legitimized to see my favorite Japanese writer solidifying his position in the US literary scene. This was one of the first seeds of my interest in the interaction between American and Japanese cultures. I was very excited to find that Professor Shibata and Murakami worked together—they have coauthored and co-translated dozens of books, and Murakami regularly contributes to Monkey, a literary magazine edited by Professor Shibata. By the early 2000s, Murakami had translated works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Grace Paley, among others. For my generation, Professor Shibata and Murakami’s translation was a gateway into twentieth-century American literature. I was drawn into their crisp and rhythmic translation that still retained the sense of the original text.

Yohei Sekiguchi     109

One day in 2003, I received a big packet from Bungei Shunju, a major publishing company in Tokyo. I was quite surprised and thrilled to find the proofs of Murakami’s new translation of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I have no idea how this happened—my best guess is that Murakami was looking for young readers’ feedback and Professor Shibata gave my name to the editor—but I surely devoured the proofs. It was one of the happiest moments in my undergraduate years. Murakami’s translation of Catcher became a national best seller, and I was very proud to have played a small part in it. This experience certainly had a role in evoking my interest in American literature. In 2005, I wrote a BA thesis on Tim O’Brien’s masterpiece, The Things They Carried. His fiction had fascinated me since my high school years, when I read The Nuclear Age—translated by Murakami, as well as The Things They Carried—so it felt natural to choose one of O’Brien’s novels as a subject of my research. Professor Shibata taught me the ABCs of writing an academic paper and revised my poor English sentence by sentence. We exchanged a lot of faxes, all of which were full of Professor Shibata’s handwritten comments and suggestions. I had no confidence in my potential as an American literature scholar, but I thought it would be wonderful to get more feedback like this from the professor I admired. I proceeded to the master’s program in the same department. My motivation was more personal and therapeutic than academic. By then, my father had returned to our home in Yokohama. But I did not know how to communicate with him. We did not have anything to talk about. I felt that going to a graduate school was a good excuse to leave home. I rented a small apartment near the university and shared it with my friend.

Reconciling with the Father I was very lucky to be instructed by two great professors in my graduate program. One was Professor Shibata, and the other was Professor Takaki Hiraishi, one of the most eminent American literary scholars in Japan as well as a distinguished author of detective fiction. In his seminar, Professor Hiraishi placed much emphasis on the significance of home and family in American literature. He often urged us to reexamine the thesis that American literature seeks freedom from home. As I started to think about the significance of fatherhood in American literature, I also ruminated about my relationship with my father. Did I leave my home because I hated my

110     Chapter 6

father? Or because I secretly sought love from my father, as protagonists in O’Brien’s novels do? The graduate classes were way harder than I expected. Unlike other graduate students, I was not familiar with canonical literature—either American, Japanese, or world. Often, I could not join—or even follow— the discussion in class. Sometimes it sounded like a foreign language even when the discussion was done in Japanese. My classmates’ passion in literature felt almost religious, and I often felt intimidated. I didn’t know anything about American history either. Traditionally, the English Department at the University of Tokyo encouraged students to focus on close textual reading of literary works and provided few opportunities to systematically learn the history and culture of the United States. Throughout my master’s education, I did not take any classes on American history or culture. My initial plan in my master’s program was to study Chicano/Chicana writers like Sandra Cisneros, in part because of my experience of learning Spanish in Mexico. In retrospect, I was somehow identifying myself with the characters in Cisneros’ stories, who suffer from their lack of proficiency in English. My interest in Hispanic culture, then, stemmed partly from my anxiety about mastering English. “No speak English,” one character in Cisneros’ story says: this phrase sounded comforting to me, for I felt intimidated by the hegemonic status of the English language. But my professors did not look too happy about my plan. Traditionally, MA students at the University of Tokyo’s English Department worked on more canonical writers. Among five graduate students in my cohort, three wrote an MA thesis on Faulkner. In the master’s cohort before and after mine, three students wrote a thesis on Melville, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, respectively. Until I started my PhD program in Hawai‘i, I never questioned that this was normal. I was not aware that closely reading the works of a single canonical author is only one of very many ways of doing literary studies. I also never thought twice about the fact that I had never studied under a female professor. The proportion of female professors in the University of Tokyo was extremely low, and still is. My professors encouraged me to incorporate elements of gender into my study, but in the absence of faculty who specialized in gender studies, I did not have systematic training in how to do gender analysis. In the end, I wrote my MA thesis on, again, Tim O’Brien: “Reconciling with the Father: On Tim O’Brien’s Metafictional Vietnam Works.”

Yohei Sekiguchi     111

O’Brien was not as canonical as the American novelists other students focused on, but apparently my professors thought it was a good choice. Provoked by Professor Hiraishi’s seminar, this time I explored the representation of fatherhood in O’Brien’s Vietnam War novels. As I read through all of O’Brien’s novels, it occurred to me that their main theme is fatherhood, not the Vietnam War. Examining the familial conflict between protagonists in O’Brien’s novels and their fathers, I argued that O’Brien’s so-called postmodern literary style—in his novels there is no distinct borderline between fact and fiction—stemmed from the protagonist’s traumatic relationship with his father rather than the Vietnam War’s confusion. Following the basic tradition of the English Department at the University of Tokyo, my approach was mostly literary without much robust historical analysis. Drawn to American literature by Professor Shibata and Professor Hiraishi, by the time I finished my master’s, I made a decision to become a scholar of American literature. My father was quite opposed to the idea. For a Japanese salaryman like him, my choice did not make sense; he was afraid that I would not be able to handle the financial and psychological stress. I had no idea how I could persuade him. One day I agreed to go on a trip with my family to visit my grandmother’s old home in Gunma. This was the worst trip ever. On the first day, my father crashed his new car. The hood was damaged and remained open, and my father fixed it with wires. It looked very fragile. It could collapse anytime. However, my father told us to continue the trip, as if nothing had happened. My mother and I tried everything to persuade him into waiting for a loaner car, but my father did not even listen to us. He did not speak much during the trip, and I had nothing to talk about with him either. On the last day of our trip, we went to a hot spring. Left alone with my father, I was very uncomfortable. While sitting in the bathtub, my father abruptly told me he was sorry about all the mess he made during the trip. Furthermore, he asked me what my goal was as a graduate student. We did not talk much, but as we were about to get out of the bath, he abruptly told me that he would respect my choice if it was what I really wanted to do. This was our first step in our reconciliation, the step taken by my father whom I thought of as hardheaded and narrow-minded.

Becoming a Father in Hawai‘i When I proceeded to the PhD program at the English Department at the University of Tokyo, I also started to consider the possibility of going to

112     Chapter 6

study at an American university. It was not so difficult for me to choose where to study. I got an offer from the foundation for the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship, which is sponsored by Keidanren, the Japanese Business Federation. Established in 1959 to celebrate the wedding of then Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko, this scholarship is awarded to Japanese students who study at UHM (and UHM students who study in Japan). Thanks to this prestigious scholarship, I had an opportunity to visit the Imperial Palace with two other scholarship recipients and talk with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko about my research project. To my surprise, they listened intently to my words for a long time and asked many questions about the representation of the Vietnam War in American literature. I felt their genuine hope that we would become a liaison between Japanese, American, and Hawaiian societies. In the fall of 2010, I enrolled in the Department of American Studies at UHM. American Studies was not my first choice; I had been rejected by the English Department. Not knowing much about American Studies as a discipline, I was disappointed by this decision; yet it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. American Studies gave me an opportunity to revise my superficial understanding of the United States. Until I came to Hawai‘i, I did not know much about components such as race, gender, sexuality, and class that structure life in America. For me, the United States was an imaginary and abstract entity that existed only in the novels I had read: my America was, say, Tim O’Brien’s America. While I was interested in the representation of fatherhood in O’Brien’s fiction, I had no understanding of the history of fatherhood in America. Neither did I know anything about the social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of American families. I had a hard time participating in class discussion during my first semester. Nevertheless, as soon as I started my course work, I realized that I could learn a great deal from the interdisciplinary approach of American Studies. I devoured many books assigned in my classes. Books like Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era taught me about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. While the white middle-class norm of the nuclear family seemed to promise the emergence of a classless society in postwar America, Black families were deemed matriarchal and excluded from the suburbs. I was shocked to learn that the concept of fatherlessness was racialized in the United States. “Look, there’s another welfare kid coming”—the taxi driver’s racialized remark haunted me. It seemed very American.

Yohei Sekiguchi     113

Fitting into American Studies turned out to be easier than I had imagined; luckily, I was helped by excellent teachers. I was especially impressed by Professor Kathleen M. Sands. She was extremely good at encouraging students, and her sense of humor eased the sometimes tense atmosphere of the classroom. It was eye-opening for me that she preferred to be called by her first name. I had often addressed Professor Shibata and Professor Hiraishi as just “professor,” as is common practice in Japan. To me, Kath was a friend and a human being—a person who listened carefully to my story and laughed, rejoiced, and cried with me—before being a teacher. When I had any concern—about my final paper, classes I taught, and my life— she invited me into her office. She always gave me a big hug, offered tea, and talked with me for a couple of hours. On March 11, 2011, a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the northern and eastern coasts of Japan. My family and friends were safe, but I felt so helpless and hopeless. My would-be wife was visiting Disneyland with her sister, and they had to stay there overnight until their father picked them up. Sitting all day at my desk in the small apartment in Honolulu and following Japanese news, I could not do anything. I was so frustrated. For the first time since I came to Hawai‘i, I skipped my classes. Then Kath sent me an email. She told me that she understood my decision. She encouraged me to drop by her office. I did so before attending her class. I do not remember what we talked about, but talking with her meant a lot to me. Sometimes I felt homesick—especially after this devastating disaster—but thanks to Kath’s constant care, I felt that I had a second home in Hawai‘i. I was also struck by Kath’s activism outside the classroom; she was one of the plaintiffs who sued the state of Hawai‘i over civil union of same-sex couples. In 1993, for the first time in the US, the Hawai‘i Supreme Court held that prohibiting same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. However, in 1998 the state of Hawai‘i amended its constitution to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples. A great many people protested against this and struggled to take back the equal rights of marriage. As the debate about same-sex marriage matured nationwide, civil union bills were passed in Hawai‘i in 2011. I was lucky to witness part of this movement. Reading the paper Kath wrote on civil union in her American Sexualities class—I had not even heard of the term “civil union”—I was introduced to the radical tradition of American Studies. I had the feeling that not only was I learning a new topic, but I was also becoming a new person. Today, as I see professors and students in American Studies fight against the construction of the

114     Chapter 6

Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea—one of the most sacred sites for Native Hawaiians and one that plays an essential role in their indigenous culture—I feel very proud of them. But I had never imagined that I would be interested in a topic like this. Living in Hawai‘i, I was also forced to understand my Japanese identity from a new perspective. In Mexico, I was an outsider. On the Metro, people frequently asked me where I came from and what I was doing in Mexico City. Most people were more than curious; they complimented me on my Spanish and thanked me for having an interest in Mexico. In Hawai‘i, I was a different kind of outsider: Japanese were everywhere in this small island, and people in Hawai‘i rarely asked me where I came from. While I was surrounded by Japanese things—foods, friends, language—I had complicated feelings about my identity as a Japanese as I learned more about Hawaiian history and culture. One of the first Hawaiian words I learned in Hawai‘i was “haole,” a term for a white person that is often deemed derogatory; it reminded me of a Spanish slang term, “gringo/gringa,” which I often heard in Mexico. To my surprise, in some contexts “haole” and Japanese were put together. My local friend once told me: “You shouldn’t go to Waikiki Beach. That’s for haole and Japanese.” As I came to understand Native Hawaiians’ critique of the multinational tourism industry, I became aware of my privilege as a Japanese. For example, a significant part of the construction cost of the TMT is funded by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan. Coming to Hawai‘i, I realized that I had mostly seen my Japanese identity as unmarked. In retrospect, this perspective gave me an inspiration for my doctoral dissertation: it helped me reexamine the cultural representation of American fathers as white and middle-class.

Father Nurtures Best As my coursework in American Studies came close to its end, it did not take me long to decide to write my dissertation on the representation of white middle-class fatherhood in late twentieth-century American literature. Unlike my MA thesis, this time I planned to examine several authors’ literary works together to underscore the historical transformation of white middle-class fatherhood. While planning for my prospectus, I had a chance to talk with Haruki Murakami in person. Murakami served as a visiting scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at UHM; his office was, by

Yohei Sekiguchi     115

chance, located on the same floor as mine. Murakami generously took as long as two and a half hours just for me to discuss the American literary works I had interest in. I talked with him in a state of pure bliss. Most of the writers we talked about were Murakami’s contemporaries—John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy—and he shared his excitement about reading their works in the 1980s. While I enjoyed chatting with Murakami, as a beginning American Studies scholar about to produce my own ideas and arguments about American literature I also felt that I should keep some distance from him rather than merely being a devoted fan and reproducing his perspective. Murakami generously told me that he was happy to take time for me again, but I did not choose to do so. I had no hesitation in choosing Kath as the chair of my dissertation committee. Choosing other committee members was not difficult either. I chose Professors Mari Yoshihara, Jonna Eagle, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Cynthia Franklin. I had never studied under a female professor at the University of Tokyo. In contrast, all of my committee members at UHM were female. Thanks to these committee members’ sophisticated understanding of and commitment to feminism, my analysis of fatherhood sharpened and deepened. It was not only these professors but also my family that had tremendous influence on the development of my dissertation. While working on it, I married my wife, Shiho. We were immediately blessed with a baby. In the winter of 2012, I went back to Japan to stay with Shiho to welcome our baby into the world together. I had just finished my course work and qualifying exams, so I was able to take some time off from schoolwork. Our daughter, Manami, was born in Tokyo on the morning of January 26, 2013. I stayed with my wife during the delivery. It was a beautiful experience, but I was also struck by the challenge of childbirth. I felt very sorry and powerless that I could not share my wife’s pain. I secretly made a vow: I would make it up to my wife by playing an active role in child care. On my way back from the hospital, I was overjoyed. I could barely sleep the night before, but I was not tired at all. Tokyo’s air was chilly in January, but it felt good. Every little thing I saw on my way home now had a different shape, displaying the beauty of life. As I moved through a crowd near Ueno Park, I even wanted to tell all of these faceless people that I just became a father. I felt that my life was going to change. And indeed, I changed a lot by becoming a father. So did the course of my dissertation.

116     Chapter 6

Attending the childbirth was not the only reason I determined to devote myself to child care. I did not want to become an absentee father like my father. Also, at UHM, I had seen many fathers take care of their kids. I had never seen such fathers at the University of Tokyo, and I was impressed by male professors who took care of kids in their office after school. Most importantly, my wife works full-time as a programmer, and we needed to share household chores. However, after Manami was born, I understood how hard it was to juggle my study and family. After becoming a father, I felt much closer to my father. Perhaps he was struggling, in his own ways, to juggle work and family. I was lucky because I could take unofficial parental leave during the whole spring and summer semesters after the childbirth; even so, my wife and I had hard times. Everything was messy in our home. I could not sleep much day or night, let alone make progress on my research. But this hardship determined the direction of my research. I added the element of “nurturing” to my analysis of fatherhood. I was proud of this choice—my family was, now, one of the implied readers of my dissertation. My choice was also very timely because nurturing fathers were gaining unprecedented attention in early twentieth-first-century Japan. While nurturing fathers started to be recognized in the US as early as the 1970s, Japanese society did not pay much attention to fathers’ roles in child care until the 2000s. In both Japan and the US, nurturing fathers are praised and represented as beautiful while mothers’ child care is deemed natural—the adjective “nurturing” is used only for fathers. In Japan, the term ikumen (イクメン) quickly became popular after it was coined by an advertising agency in the late 2000s. Ikumen is a play on the colloquial word ikemen (イケメン), “good-looking guy”; representing paternal child care as an aesthetic issue, this manufactured terminology suggests that a nurturing father is cool. Child care is not an obligation for a father, but hey, it’ll be great if he plays some role in child-rearing—no matter how limited. Every time this term was applied to me, I felt awkward and frustrated: my wife, who mainly shouldered the burden of child care and constantly supported me to give me time for my research, was rarely praised, whereas I was admired just by picking up my kids from the day care center. I had mixed feelings about nurturing fathers represented in American popular culture as well. On the one hand, I cried watching Kramer vs. Kramer and laughed watching Full House and Growing Pains. To some extent, I identified with nurturing fathers in American culture and saw them

Yohei Sekiguchi     117

as forerunners from whom Japanese fathers should learn. Ironically, I was born in 1980, the same year Kramer vs. Kramer was released in Japan. What if my father had watched the movie when I was born? Was my father absent from my youth because he was not Americanized? On the other hand, it seemed to me that the nurturing father in American culture illuminated a problem rather than a solution. Why does American culture portray child care as white middle-class fathers’ individual struggle? What’s the point of praising single fathers while single mothers were stigmatized in the demise of the welfare state? I gained true inspiration for my dissertation when I reflected on my own ambivalence toward nurturing fathers in American culture. My life changed significantly during the course of writing my dissertation. I came back to Hawai‘i in summer 2013 with Shiho and Manami. Relocation with a six-month-old was not easy, but we gradually got used to living in Honolulu. We had a small wedding ceremony in Hawai‘i Kai in 2014, and we were blessed with another baby; our son, Kou, was born in Honolulu on the morning of April 10, 2015. In total, my wife had a threeyear maternity leave—although maternity leaves are widely available in Japan unlike in the US, a three-year leave is still rather unusual. Thanks to my wife’s understanding and support (and her company generously granting a three-year maternity leave), I could concentrate on my dissertation. I became a father as I wrote my dissertation, and I did my best to play an active role in child care. Establishing authority was not the goal of becoming a father and writing a dissertation. I loved these two very different processes—one private and the other public—because their challenge equally lay in listening to the voice of others. My children’s names are Manami (愛海) and Kou (航). In Japanese, the former means “to love the ocean,” and the latter, “to navigate.” They were born in Japan and Hawai‘i, respectively, and we wished them to build a transnational network someday. It seemed right to give them these names because our names also evoke the image of the ocean—my name is Yohei (洋平), and my wife’s name is Shiho (志帆). The two characters of my wife’s name each represent “will/intention/determination” and “sail”—in other words, “sailing with will.” My name signifies the Pacific Ocean, and my parents gave me this name because my father was on a ship in the Pacific Ocean when I was born. He was, quite literally, building a network— he was laying the submarine optical cable. Celebrating the completion of the transatlantic cable, Walt Whitman proudly sang in Passage to India:

118     Chapter 6

“The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires.” My passage to America started, maybe, when my father built eloquent gentle wires: my father had no interest in the United States, but he still would have wished for “The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near / The lands to be welded together.” I hope that the wires I am building for my kids are eloquent and gentle, like the ones my father constructed for me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Accidental Mirror The Shine and Shatter of My American Dream

Yuko Itatsu

“I wonder what your life would have been like if we hadn’t taken you to America,” my mother asks every once in a while. “I’m not sure,” I reply. It’s a well-rehearsed conversation. I know how it goes. “Your father comes home one day and says the company wants to send him to America. He asked me how I felt about that. It was an immediate yes from me. In fact, I was more excited than your father. It was kismet. I always wanted to live in America, and the opportunity was right in front of us.” “If it weren’t for your father’s job, you wouldn’t have learned English like you did. You probably wouldn’t have become an academic.” “I think my life would have been completely different. I owe everything to you, mom.” It’s a verbal dance that we do. The rhythm is always the same. The content is the same. The outcome is the same. It’s a ritualized recognition of a decision made decades ago that informed my personal identity and my path to becoming an Americanist.

Phase 1: Introduction to the Mirror My family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and lived there for seven years. My mother likes to take credit by saying it was her enthusiasm that propelled our family to L.A. She belongs to the post–World War II baby boom generation and grew up fantasizing about the American lifestyle she 121

122     Chapter 7

saw on television shows. She was fascinated by Jackie Kennedy, who is still her idol. As a young person, my mother had participated in the sister-city exchange with a town in California and loved conversing and writing letters in English. She had a degree in English literature and had obtained teaching credentials for teaching English in middle school. Having gotten married, she quit her job and had become a full-time mother. Moving to the United States was a dream come true for my mother. My father worked for a piano company based in Hamamatsu City in Shizuoka Prefecture. In his mid-thirties he was transferred to the Los Angeles branch, and six months later the rest of us followed. I was three years old, and my brother was one. Most of my memories of the early years come from photos in our family album: that at the airport, I was wearing a blue-and-white frilly dress and had a bouquet; that my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins came to see us off at Haneda Airport; that my paternal grandmother accompanied us to L.A. for a few weeks (or was it a couple of months?) until my mother settled into a routine with young children in the foreign land. My earliest memory independent of any photos is of being in the playground at my preschool. I must have been three or four years old. My memory was of a girl my age tying the bottom of her T-shirt into a knot, which revealed her stomach. One would think I would remember the more dramatic experience of the first day of preschool, where I was dropped off apparently without advance warning of the strange new language. Or the next four days that I supposedly cried, not being able to understand what was being communicated to me. I don’t remember any of that. It is the girl with the long brunette hair and her polka dot T-shirt knot that I remember. We were sitting on the swings next to each other on the playground. She took the bottom of her colorful T-shirt and tied it. Being new to preschool, I couldn’t have been able to communicate much of anything to her, so I probably just stared. I watched, not knowing it was possible to do something like that with one’s clothes. Neither had I registered someone else’s body like that. I felt something—perhaps from seeing the girl’s midriff. It might have been from learning that rearranging one’s clothes can make someone else intrigued. This kind of emotion occurred from time to time, proving to be an inkling for what was to come. For the next seven years, growing up as a typical child in 1970s America, I went to preschool and then the local kindergarten and elementary school in the South Bay Area. Every day, I’d play with my brother in the

Yuko Itatsu     123

backyard, run around inside the house, play fort with the sofa cushions, and ride my bicycle around the neighborhood. I took violin lessons, we traveled to national parks in the summer, and we went to company parties at Christmas. I was also put in a Japanese-language school run by a nearby Christian church, and my brother was put in the Buddhist temple preschool. After my American school, I would be driven to the Japanese school from about 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday. We covered the Japanese national curriculum, learning not just Japanese language but social science and math as well. Even as a child, I remember the influx of expat children joining the school as more desks were added to the classrooms every year. By the early 1980s, the school was bursting at the seams, and it had built a second campus in Palos Verdes. Other than learning this foreign language that my parents spoke, I wasn’t conscious that I was living a so-called expat (or immigrant) life. While some of my friends were from families who had chosen to settle in the States, most of the friends from my Japanese school were expat children. Somehow, though, these expat children seemed to have a different life from mine. Many of their dads worked in big Japanese banks or car companies, and they hailed from big cities in Japan. My expat friends had more Japanese toys than we had and wore more Japanese clothes than we did. They knew more about Japan than I did. They had Rika-chan dolls and Japanese games; my brother and I played with Barbie dolls and Spiderman figures and Connect Four. English was my dominant language, and when I had to speak in Japanese, I just about made myself understood by mixing English and Japanese. It was easy growing up in L.A. I was able to be who I wanted to be. No one told me to be someone else and I loved who I was. At school, the teachers told us how each child was special in their own right, and I believed it. We learned how to read at our own speed; we learned arithmetic at our own individual speed. My brother and I were showered with love from our mother. Of course, we were also scolded regularly for not tidying up, or for getting too rowdy, or for not concentrating on our homework, but it didn’t stop us feeling that we were adored as unique special children. I wasn’t told what I had to wear, what I couldn’t wear. I could wear my corduroy jeans and T-shirts to my heart’s content. I begrudgingly wore my dresses to church on the weekends, but otherwise I could be a tomboy without any worry of judgment. I grew up with the self-confidence I’d want any little girl to have.

124     Chapter 7

But all of this happy-go-lucky self-assurance and confidence was seismically shaken upon my cataclysmic realization that there was another unfamiliar yet inevitable culture within the boundaries of which I would have to function. I was six years old when my family and I visited my grandparents in Japan for a couple of weeks. It was my first time to Japan that I have any memory of, and it was my first experience of culture shock. From the airport, we took the bullet train to Shizuoka. I remember I needed the bathroom, and my grandmother came with me. I didn’t know how to voice my protest in Japanese when she insisted on coming into the bathroom with me. I got even more embarrassed when my grandmother pointed out that what I thought was a toilet seat was something to squat over. I didn’t know there was more than one way to go to the toilet. This bathroom faux pas was just a preview of what was to come in Japan. My guard went up and remained up throughout the trip. One day my brother and I were taken on a tour of the nearby public elementary school. The photos show my brother and me in our Sunday best; I was in a floral one-piece dress, and my brother in a white shirt, tan slacks, and a vest. I was introduced to the children and they to me, but I felt we were alien to each other. Why were these children wearing white smocks during lunchtime? Why were they all wearing the same shoes? Why did they all look the same? I was utterly confused. I observed carefully what was going on with these very uniform children. There were no smiles from me or my brother in the photos of that trip. Not only was everything foreign, but it was utterly puzzling and incomprehensible to us both. We simply couldn’t tune in. We were totally discombobulated. Once we came back from our trip to Japan, I felt at home back in my American school. There were other kids who looked like me, who dressed like me, and who spoke like me. There were other kids in class who had an Asian heritage but spoke English. The Japan trip cemented to me that I was not Japanese but an American with Japanese roots. One time a Japanese girl joined my class in American school. She didn’t speak English, so the teacher designated me the class interpreter to help her understand what was going on. I was the American student who was able to speak Japanese. There was not an inch of me that questioned the American way. Nor did I hear my parents complaining about how Americans did things. In fact, the only complaint I remember hearing about living in Los Angeles was about how tofu came in funny paper cartons. My father loved being in the States and had extended his initial five-year appointment. My father

Yuko Itatsu     125

loved eating steak and playing golf. My mother immersed herself into all kinds of craft making, and Los Angeles was a great place to get tools and materials for leather craft, macramé, and quilting. Whatever discomfort or discrimination my parents must have encountered during our seven years in the 1970s and 1980s, I was certainly oblivious to it. Living in Los Angeles, I knew about needing to be alert to my surroundings, but that was part of anyone’s life as far as I knew. Outside my American school, sometimes there were strange men waiting in their cars as kids left school. A couple of times the men shouted at me across the street to come get in their car. I ran as fast as I could, my backpack swinging sideways as wildly as I scarpered. During recess time at Japanese school, the kids and I knew to stay away from a man who used to hang around the playground fence watching us play dodgeball. He’d tell us to come check out his stickers. Rumor had it that he smeared drugs on them so kids would lick them and then get addicted. Once in a while, my mother would take my brother and me to the Japanese movie theater in Downtown Los Angeles. At the time, the historical Linda Lea Theater in Little Tokyo was in a rundown neighborhood. One afternoon the three of us were on our way home in my mother’s yellow Plymouth. “Lock the door. Right now.” I remember the urgent tone of my mother’s voice as we drove through the Skid Row area. Our return to Japan was a sudden one. When my father’s brother passed away from illness, my father did the dutiful thing as the eldest son and returned to Japan to be near his parents. Despite my first trip to Japan and the short second trip attending my uncle’s funeral, I did not know what to expect from my new life in Japan. In Japan, I felt alien in many ways. First of all, my body felt alien to the new environment. Although I was born in Japan, my body had completely acclimatized to the weather and environment in Southern California. It had become alien to the rural Japanese ecology I found myself in. The first summer back in Shizuoka, mosquitoes took a liking to me and left behind at least fifty bites on each leg. It looked like I had chicken pox—a physical marker of how my body had become a foreign one. In L.A., I had developed skills of detecting danger in the form of perverts and drug dealers. These skills were not transferable in Shizuoka. I needed to develop skills of detecting mosquitoes that hovered around my skin. My language was different. I had diligently learned my Japanese characters and knew how to read Japanese, but somehow it wasn’t functioning. I understood most of the words, but even the mildest forms of local dialect

126     Chapter 7

sounded foreign. There were enough times I couldn’t understand what was being communicated, not because I didn’t understand the words but because I couldn’t comprehend the meaning of these words in the context. Like when our teacher said he was looking for a volunteer to be on the student council, I raised my hand diligently, thinking I wouldn’t mind taking on that role. I didn’t know it was highly irregular for the students to volunteer and that I would be considered too ambitious. My paternal grandparents grew concerned about our foreignness and made it their mission to correct our ways. By the time we had returned to Japan, my paternal grandfather had sold off the company he had built and was offering lessons every day to grown-ups who came for tutelage in calligraphy and tanka poetry. Being the traditionalist, he was also the one who did the flower arrangement in his house and performed tea ceremonies. My grandmother grew up in Yokohama, where her father worked for Royal Dutch Shell. She sometimes talked about all of the imported goods that her father brought home for her. Her taste in Burberry and other fine things from Europe was something she would maintain until she passed away. While my paternal grandfather was trained in traditional Japanese culture, he was also a studious young man who spent his youth studying English and Esperanto. While my grandparents were worldly and appreciated foreignness culturally and artistically, reconciling the foreignness within their grandchildren was a step too far. For about a year while we lived with my grandparents, we learned how to be “proper” Japanese children. Sometimes we received explicit instructions, but most of the time my brother and I learned by watching and mimicking my grandparents, half-jokingly most of the time, and how our parents and visitors acted in front of them. There was an unspoken pressure to conform to how things were done in the Itatsu household. My brother and I knew we had to be obedient, and we did so to keep everyone happy. Once in a while I complained to my mother and brother, but we knew never to complain directly to my grandparents or my father. Learning the ways of the Itatsu family was like learning another culture, which I accepted to keep my standing in the family and our family’s standing in the extended family. School culture was yet another culture that I struggled to accept. I questioned most things at school. I could not believe that the girls went to the bathroom together, that they were constantly doing everything together. I could not believe that everyone had to wear the same gym clothes

Yuko Itatsu     127

and that, moreover, the girls had to wear bloomers, which I absolutely loathed. Why couldn’t I wear shorts? Why did I have to wear these blue form-fitting unflattering things that can only be described as a second layer of underwear? Why did only the girls have to worry about their underwear showing out of the bloomers? Why did I have to learn the otherwise useless skill of how to use my index fingers to scoop just the bloomer around my bottom to make sure my underwear was not showing? It was also incomprehensible to me that we had to take responsibility for other people’s actions. One day all forty students in the class had to create a single file and get double-slapped on the cheeks by the teacher because a few of my classmates had goofed off during cleaning time. (This remains the only time I have been slapped on my face, for which I am clearly still holding a grudge.) Neither could I believe I had to wear a helmet to school. An imminent threat of Mount Fuji erupting and a major earthquake accompanying it was a major concern, so all children in our city had to wear a white emergency helmet walking to school. It made no sense to me as I walked through the rice paddies. What were the odds of a boulder falling on my head in the middle of the rice field nearly one hundred kilometers from Mount Fuji? Every morning the pigtails that my mother had just done up for me got smushed by the helmet as I headed off to school. One particular incident shocked me to my core and further fueled my lifelong resentment toward conformity. It was early summer in fifth grade. My teacher told me to cut my long hair. I could not believe that a teacher had the right to demand something like that. Her reason was that my long hair wouldn’t dry properly after swimming in PE class. I couldn’t believe my human rights could be so easily violated for such an insignificant reason. I told my mother when I got home. She was not impressed, but we respected the authority of the teacher. My mother had always cut my hair until that point, but she took me to my first hair salon visit for this big cut. As I sat in the cutting chair distraught, I vowed never to grow my hair out again as a reminder of this moment. As an eleven-yearold, I felt my dignity being violated and developed a deep resentment ­toward the unreasonable expectations that society imposed on me. In Shizuoka, I was an outlier from the beginning and continued to be. Returnees were still rare in small-town Shizuoka in the early eighties, and I was gawked at like a panda in a zoo. Kids from other classrooms came to take a look at the new odd kid during recess. Say something in English for me. Can you sign your name in English for me? Can you write

128     Chapter 7

my name in English? I got used to classmates asking me for autographs. They weren’t interested in me as a person; they were just interested in the novelty and oddity that I was. Any kind of merit or qualities I might have possessed as an individual were all overwritten by the fact that I had lived abroad. I became suspicious of people who wanted to be my friend. Throughout my teenage years, I learned how not to stand out. Every time I had to give an answer in English class, I had to think about how much I should roll my r’s or try to give it a slight hint of a Japanese accent. I learned not to speak out of turn. I felt displaced, confined, and suffocated. A yearning for the life we left in Los Angeles grew in proportion to my resentment toward the confinement that was small-town Shizuoka. While I observed and learned to identify the behavior patterns of this small community of seventy thousand, I could not make myself a part of it. I missed sorely the individualism, diversity, creativity, and basic human rights that were valued in Los Angeles. Another thing I desperately missed in Shizuoka was access to popular culture. My parents had taken full advantage of being in Los Angeles and took us to see a wide range of mass entertainment, from spectator sports to the arts. We went to lots of classical music concerts; I remember seeing musicians such as Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. My brother and I liked practicing different kinds of clapping when the applause started. I enjoyed being a part of a crowd like that. I enjoyed the way the audience reacted to these musical performances or at sports events. In those moments, it didn’t matter who we were; we became one by appreciating something special. Musical theater was my favorite. I remember buzzing for weeks after seeing the national tour of Annie. We listened to the sound track on vinyl endlessly. I also remember seeing A Chorus Line. Though I was eight or nine and way too young to understand everything, I could tell grown-ups were talking about grown-up things that were inappropriate for children to hear. Nonetheless, it was clear that these characters were singing about their desire to be seen for who they were. What I loved about American musical theater was the unapologetic optimism and audacity in seeking a truthful existence. This resonated with what I loved about America. Having had such a big dose of commercial entertainment in Los Angeles, the sudden drop in what was available in Shizuoka had an unexpected impact. Going to see Hollywood movies became an act of nostalgia for me. When E.T. came out, it resonated with me how this extraterrestrial being was misunderstood in an alien culture, but just as meaningful was being

Yuko Itatsu     129

reminded of the imagery of American houses and suburban life in my little town’s movie theater in rural Japan. When I was seventeen, I won a satellite dish at an English speech contest, and my parents happily got it installed. Around the same time, my parents bought a VHS video player, and a new video rental shop opened in our neighborhood. The arrival of these forms of media created a crack in the glass box confinement of small-town Shizuoka and allowed me to breathe in the outside world again. I was allowed to watch English-language news, documentaries, and movies for hours on end, all in the name of improving my English. I was aware I had outgrown the ten-year-old vocabulary with which I had left the States. I felt the people I saw in the movies and on the television shows had more in common with me than the people around me in Shizuoka. These characters had a similar mentality to mine; many of them were interested in defining their happiness and believed in living truthfully. There was an innate belief in justice, as the “good guys” always won at the end. In these imageries, I sought and found the American values that I missed. The countless hours of watching images of American life formed the foundation for me to become interested in speech pragmatics and discourse in the English language, cultural representation, and popular culture and media. When it came time to apply to universities, leaving Shizuoka was a nobrainer. By that time, it was clear to my family and me that some kind of study using my English ability was the way forward. My career goals were still rather vague, but I was interested in translating English into Japanese. I noticed a person called Natsuko Toda had done many of the subtitles for Hollywood movies, and I wanted to do her job. I also imagined myself becoming an English teacher at that point, so knew I needed to get teaching credentials while at university. I also remember watching university professors on television, reading their opinions in the newspaper, and vaguely thinking that would be a “cool respectable job as a woman,” but it did not occur to me that becoming an academic could actually be in the cards for me. I chose a number of universities where I could study the English language or American culture and, in the end, chose Tsuda College (now Tsuda University). My family knew of Tsuda’s good reputation in English education. We never explicitly discussed the choice of attending a single-sex institution, but I would not be surprised if they quietly thought it was a safer place for a woman to thrive. My life at Tsuda was everything I had hoped for. I met professors who were experts in American culture and English, and I felt an immediate

130     Chapter 7

affinity with them since I thought they spoke my language and I imagined they would understand my frustration. I enjoyed my classes and did well. In my first year, one of the professors took me aside and told me about an exchange program with Bryn Mawr College. It built my confidence and made me strive to do better. When it became time to choose a specific emphasis within the English Department, I chose American Studies. It was partly based on my naive assumption that I had an inherent understanding of the subject matter, and partly based on my conviction that the US was more culturally progressive and worth learning from. While taking my classes and seminars in American Studies, I gradually came to think I wanted to pursue the subject professionally. I thought I’d be able to find a community that had something in common with me. Although I had a growing awareness of my attraction to people of my own sex, I didn’t really know what it was or what I was. What I did know was that I had a better chance of finding a community in the States that would understand me. This drew me to learn more about cultural politics and identity politics in the US. I gravitated toward the study of social movements and fantasized about how the strategies could be applied to instigate societal change in Japan. However, I was not brave enough to actually delve into identity politics when it came to choosing my thesis topic. I decided to work on something that masked my true interests. Having just moved to Tokyo, I found that the difference between the urban built environments of Los Angeles and Tokyo was also something that interested me. I decided to do my graduation thesis on homelessness and social welfare programs.

Phase 2: The Truth Serum on the Mirror If my first seven years in the States was purely accidental, the second time living there was encouraged and intentional. The yearning for my lost American life and encouragement from a mentor at Tsuda led to a year at Bryn Mawr College during my senior year. An exchange program between these two institutions made my ten-month stay possible. The founder of my school, Umeko Tsuda, had studied at this liberal arts college for women from 1889 to 1892. Tsuda had been part of a bold endeavor by the Japanese government to send five girls to the US to learn the American modern ways. She became a success story as she finished all of her education in the US and subsequently founded a college for women in Tokyo. The exchange program between Tsuda and Bryn Mawr allowed for one student to study

Yuko Itatsu     131

overseas every year. I saw this as an opportunity to return home to America, somewhere I could belong. Chosen to be the delegate for my year, I was determined to do well in my “natural habitat.” With my father passing away from cancer six months earlier, I had a new appreciation of the solitary existence that was the human experience. I felt alone in the world and wanted to sculpt my own life’s landscape. This naive optimism of returning home was quickly met with great disappointment and indeed shock. The sense of homecoming was nowhere to be found in Pennsylvania. This turned out to be the first time I felt like a racial minority. Bryn Mawr is located in an affluent area in the suburbs of Philadelphia with 90 percent of the community Caucasian. It was the sort of Rockwellian community where the local newspaper reported a story about a burglary at a house in which a set of silver spoons had gone missing. At the time, the students at Bryn Mawr were also mostly white, and the Asian students were mostly foreigners rather than Asian American. There was one African American student among the entire student population, but she left school after a while. The cleaning staff in the dorms and kitchen staff in the cafeteria were overwhelmingly African American. On moving day at the Bryn Mawr dorm, we all gradually congregated in the hallway and an impromptu mixer ensued. Someone started talking about the television show The Brady Bunch. I was elated inside. This is where I belonged. These people had the same kind of upbringing in the States. I felt a sense of returning to a place I was meant to be. Mid-conversation, a couple of people started singing the theme song. The chorus grew, and there was a rousing group singing in unison. But once I realized I didn’t know all the words like everyone else, I was left with a sense of being in between cultures again. The Bryn Mawr experience threw a wrench into what the US had symbolized for me all this time. The idea of individualism, freedom, and liberation from socially conservative norms still held true, but I certainly didn’t feel part of this community in the wealthy white suburbs of Philadelphia. Quickly, I realized my knowledge of America was limited and partial. I didn’t understand the historical references or the literary references that kids my age knew from high school. When I didn’t know something, professors or friends would assume it was because I was Japanese. At the beginning, I felt hurt for being excluded from the society with which I assumed I was more in sync. I became rather socially reclusive as I realized the vast gap between myself and others.

132     Chapter 7

Eventually I gave in. To compensate for my lack of American knowledge, I became increasingly Japanese. If I had written a poor essay, it was because I was an ESL student. If I did poorly on a course on the millennial history of architecture in Western civilization, I gave myself the excuse that it was because I hadn’t gone to high school in America. I heard about a TA job in the Japanese-language program at nearby Haverford College, so I applied and ran the drill sessions for a semester. I used this TA job to appease my ego and justify my worth. I knew it was a cop-out to reach into such basic skills to feel my worth, but at the same time, it was a necessary defense mechanism to avoid feeling completely inept and hitting rock bottom. Having gone to a women’s college in Tokyo, I was already familiar with a single-sex environment. At Bryn Mawr, however, I was also faced with an eye-opening education on sexuality during my exchange year. I had come to a campus where women dating other women was normal. I also heard rumors that one-third of the students at Bryn Mawr were gay. Veracity of the numbers aside, it was certainly a paradigm shift for me to be in a place where young gay women were not made to conceal their sexuality. On campus, I saw lots of hugging, hand-holding, and pecks on cheeks, but I couldn’t tell whether they were just being friendly or whether they were stronger demonstrations of affection. I looked for subtle signs of difference so I could avoid making a faux pas by misunderstanding people’s intentions. I paid attention to how these women interacted and took note of the dating rituals between women. One day, queer author Rita Mae Brown came to visit our freshman seminar and discussed lesbianism in literature. I couldn’t believe that this was a topic that could be discussed in a class. I became hypersensitive to my behavior; I worried that anything I sputtered out in the class would give away my secret. But at the same time, I desperately wanted this queer author to know I was gay too. I tried to be as still as possible and not try to give away my excitement. At the same time, I hung onto every word Miss Brown said and gazed at her intently, hoping she might be able to pick up my stealth message. It was the first time I experienced queer culture being legitimized and normalized in an educational setting. Without the Bryn Mawr experience, I don’t know if I would have allowed myself to dream of happiness as a queer woman. Having found myself at Bryn Mawr was empowering, but now I had the problem of not knowing what to do with my newly established sexual identity as I headed back home to Japan. Coming out to my family was

Yuko Itatsu     133

inconceivable. I needed to undo what I had experienced and go back into the closet. I needed to reprogram myself. So rather than hopping on a plane, I decided to go on a train journey from New York to Los Angeles and buy myself some time. I boarded the Amtrak Crescent from New York City. Since the sleeper cars were already all booked, I traveled in coach. Thirty hours later, I got off at New Orleans, stretched my legs for a few days, and then took the Amtrak Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles, another forty-eight-hour ride in coach. While the train ride ended up being more expensive than a plane ride, the terrestrial trip was an important way for me to buy time and space to reflect on what had happened over the past ten months. It was also a way to experience what else was out there on the American continent, beyond the East Coast and California. Bryn Mawr had unhinged me; I needed to remember who I was before. The Bryn Mawr experience had also devastatingly proven to me that the United States was not the home I had thought it once was. But it provided me with the opportunity to recalibrate my place and identity in the world. Bryn Mawr taught me that I did not have to belong to anywhere or anything.

Phase 3: Questioning the Mirror If the first time living in America was accidental and the second time was encouraged, the third time was on my own terms. While researching the social welfare system in the US was a meaningful experience, I felt increasingly hypocritical continuing this line of research. The more I learned about the precarious conditions in which working-class and poverty-stricken families were living, the less confident I felt of the impact I could have with my scholarship. It had started out as a noble calling to study low-income housing and the government’s role in securing shelter for all people, but it was not the calling for me. While studying the representation of minorities in Hollywood movies and thinking about the power of cinema, popular culture became my next topic. In the late 1990s, it was still difficult to find a Japanese PhD program in American Studies with an emphasis on popular culture. Therefore, I decided to study abroad again. All but one of the doctoral programs I applied to were on the East Coast, where I had hoped to redeem myself after Bryn Mawr. However, in the end, the History Department at the University of Southern California (USC) seemed like the best choice for the academic training I wanted as well as the archival work I wanted to do.

134     Chapter 7

In the summer of 2000, I started my studies at USC with funding from the Fulbright Commission and the College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ). CWAJ was founded in 1949 by Japanese and American alumnae of Mount Holyoke College coming together to raise funds to enable Japanese students to study in the US. I felt the gravity of and responsibility to the history of their sisterhood as I received their travel grant designated for female students. In a way, this new chapter of my life was a neat story of a return pilgrimage to Los Angeles. A former expat child returning to her roots to study American history. My hopes had been reined in, as the Bryn Mawr experience had taught me to be cautious with my expectations of returning “home.” The first year in particular, I had difficulty speaking up in graduate seminars and became the stereotypically quiet Japanese student. I didn’t have the vocabulary or spontaneity needed to quickly interject a comment with logic, accuracy, and nuance. It would take about five years to feel fully confident in debating with my peers. During my seven years at USC, I finally came to terms with my cultural identity. I learned my race and ethnicity were fluid and changed many times during the day. If I went to the bank or rented a car, I passed as an American. If I went to Koreatown for a meal with friends, I passed as Asian American. If I went to a gathering in the Japanese American community, I was a short-term international student from Japan. If I went to the Tsuda alumni lunch in L.A., I was an expat–exchange student hybrid. Sometimes I chose to perform certain faces for a desired outcome. Other times, I succumbed to expectations that were imposed on me. And still other times, I challenged expectations. Often on the transpacific flights, I played (slightly mean) games with the flight attendants as they tried to look for clues as to whether they should speak to me in English or Japanese. Stereotypical assumptions followed me, as they did for others. In my second year at USC, I was given a teaching assistantship, but it was for an introductory-level Japanese history course. I was grateful, of course, but had mixed feelings about the course assignment. I suppose my name and physical appearance lent a kind of authenticity for the students, and I was meant to feel more confident about the subject matter because of my presumed knowledge. During my years at USC, America wobbled on the pedestal it occupied in my mind. September 11, George W. Bush, Iraq. There was a vulnerability that the US revealed; it was raw and entirely unsettling. Every summer when I renewed my student visa, visiting the immigration desk at

Yuko Itatsu     135

the American Embassy reminded me of my alien status. Every summer as friends and colleagues arrived to Los Angeles, we encountered all shades of xenophobia, racism, classism, sexism, and ageism. Seeing American society, warts and all, meant that I no longer felt compelled to hold the US in a place of superiority. I became increasingly critical of America’s self-projected image of being the city upon a hill. The great American experiment had lost its aura, but at the same time it presented a contradictory source of personal solace for pursuing self-authenticity. In the last decade or so, two events have contributed to making my American experience even less absolute. One was marrying a Brit and learning the values of her culture. The similarity in language masked the steep (and unexpected) learning required to understand British humility, conversational rhythm, and self-deprecating humor. The premium put on pursuing individual freedom was nowhere to be seen among my new circle of British friends and family, who found the blind pursuit of such freedom, self-promotion, and superlatives to be somewhat embarrassing and self-indulgent. The second was getting a job as an academic at the University of Tokyo; my first position was working primarily alongside international faculty. Among my Australian and British colleagues, I was the sole American accent. As the program grew and more faculty members were hired internationally, the relativity of my American experience became more obvious. Our discussion on standards and ethics led me to two discoveries. The first was finding that American higher education no longer convincingly occupied the place as the natural leader, and this created doubts about the reasons for conducting business in an American fashion. My second discovery was perhaps more serious. At work, I’ve been made acutely aware that Anglicization, Americanization, and globalization often get bundled into one big sore subject. It’s easy to conflate these things, as I’ve certainly done so myself. Sometimes it starts with departments or faculties getting frustrated when international students and faculty don’t follow rules and regulations, while refusing to allocate a budget to translate these documents into English in the first place. Occasionally rules are translated into English, but this is still ineffective because they have no apparent logic unless one understands the idiosyncrasies of Japanese norms. Explaining the norms more explicitly causes unpleasantness because Japanese staff and faculty are forced not only to reflect on their practice but to defend it. God forbid that Japanese rules are challenged for expediency, efficacy, or transparency or, even worse, merely to indulge Western practices. It is

136     Chapter 7

difficult separating the move toward Anglicization from the values that English-speaking countries impose. The conversation occurs regularly, but with different actors and in different contexts. A messy set of emotions quietly festers among both Japanese and international members of the university. Navigating one’s way through this delicate institutional ebb and flow of emotions has affected in turn the way I assess my pragmatic American ways. The first set of human values I learned were in America and through the English language. The belief in individual liberty for all through the creation of an inclusive society remains one of my core values. The appeal of the American experiment for me has been that these values form the ideological mainstay for contesting the status quo and seeking further inclusivity. The US has effectively served as my mirror, a constant in my life that I’ve used to reflect on myself and society. When the US starts to question these fundamental values and is no longer willing, or indeed able, to represent them to the world, my US-learned pragmatism yields an ease in which I am able to place my respect of Americanism on a metaphorically sacrificial altar and look elsewhere, seeking new horizons where these values are upheld, albeit at varying degrees of success. Truly, as the US staggers toward shattering its standing on the global political stage, I am forced to reluctantly look for mirrors elsewhere, beyond the looking glass I have held unquestionably and so dearly for so long.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An Americanist from a Different Shore, and Gazing Back at Japan Hiroshi Kitamura

Why did I become a scholar of US history? As I meditate on this question, three “moments” come to mind. First was my childhood. Born in Japan in 1971, I was raised in an “Americanized” household that exposed me to US culture and life from a young age. This cultivated my early fascination with the United States. The second moment came during college, when I decided to pursue the study of American society and culture. This led me to quit my Japanese university in the early 1990s and spend thirteen years as a student in the United States. The third moment emerged when I decided to look for a teaching position in the US. This resulted in a full-time, tenure-eligible job at the College of William & Mary, where I continue to teach today. Unlike most Americanist scholars who were born and raised in Japan, I have chosen to live in the United States. But in America, I share a common experience with many people around me, as I grapple with my hybrid identity. Earlier in my life, my liminal self was largely shaped by engaging and imagining the United States from the other side of the Pacific, but now I think of my in-betweenness by gazing back at Japan. As an observer of two societies, I find genuine attempts to build a mutual understanding, but cultural gaps continue to exist. I particularly worry about the future of Japan and its relationship to the wider world. ***

137

138     Chapter 8

I originate from a household that was heavily influenced by the United States. My father, Takao Kitamura, was a professor of English and African American literature. Born and raised in the countryside of Gifu Prefecture, he first became an English teacher before receiving a Fulbright fellowship to study in the United States. After completing his education at Austin College in Sherman, Texas (BA) and Howard University (MA), he taught at Chuo University and Nagoya Gakuin University. My mother, Mitsuyo Kitamura, was also an academic. A proud Kyoto native, she studied at Stout State College in Menomonie, Wisconsin (currently University of Wisconsin–Stout), and Hope College in Holland, Michigan, to earn her BA. During her time in Michigan, she became interested in Spanish language and culture. After graduation, she worked as a teaching assistant for a year at Washington State University before returning to Japan, where she became a professor of Spanish at Aoyama Gakuin University. Later, she left the academy to become a cookbook author and food critic—a job she relishes today. My parents cultivated a strong admiration for the United States. As devout Christians, my father and his family suffered from bullying and harassment by the military police during World War II. After Japan surrendered to the Allies and American GIs started to arrive, he was elated. Once he reached the United States to begin his studies, he marveled at the big homes, the shiny cars, and the huge scoops of ice cream that were served after dinner. He was also touched by the kindness of scholars, writers, and families who hosted his stay, supported his research, and cherished longterm friendships (one of them was Langston Hughes). Also a Christian, my mother became lifelong friends with the family of a congregational minister who offered her a room to stay in exchange for household work. One summer evening, she participated in a cookout hosted by a friend’s church. There she encountered the dill pickle, which reminded her of Japanese tsukemono pickles. It later served as an inspiration for her to raise Western herbs in her garden and launch her culinary career. Having appreciated the fruits of their cross-cultural experience, my parents wanted me to live a life that would crisscross the Pacific. So when I was born, they named me “Hiroshi” with a kanji character that signifies “ocean.” They also attempted a multilingual education. From the moment I entered this world, my father spoke to me only in English, and my mother in Spanish. Though polyglot families do exist in many parts of the world, hearing three languages spoken in a Japanese household in the 1970s was quite rare; my parents, in fact, called their act an “experiment.” But thanks

Hiroshi Kitamura     139

to this bold endeavor, I learned English and Spanish even before Japanese, which I first picked up from my grandparents. Perhaps for this reason, though, my ability to speak Japanese was quite poor early on—and Japanese (kokugo) became one of my weakest subjects at school. My friends sometimes called me “foreigner” (gaijin) for speaking different languages. But growing up in this rather unusual household, I quickly became fond of American popular culture. When I was a little child, I remember clinging to our tiny television set, week after week, to watch Sesame Street. Shortly after entering first grade, I begged my father to take me to the movies with my friends to see Star Wars. My jaw dropped when I saw a giant battleship chase down a tiny spaceship in the film’s opening scene. While I did read a lot of Japanese manga, I had a craving for American comic books. I treasured the anthologies of Mickey Mouse, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. My exposure to America increased in other ways. Since my parents often invited international visitors for meals and overnight stays, I made friends with many Americans from early on (and had a chance to converse with them in English). I was also blessed with the opportunity to visit the United States. During the summer of second grade, I traveled to the United States for the first time with family. I remember climbing the Empire State Building, trekking the arid paths of the Grand Canyon, and losing the battle to consume a giant hamburger. My second visit happened in fifth grade, when my father received another Fulbright to teach at Austin College. I accompanied him for the full year and attended a local elementary school in Texas. It was a nerve-racking experience at first, but I soon made many friends. I had a blast playing kickball and touch football. In spite of my rather unusual upbringing, I did live a “normal life” in Japan. I enjoyed my years in elementary school and attended a local (public) middle school. Like others around me, I donned a standard black uniform for boys, hopped on a train every morning, studied during class hours, and played during recess. I also joined the school’s newspaper committee and became involved in publishing the school paper. In high school, I played team handball for a few months until falling ill. In my senior year I became the class leader of the school’s athletic meet, which was a year-long responsibility. I studied hard for the college entrance exam and went to prep school like my peers did. By some stroke of luck, I was accepted to Keio University and started commuting to its newly built Shōnan Fujisawa campus. ***

140     Chapter 8

The turning point came during my first year of college. For a few months, I was enjoying life at Keio, where I joined the first group of students who studied environmental and information studies (kankyō jōhō gaku). I remember the fresh air and the shiny chairs in brand-new lecture halls; I enjoyed getting to know new professors and spending downtime with new friends. But there was something unsatisfying about the experience. For one thing, I did not think that the school’s academic climate was as impressive as its reputation. The size of the classes was huge, and it was not hard to get good grades without studying much. Also, I quickly realized that I wanted to learn more about the United States and that the program I had joined was not an ideal place to pursue my studies. When I vented this frustration to my parents, they urged me to apply for colleges in the United States. I was admitted to three schools and decided to attend the best school that accepted me: Carleton College. Carleton is located in Northfield, Minnesota—a small town thirty-five miles south of Minneapolis. The summers are beautiful and pleasant, but the winters are brutally cold and harsh. The town, perhaps best known for a failed bank raid by Jesse James, has a short main street and not much more. But my four years at this small college in Minnesota was a transformative experience. The school’s academic culture was stimulating beyond imagination. Thanks to its well-run liberal arts curriculum, I was able to take a range of classes—in literature, history, sociology, anthropology, art, political science, media studies, and economics—and loved every one of them. It is no surprise that my favorite courses involved American Studies, which soon became my major. I fondly recall Wayne Carver’s freshman seminar on the literature of the American West, Cliff Clark’s lectures on America in the 1890s, Mike Kowalewski’s reading course on the “visions of California,” Ann Braude’s survey of religion in the United States, and Harry Williams’ pioneering class on hip-hop music. Coursework was intense and demanding. I spent many days and weekends at the library, rubbing my fatigued eyes. But the professors were friendly and supportive, and I gained confidence as the weeks went by. Carleton students were bright and articulate. Since I was accustomed to the classroom environment in Japan, where students primarily listened to the teacher’s lectures and took notes, I was shocked at first to witness how energetically students would debate others, including professors. Many of them were also active in sports, art, music, and other cultural activities. Some volunteered for churches and community organizations—which I seldom saw among my peers in Japan. Most remarkable was their involvement

Hiroshi Kitamura     141

in politics. During my first year on campus, the trial in r­esponse to the Rodney King beating was ongoing. Immediately after the policemen were acquitted and riots erupted across US cities, a group of students called for a boycott of classes to demand that the school hire and admit more people of color. Multiple assemblies, amplified by megaphones and speakers, took place and attracted crowds. While I sympathized with the cause, I was stunned to see the ways in which students so vigorously mobilized against a campus that already seemed to be working hard to diversify its community. The years I spent in Minnesota were stressful but fulfilling. I also became convinced that I wanted to continue my studies on US culture and society. This inspired me to look into graduate programs in American Studies, literature, and history. During my senior year, while writing a thesis on the literary imaginings of the American West, I submitted applications to a handful of schools, and I decided to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Wisconsin attracted me in part because it had an excellent program in US history and because living costs in Madison were affordable. Wisconsin also had Paul Boyer, whose By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age explored the widespread influence of atomic discourse in the United States during the first five years after Little Boy exploded over the city of Hiroshima. Although I was interested in US culture in general, this study made me think that I could pursue a cross-cultural project that could bridge the Pacific. Professor Boyer kindly agreed to serve as my graduate adviser. Madison was an ideal place for graduate study. Among the classes I took, two particularly stood out. One was Boyer’s seminar on US cultural/ intellectual history, which opened my eyes to a wide variety of topics that could be explored in scholarship, from religious tracts to toys and photography. The other was Tom McCormick’s course on US foreign relations. Although I was not aware when I first joined the program, Wisconsin was famous for the study of diplomacy and international relations (aka the “Wisconsin school”), and I had the opportunity to study with a doyen of the field. I made the decision to write my dissertation about Hollywood’s influence on Japan during the Allied occupation (1945–1952). The project dealt with a topic that I was truly passionate about—the movies. It also gave me an opportunity to explore questions surrounding US power. Since my days as a young child, I was aware that my everyday life in Japan was saturated with “things American,” but during my teenage years I started to wonder why this was the case. Why did US presidents and their policy decisions

142     Chapter 8

become front-page newspaper headlines in Japan? Why did my friends and I crave McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken? Why was America “cool” in the eyes of many Japanese? Why was there so much “America” in an island nation six thousand miles away from the United States? It seemed to me that an answer to these questions could be found in the occupation era, the only time in which my home country was governed by a foreign power. I also thought that the power wielded by the United States involved not only economic and security policy but also the spread of culture—which was starting to gain deeper attention in the field of US foreign relations. I thus embarked on this project with excitement, eager to chronicle US and Japanese perspectives, government and social action, and the meanings of films in relation to their surrounding contexts. The project took me to archives in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki. In Japan I interviewed over fifty people—critics, fans, and former employees of US studios—and learned a lot on local attitudes and feelings. Eventually, I was able to complete my dissertation, which a few years later was published as a book entitled Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan. *** Working on this research project was fun and exciting. More important, it emboldened me to look for an academic job in the United States. This decision, however, was far from typical. Normally, international students from Japan would return home after completing their degrees. This is true for most undergraduates, even for those who attend a US institution for four years. Graduate students, too, tend to migrate back to Japan, since there is likely a better chance of securing a job there, especially with a US degree. As for myself, I was purely excited to pursue an academic career in the United States. Also, I no longer had institutional connections with Japanese universities, after withdrawing from Keio. I thus decided to try the US market and go back to Japan if things did not pan out. The job search was tough. During the first year, I applied to a number of schools but did not get any nibbles. However, my efforts took place when the field of US diplomatic history was undergoing a major transformation. Originally focused on state-level policy making, the field was opening its doors to the study of private actors, transnational flows, and “bottom-up” approaches. Instead of looking predominantly at economics, security, and high-level

Hiroshi Kitamura     143

politics, it also turned to such subjects as race, gender, women, popular culture, and consumption. In addition to looking at US perspectives, scholars increasingly turned their attention to non-US viewpoints, particularly by relying on international archives and foreign-language sources. “Diplomatic history” was turning into what is now known as “America in the world.” The rise of the “America in the world” field made me feel that my study on Hollywood’s global expansion had an intellectual home. I also thought that my “foreignness” could be used as an asset. In my application materials and campus interviews, I stressed that my research would bring an international dimension to US history through extensive use of Japanese-language sources. I argued that my cross-cultural education and training would enable me to deliver a unique perspective on US history. During my second year in the job market, a handful of search committees interviewed me, and I eventually landed a one-year teaching job at SUNY Oswego. A year later, I received a job offer for a tenure-eligible position at the College of William & Mary. At William & Mary, I was hired to teach “America in the world.” However, I also attempted to “globalize” the study of US history. As I was beginning my professional career, a growing number of Americanists, led by Thomas Bender, were reconceptualizing the study of US history by integrating international and transnational perspectives. I agreed with these historians that slavery in the American South could be usefully juxtaposed with South African apartheid, or that the civil rights movement in the US needs to be seen as both an international and a domestic phenomenon, or that US immigration operated in a larger dynamic of global population flows. In an attempt to impart to students a wider intellectual lens, I not only introduced comparative and international examples but also used my outsider status to provoke students. After announcing that I was born and raised in Japan, I would ask the class to define “America” for me (a foreigner!), explain who is included and excluded in that definition, and how that idea has changed (or not changed) over time. These became great conversation starters, and I challenged students to offer their answers by the end of the semester. I also developed topical courses that could not be contained by national boundaries, one of which is called the Nuclear World. The class begins with British science fiction writer H. G. Wells’ novel The World Set Free (1914), which is said to have anticipated the nuclear age. It then turns to the atomic bombings of Japan, the nuclear arms race, nuclear power, and nuclear terrorism unfolding in multiple continents. One of my favorite

144     Chapter 8

assignments is a role-play paper on the atomic bomb and the end of World War II. Its setting is July 1945, after the US successfully tests its nuclear weapons in New Mexico but before they are used against the last Axis power standing. Students are tasked with writing a personal letter to President Truman, expressing their opinions on how to deal with the new creation. Should the US wield them against Japan? If so, why, where, how, and how many? If not, on what grounds do you oppose the idea? Students can choose to become a scientist, a military officer, or a policy maker, but their opinions have to be their own. Each time, the assignment provokes a range of reactions. Usually, about a third of the students support the decision in one way or another, another third opposes it, and the rest fall in between. Courses like the Nuclear World have taught me the importance of working with multiple disciplines. Of course, touting interdisciplinarity is nothing new; in fact, I would like to think that all of us in the academic world today are interdisciplinary in some way. However, efforts to crossfertilize across intellectual fields have been rather uneven. In American Studies, for example, scholars tend to exchange ideas within the humanities but less with the social sciences (to say nothing of the natural sciences). Since the “America in the world” field does engage social scientists in a major way (political science and international relations), I am often reminded of this lopsidedness—for example, when attending the annual conference of the American Studies Association. Interestingly, the intellectual dynamic is different in the Japanese Association for American Studies, which involves a much larger presence of diplomacy and foreign policy experts. The persistence of disciplinary divides has driven me to work with the international relations program on my campus, more specifically by teaching a sophomore course in international relations. Structured as a string of guest lectures from government, economics, history, sociology, and other departments, the course exposes students to diverse approaches and methods, from classic international relations theories, to historical narratology, to formalism in economics, to global ethnography in sociology. While gaining a lot from diverse guest lectures, I strive to present a humanities approach to the study of international politics and foreign policy. I thus introduce my research agenda by requiring students to watch a North Korean feature film and write a paper on what could be learned about that country via cultural propaganda. The course has taught me that there are challenges but fruitful opportunities for cultivating new knowledge by bringing multiple disciplines into dialogue.

Hiroshi Kitamura     145

In the meantime, I have used food to explore international relations. Since I started my studies in the US, I had been bothered by the abundance of unhealthy food and waste in the United States. At Carleton’s cafeterias, I was shocked to encounter “food fights,” large and small, especially in light of the pervasiveness of poverty and social inequality (thereby reminding me of a Japanese academic’s remark that “a third of the First World is the Third World”). More recently I was struck when a teacher at my daughter’s day care center used dried macaroni for an art project. When I read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, I realized that the problem may be rooted in industrialization and the exponential growth of the fast-food business, which seemed to exacerbate a wide variety of social problems, from economic inequality to obesity and poor health. This issue, I thought, needs to become a classroom subject. As an “America in the world” scholar, I came to think that the fast-food phenomenon could be usefully explored by juxtaposing it with “slow food”—an international countermovement that promotes local foods, healthful eating, and the deceleration of our pace of life. I thus decided to use my class to offer a sample of “fast” and “slow” items—bread, ham, and cheese—and ask students to analyze the look, taste, texture, and smell of these products. Students responded by identifying underlying patterns in the two categories: among other things, the former tended to be uniform in taste and easy to consume, while the latter offered complexity and richness that made it suitable to eat “slowly.” To explore the taste dynamic more closely, I obtained a fellowship to take three students to northern Italy—the birthplace of the slow food movement—and visited producers of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, prosciutto ham, and organic wine. The experience in Italy enriched our views on food culture and the food economy. It confirmed that “taste” is a social construction and that culinary choices are made in a wider matrix of globalization. *** The years of teaching in the United States have inspired me to explore the nation’s history from international and global viewpoints. They have also driven me to meditate on US-Japan relations from an American perspective. During my days as a youth, I looked to the United States as a Japanese. But as I tend to my daily life in America, I not only cast my gaze on Japan from

146     Chapter 8

the other side but also think about how Americans view the Japanese. How do people in the US make sense of Japan? Do Americans have a deep understanding of the Japanese? Have their thoughts and beliefs changed over time? My answers to these questions are mixed. On the one hand, Americans today seem to be nothing but fond of Japan and the Japanese. Every day, we see Honda and Toyota automobiles zipping by on the streets. People in cities and towns savor Japanese food—from sushi and nori seaweed to Wagyu beef. Young people crave anime shows, manga volumes, and video games. Japanese professionals—such as Ichiro Suzuki, Naomi Osaka, Masaharu Morimoto, and Marie Kondo—have become popular celebrities (I was once surprised to see Morimoto on a huge billboard in Las Vegas, promoting his restaurants). Being on a US campus, one cannot help but notice this public fascination with Japan, as students sit in language and content classes, gather for seasonal festivals, and visit Japan for leisure and study. Upon graduation, some even seek work opportunities in Japan as teachers, researchers, and business employees. On the other hand, a noticeable gap still divides us along the Pacific. Well into the twenty-first century, images of Japan as a strange and mysterious place continue to shape US viewpoints. Movies and TV shows continue to carry Japanese stereotypes. With curiosity and wonder, US journalists report on Japanese soccer fans collecting trash in the stadium after the game or ordinary citizens not looting in the streets in the wake of a major earthquake or disaster. I feel the rift on a more personal level, living in Williamsburg, Virginia—an area where people of Asian origin are small in number. For a few years after I started teaching, librarians at the checkout counter mistook me for a student. At the supermarket or the doctor’s office, I am still mistaken for a Chinese or Korean person. My daughter once complained that a kid in her school directed a slant-eyed gesture against her. Thus, while teaching “America in the world” classes, I have attempted to bring Japan closer to campus. For example, in the wake of the March 11 disaster in 2011, I co-taught a course entitled After Fukushima to deepen our understanding of the causes and consequences of the nuclear disaster. Also, a group of us—faculty and students—launched a Japan Recovery Initiative to raise funds and help the victims of the unspeakable catastrophe. A few years ago, students and I curated an exhibit of the artist Tōshi Yoshida’s woodblock prints at the college’s art museum. The idea originated from my acquaintance with Tōshi’s son, who kindly agreed to loan us a set of prints for this student-teacher collaboration. The exhibit, titled “Tree to

Hiroshi Kitamura     147

Mountain: The Woodblock Prints of Tōshi Yoshida,” was a great success. It drew many visitors from campus and beyond. Japan has also become a part of my research agenda. As I pursued my research for Screening Enlightenment, I became interested in learning how the Japanese reacted to the Allied occupation and beyond. Thus, while continuing my study of Hollywood’s transpacific filmmaking, I began to devote greater attention to Japanese cinema and culture. I published essays on the “Japanese western” (wasei seibugeki) genre and Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships. Currently I am writing a book on Yodogawa Nagaharu, the “evangelist of cinema” (eiga no dendōshi) who tirelessly promoted the movies through film reviews, TV commentaries, public lectures, radio shows, and books. My interest in revisiting Japan has led me to engage the field of Japan and East Asian Studies. I participate in Asian Studies–related conferences, review books, and participate in program reviews. I am also involved in the East Asian Studies program on my campus (currently merged under Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) and codirected it for a year. As an Americanist, I find it refreshing and inspiring to socialize with Asian Studies scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and the languages. Doing so has, once again, reminded me of the need to step out of one’s comfort zone, in search of new ideas, creative methodologies, and synthetic knowledge. In fact, a casual conversation with a Chinese Studies colleague inspired me to audit Mandarin for three semesters (I had studied it in college). This in turn inspired me to visit Hong Kong for conferences and research. Some of my findings there made it into my essays on Bruce Lee and filmic coproductions between Japan and Hong Kong during the height of the Cold War. *** The United States is shaped by a kaleidoscope of cross-cultural identities. In becoming a specialist in the nation’s history, I studied this phenomenon not only through my research but also by experiencing life as a hybrid person. From my early years in Japan, growing up in an “Americanized” household, to the past decade and a half as an academic in the United States, I have become an in-between person, living in the intersection of two worlds. As an Americanist of Japanese descent, I have often found myself being a “foreigner” or “outsider” in the United States, but I have also learned that one can gain a lot by walking the borders.

148     Chapter 8

One could say that I am a product of a larger international system that has shaped world affairs. Indeed, my life and career thus have been enabled by the strong bilateral relationship shaped between Japan and the United States—one that was formed after World War II and has remained intact ever since. As an “agent” of cultural diplomacy—as diplomatic historians like to refer to individual actors who cross national borders—I have attempted to better understand the two societies and bring them together by way of knowledge, research, and education. The gulf that separates the two societies has narrowed since my parents first landed in the United States decades ago. Yet much work remains for us to deepen our understanding of each other. I have written these words as protests and demonstrations continued in response to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (among others), under the presidency of Donald Trump. Race and cross-social relations in the United States remain tense and difficult. Yet, as an educator, I also observe that public opinion is malleable. Through classroom teaching, I have seen students’ opinions dramatically change from supporting to opposing the US invasion of Iraq, from embracing nuclear power to rejecting it in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and considering China as an ally instead of a foe. In the United States, people’s values and beliefs can transform quickly. To me, this assures the possibility of improvement and positive change. I wish I could say the same of Japan. On the surface, this wealthy postindustrial nation boasts cutting-edge infrastructure and technology, welcomes foreign visitors, and enjoys cultures and consumer products from all over the world. However, I also cannot help but notice the presence of hostility toward outsiders and the public’s growing disinterest in engaging the wider world. I specifically worry that many young people are finding a false sense of comfort in a “domestic” bubble, choosing not to study in places like the United States, and depending too much on technology (instead of on their own linguistic skills). In the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese leaders called for the nation’s rapid “internationalization” (kokusaika). I believe that society is currently in a place where it should have been thirty years ago. I confess that I am concerned about Japan’s future as a member of the international community.

CHAPTER NINE

Loneliness, Laughter, and Belonging A Feminist View of an Asian in America

Naoko Wake

Growing up in Japan, sooner or later you realize that you are surrounded by people who are very curious about foreign cultures—that is, cultures of European countries or the United States, for the most part. You go to a bookstore and the shelf is full of titles about these countries by Japanese authors who have lived there. Supposedly, they are bridging cultures. Born and raised in Japan, these writers somehow made it beyond the national boundary. They are educated or cultured enough to become familiar with a foreign country, while they also maintain an ability to speak about their experiences appealingly to Japanese readers. In the mid-1990s when I was pondering going to the United States to study history, there was Fujiwara Masahiko’s Haruka naru Kenburijji about his days as a youthful mathematician in Cambridge, England.1 Novelist Shiono Nanami wrote eloquently about her fascination with the city of Rome, Italy, in both ancient times and the present, in her Itaria ibun.2 There was also Haruki Murakami’s Yagate kanashiki gaikokugo, which contained a disturbing account of his encounter with gender during his two years in Princeton, New Jersey. He had to explain why his wife was a housewife—not some sort of a professional—over and again, because, apparently, that was the question that academics he socialized with wanted to ask the most.3 Then, there was Akiyoshi Toshiko’s Jazu to ikiru (1996), which I read just before coming to the United States.4 A well-known jazz pianist, she came to America in 1953 alone and built a splendid career as a player,

149

150     Chapter 9

bandleader, and composer. She was married to jazz saxophonist Lew Tabackin, and her big band featuring him released highly acclaimed albums like Kogun (1974) and Long Yellow Road (1975) that wove together Japanese and American traditions. (Akiyoshi is still playing at age ninety-one, though mostly as a solo player. Obviously, I am awed.) What stood out for me the most in Jazu to ikiru was a passage about her loneliness. A tension between personal and professional lives, she wrote, sometimes made her feel “hopelessly lonely and isolated.”5 By the time she wrote this passage, she was already a successful musician. She felt fulfilled in her marriage—she respected, and felt respected by, her partner. And yet, her loneliness reached me like a ray of truth piercing through her happiness. I must have been a bit scared by this. Here is a woman who is curious and creative enough to have made it in America. What, then, does it mean that she is so lonely? Is this what crossing the national boundary leads to? Despite such worries, I felt an increasing urge to learn US history in the United States. To go to the source was one of the forces that landed me in Bloomington, Indiana, as a graduate student in the fall of 1999. At that point, I had no idea what it meant for an Asian woman to live in America’s heartland. The graduate director of the Department of History had already told me that Indiana University is not an “elite” school like Kyoto University, where I had been studying. I liked the man instantly. A part of why I wanted to study in America was a question I started to ask about privileges that came with being at a privileged place like Kyoto. Institutional affiliations, not individual qualities, seemed to define rewards and recognitions. The graduate director’s comment also made me wonder. To be sure, Indiana is a nonelite school that is not highly competitive for undergraduate students to get in. But Indiana also offers many nationally ranked graduate programs, including ones in history. Looking back, I wonder if he was trying to introduce me to the unique institution that is the US state university. It is a huge place where a range of diversity meshes together, sometimes a bit overwhelmingly or confusingly for foreigners. Regardless, I felt thrilled by the school’s immensity and an array of opportunities that it presented. I had already met a handful of faculty at Indiana, who seemed genuinely delighted with my interest in the history of mental illness, psychiatry, and US society from the 1920s to the 1950s—an esoteric topic even at a US university. I was ready to get busy, and I did get exceedingly busy as the end of the twentieth century drew near. My English was not fluent, which meant that it took me an enormous

Naoko Wake     151

amount of time to read a book. It also meant that I could not understand much of what people were saying and, maybe more importantly, how they were feeling. I felt like a baby born for the second time, completely stripped of cultural smarts and sensitivity. My bright spot in all this, though, was that I was with my partner. He too was a graduate student from Japan, going through the same stuff. When I was falling asleep at six in the morning over the pages of a book I had yet to finish reading, he was struggling to stay awake to complete the last sentences of his response paper. If nothing else, we had each other. Or so I thought.

Turning toward Sexuality Meanwhile, my dissertation research started to take an unexpected turn. I was going to write an intellectual history that paid attention to not only physicians but also patients. I spent a lot of time reading clinical records at mental hospitals, especially one near Baltimore, Maryland, where Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) had worked as a psychiatrist in the 1920s. In 2002, after I had already planned out my dissertation chapters, a substantial amount of new records became available, leading to a surprising discovery.6 Sullivan and his patients had talked a lot about their experiences of being homosexual in a homophobic society during the therapeutic sessions. I knew Sullivan was gay, but I did not know that his sexuality had affected his clinical work so fundamentally. Anyone who studies the history of sexuality or medicine would have been delighted by this discovery; you have found a kind of primary source richly informative but extremely rare and difficult to access.7 And yet I was not really trained or interested in the history of sexuality. I needed to study a whole new field called the history of sexuality in order to write a dissertation. I would need more time—and money—for my degree than I expected. With a graduate assistantship, lectureship, and fellowship, Indiana University fully funded all six of my years in Bloomington, although my parents, too, made contributions at critical times, like when my car broke down. I explained to them how it was not possible to live in the United States without a car, especially in the Midwest, an explanation they accepted graciously. I wish I could say that I received an abundant intellectual support from faculty too. Unfortunately, I cannot. This was not because there were no historians of sexuality at Indiana; nor was it because they were unavailable or unwilling to help. Instead, it had everything to do with my idea of what it means to be an advanced graduate student. After taking

152     Chapter 9

all required courses and passing qualifying exams, I thought, I should be on my own. I was spending most of my time reading and writing in a graduate student carrel at the main library. I had a tiny circle of friends with whom I shared my surprising turn toward the history of sexuality. It did not occur to me to ask for professors’ time, which seemed like an unacceptable imposition. I should learn by observing their examples instead of demanding them to teach me, I believed. Yet this solo exploration of the field allowed me to find what I must have been looking for. To me, the history of sexuality in the early twentyfirst-century US was all about rethinking or deconstructing assumptions. You question accepted notions like femininity and masculinity.8 Sexuality is not the same as gender, but they are like closely related cousins. Learning to question things that people do unthinkingly, I came to understand the idea of “the personal is political.” Why do I dress in the way I do? Why do I speak up in this company but not in others? Does it have anything to do with power? No other fields of inquiry—not even cultural relativism and postmodernism, which had excited me in Japan—got under my skin deeply enough to raise these questions. They led me to see that women are clearly on the receiving end of structural inequality when it comes to gender. Empowered by this knowledge, my eyes started to see things in the United States differently. I began to find beauty in what used to look unpretty. I used to dislike, for instance, the sight of American women sitting with their legs crossed in the shape of “T.” Instead of capping a knee neatly by the other knee, as many Japanese women do, some American women put a calf on the top of a knee, creating a triangle-shape opening right in front of their pelvis. The posture used to look unfeminine, even inelegant, to my eyes. Now I started to see women’s agency in this posture. Some women choose to cross their legs this way because it feels good. They need not discipline their bodies as society dictates. Something other than appearance and manner made their worth. It also impressed me that many American women kept their family names after marriage. Others kept their name by hyphenating it with their partners’. These practices began to come into a sharper focus around the time when I became familiar with the history of sexuality. I came to understand how these practices generated and were generated by the intention and, in some cases, the effect of making things equal between partners. This latter revelation spoke personally to me, for whom changing my family name had never felt right. Legally, my name had been changed into

Naoko Wake     153

my partner’s, but I continued to use my maiden name professionally. Sometimes, I used my married name as my middle name, or my maiden name combined with my married name, leaving behind a long record of ambivalence. Although I was impressed by the US name-recording system that made room for all these names, it did not offer any fundamental solution to my dilemma. This problem with too many names was not unrelated to another pressing question arising from my marriage—Where do we stay when we visit our families in Japan in summer? At my parents’ or his? My preference was that we spend an equal amount of time with each. My partner wanted us to spend more time with his family, although I do not think that he ever said that explicitly. Our difference widened so much that I found myself spending many summer days away from him. It was not at all easy. I felt lonely through the summers. I still do if I think about this time period in my life, gently unfolding until it reached the breaking point. American scholarship on the history of sexuality, gender, and women, then, revealed my reserve in my relations to some—like professors—at the same time as it revealed my assertiveness in my relationship to others, including families. It might be easy to see this period of my life as a process of my new feminist awareness taking over my identity, disassembling my marriage along the way. But things were not that simple. By then, I was aware of the history of feminism being used as an ideological justification of Western colonial domination in non-Western societies, whereby Western women uplifted their non-Western sisters by enlightening them with the notion of gender equality. I had a handful of uncomfortable interactions with Americans, including proclaimed feminists, when they treated me demeaningly, if ever so slightly, as if I did not get certain things because I am from a country where women are unequal to men. There was abundant room for me not to understand, but little space for us to disagree. I was keenly aware of these unpleasant times, meaning that a part of myself critical of US feminism, as much as the assertiveness that it had taught me, was well and alive. In Elaine Castillo’s novel America Is Not the Heart, the protagonist, an immigrant from the Philippines, says this about her friend: “There isn’t anything, anything in the world scarier than a strong person.”9 The problem for the protagonist, and increasingly for me too, was that we had within ourselves two strong persons fighting, pulling us to disparately different futures. No matter who remains standing, there will be a casualty on the floor. Not a fun prospect. Although this prospect is not unique or universal among immigrants, I learned later that many Japanese Americans—Issei, Kibei Nisei, and Shin

154     Chapter 9

Issei, for example—had frequently expressed a similar sentiment of being in between cultures. What is common among all these groups is that they spent a considerable amount of time in both Japan and America, developing a feeling of belonging to both. Cultural conflicts arose between the global superpower and its compliant ally throughout the Cold War, and these groups of Japanese Americans felt personally and politically pulled apart. To me, the history of sexuality—and by extension, gender—offered an opening for these conflicts. They might have been new to me, but they had a long history. Of course, I had experienced many forms of gender inequality while in Japan. Still, seeing them from across the ocean made them look utterly unchangeable and completely open to change at once.

Becoming an Asian in America With my degree in hand, I began to teach in 2005 as fixed-term faculty at Michigan State University (MSU), another Big Ten school in the Midwest. The job market in US history was slim, and once I began looking for a job, I often recalled the statement about Indiana not being an elite school in a different light from the view I had had before. Many of my fellow graduate students at Indiana earned degrees but remained jobless, something that I did not witness at Kyoto. The word among experienced job seekers in Indiana was that, unless everything falls into place—that you are from an elite school studying a popular subject—the chance at a stable job was extremely poor. After all, US academia was not entirely free of privileges that separated elite from nonelite schools, making it easy for any mint PhDs to look up and feel envious. Your identity mattered too. Being a non-LGBTQ person specializing in LGBTQ history put me in a complicated position, yet my teaching experience was equally shaped by my geographical and social location. If I was inexperienced as a teacher of the subject (and I was), my students were even more inexperienced as learners. Most of my students were from small communities in Michigan, whose parents worried about sending their sons and daughters to this big, dangerous city of East Lansing (which it wasn’t). They had not learned much about sexuality before arriving at MSU. These students were incredibly appreciative of the new body of knowledge they took away from my classes. I often wonder how my experience would have been different if I were teaching in a state like California or New York, where my students might have been more familiar with LBGTQ experiences and their histories within their own communities. In Michigan, my

Naoko Wake     155

classes offered a handful of students one of their first opportunities to come out, suggesting that they had not had communities, sometimes families, in which they had felt safe. Their racial backgrounds and zip codes, too, contributed to this lack of support. Being able to gain trust from these students was my newfound privilege. Just as I was a non-LGBTQ person teaching LGBTQ history, I was also a non-American teaching US history. My wide-eyed students often asked me questions such as “How did you become interested in American history?” and “How did you start teaching the history of sexuality?” It was around this time when I began to really appreciate the notion of the “ally” in LGBTQ scholarship. You may not be a sexual minority, but you can be an ally. You ally with sexual minorities, but you do not try to be one of them or become a leader in their community. Whenever possible, allies stand by the podium instead of going up to it. Teaching LGBTQ history in a university classroom seemed to be one important way to put this idea into practice. As an outsider ally and advocate rather than an insider, I helped MSU create a new minor in LGBTQ and sexuality studies in 2012–2013. This idea of being an ally became a seed for my current scholarship on transnational history. I wanted to study a history that connects, as much as separates, countries—Japan, the United States, and South Korea. I was drawn to ethnic and immigration history, Asian American history in particular, as a field in which I could further my interest. This meant that I must study a whole new field once again. Around this time, my position at MSU became tenure-track, and I basked in my newfound job security. No longer did I have to worry about paying bills or keeping health insurance. I also enjoyed the feeling of knowing myself as a scholar better than before. I am an Americanist with an eye toward transnational relations that shape American history. Intellectually, this framing put me in one of the most exciting, rapidly growing fields of inquiry in Asian American history. At the same time, these new connections came with a realization of difference. I am an Asian in America, but not an Asian American. I happily worked in the United States, but I also wondered if I wanted to return to Japan, where my home was. And unlike many of my colleagues in the field, I teach in the Midwest, where the Asian population is small, though not minuscule. I think about these differences often. Being in the Midwest means that, in the most immediate sense, I am frequently stared at by strangers. In some cases, their stares turn into a blunt question: “Where are you from?” I have learned that my Asian American friends also get this question

156     Chapter 9

frequently, a form of racism that sees Asians as perpetually alien to America.10 But does this question also offend me, an Asian in America? At first, I did not give it much thought, simply responding: “Oh, I am from Japan.” But I grew to dislike the question. There is no need for me to reveal an aspect of my biography just because a stranger asks. It was not just the question itself that bothered me. Once answered, it created an opening through which people apparently felt free to ask more questions or offer random comments. “Oh, I like Japanese food—it is so good!” “I have a friend married to a Japanese.” “I was in Tokyo many years ago . . .” These unsolicited comments seemed to imply that I should be delighted to know that anyone is interested in Japan. There is also the issue of most Americans’ inability to distinguish among different Asian ethnicities. They might be able to tell that South Asians look different from East Asians or Southeast Asians. But that is about it. Especially in the Midwest, where Asian populations are not as visible as they are on either coast, the inability to distinguish is more prevalent. As a result, we cease to be Japanese, Indian, or Vietnamese; we all become Asians. Or, maybe, we all become Asian Americans, as we become folded into the US racial hierarchy. One thing I notice by being an Asian Americanist is that there is a distinct streak of American history as race history that holds together the notion of Asian America. Most Japanese Americans have family histories that connect them to the wartime mass incarceration.11 Korean American history often leads to stories of colonial resistance, military brides, or international adoption.12 Refugee and diasporic experiences strongly color Vietnamese American history.13 They all suffer from racism, including the belief that there is something essentially foreign about all Asians, no matter how long they have been living in America. In the 1960s and 1970s, they came together to say how wrong this is, creating the Asian American movement. They also built alliances with people of Asia experiencing America’s domination, leading to the formation of Third World Awareness.14 Growing up in Japan, a former colonial power in Asia, I had experienced nothing comparable to this activism and awareness. I was right to think that my life in Japan had been privileged, but in more ways than I had known. One of the Japanese American informants I met in my research told me how, as a young social worker in San Jose, California, in the 1970s, she had been concerned about whether she would be accepted by her multinational clients—the first-generation immigrants from the Philippines, China,

Naoko Wake     157

and Korea. They were from the former colonies of Japan, her ancestral land. Although she was born and raised in the United States, her daily encounters with racism helped raise a strong sense of responsibility toward her fellow Asian minorities.15 Getting to know her made me reflect on my past: What was I doing when I was her age, in late twentieth-century Japan, whose prosperity was built on colonial and postcolonial exploitations? What was my sense of responsibility as an educated, middle-class woman in Japan, and what was I doing with it after I came to America? These questions made me fall silent, then ashamed. The distance between an Asian in America and an Asian American as I personally experienced it could not be farther. I also felt this distance between Asia and Asian America in professional settings, something that other first-generation Asian scholars in America have told me that they, too, experienced. They did not feel fully accepted by their colleagues in US history and, sometimes, in Asian American history. Although the transnational approach to history has been richly explored in most fields, national differences have still erupted. In a recent article, literary scholar Quan Manh Ha discussed an incident that took place during the 2014 conference of the Association for Asian American Studies. During a panel on the future of the Asian American Studies, Ha noted, “one member in the audience expressed his concern about the absence or exclusion of Asian scholars from critical dialogue in the panel.”16 This absence or exclusion, Ha believed, contributed to the still-persistent lack of Vietnamese perspectives in the US scholarship about the Vietnam War. American and Vietnamese American scholars’ voices dominate the field. Obviously, a shared race does not lead to a shared racial experience. The US notion of race is not necessarily transnational. It is easy to recognize this, but not so easy to overcome it in practice. Speaking for myself, I did not grow up in an Asian American community, and I came to Asian American history later in my career. Both factors seem to create a slight distance between me and my Asian American colleagues. Of course, it is impossible to say if, indeed, these factors play any role in my relations to my colleagues in the exclusionary way that Ha suggested. But the possibility is on my mind. And yet, I also am a woman of color in the United States, as much as I am a foreigner. Although I became a US citizen recently, foreignness does not disappear overnight, not to mention skin color. Again, there is nothing new about this experience of falling in between; many immigrants, ­including academics, experienced much of what I experience.

158     Chapter 9

When I enter a meeting room, most people do not think that I am faculty. I am constantly carded when I purchase liquor, something that also happens to my Asian American friend who has just turned fifty. My name is misspelled regularly, and some of my colleagues cannot pronounce it after knowing me more than a decade. A longtime colleague of mine introduced me to someone as néko, making my first name sound like “cat” in Japanese. My race, gender, and foreignness are jumbled up in these incidents. Many days, I blow off these small things as I must. Other days, they get to me. In Silverlake Life: A View from Here (1993), a film about a white gay couple dying of HIV/AIDS, one of the protagonists says that it is wellmeaning liberals, not conservative homophobes, who drive some gay men to suicide.17 Because they are casual and meant to be harmless, small acts of discrimination really hurt you. You feel hopeless about ever filling the gap and belonging. Even if you can push aside your disappointment, these small “mistakes” still keep you busy, fatigued. I need someone to share these feelings, and I often reach out to my friends for this reason. My partner in my second marriage, too, is intimately familiar with my woes. In this sense, they are my dear allies, for whom I also hope to be an ally. Their individual qualities diverge from mine, but allies prosper in difference, not sameness. I was happily surprised by what happened, then, when I proposed that the name of the Asian Pacific American (APA) faculty and staff organization at Michigan State be changed from APA to Asian Pacific Island Desi American and Asian (APIDAA). I was unsure if adding “Asian” at the end of our name would be seen as making the organization less “American.” On the contrary, some of the group’s members, who were nearly all American citizens, revealed to me that they were born in Asia and keeping some family connections there. With enthusiasm, they endorsed the new name as inclusive of both American and Asian cultural citizenships. Of course, this does not mean that differences are gone. And yet, a reach toward transnationality can make things less dualistic, looser. Talking about transnationality in personal terms, in turn, can make the non-dualistic world more tangible. This possibility has made me a listener; I take more time to listen than before when I am with people whom I care for. In 2019, I marked the twentieth year of my living in the United States. As of now, then, this is what I think as an Americanist living in America. To think about history transnationally is to stay close to a specific locality. Occasionally, this mode of thinking lets me belong to more than one

Naoko Wake     159

country, one people. As much as I cherish this vastly optimistic thought, I also know that I am missing out on a lot by not being an Americanist living in Japan. I am not fighting the gender inequality or racism in Japan that I know many of my Americanist friends there are fighting on a daily basis. I am equally aware that I have already missed out on a lot by not being an Americanist born and raised in America. No matter how eloquently I critique US racism, I cannot build alliances by sharing personal stories of confronting racism early in my life; I simply do not have them. Besides, I do not necessarily wish to become more American, because becoming American inevitably involves assimilation. Assimilation happens even without seeking it as you eat, drink, and meet people. It has already made my life rich, and at the same time, it has made me lose everyday touch with happenings outside my current locality. One cannot live two lives, and belonging to multiple countries can sometimes feel like one belongs nowhere. It is as if I am in a film and watching it too, not knowing exactly where I am. Recently, as I was listening to an oral history of a Chinese American woman named Shihping Cho, who is a first-generation immigrant like myself, I came across a moment when she started to laugh. She was struggling to find a word, which did not come to her easily either in Chinese or English. “I forget my Chinese and also my English!” she exclaimed in English. Then she burst into laughter.18 To me, Cho’s laughter rings as true as Akiyoshi’s passage about loneliness. Living between cultures, you know you have lost something, and you know why you had to lose it. You know you have gained something, but you are not always sure why you had to gain it. To be happy? It would be nice if it turned out that way. But asking myself if I am happy is such an American thing to do; pursuit of happiness is an individualistic project. I did not grow up in Japan asking myself if I am happy, and these cultural habits are difficult to shed. Caught in between, then, laughing out loud might sometimes be the best we can do. How did we get here? We did not plan on this. But here we are. You recognize your stubborn self, which nonetheless has been shaped so immensely by unpredictability. A view of the Cold War’s afterlife from here is not about either domination or being dominated, even if there is a plenty of that; it is about finding ties and strength collectively when a larger historical force makes them look hopelessly impossible. I am not sure if this recognition has anything to do with bridging cultures, as my predecessors were believed to be doing. Maybe it is a brick somewhere in the bridge. But that remains to be seen.

160     Chapter 9

Notes 1

Fujiwara Masahiko, Haruka naru Kenburijji: Sūgakusha no Igirisu [Faraway Cambridge: A mathematician’s England] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1994). 2 Shiono Nanami, Itaria ibun [Unknown stories of Italy] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1994). 3 Murakami Haruki, Yagate kanashiki gaikokugo [And then, sorrowful foreign language] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994). 4 Akiyoshi Toshiko, Jazu to ikiru [Living with jazz] (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1996). 5 Ibid., 69. 6 Clinical records, nos. 5371, 5373, 5392, 5402, 5426, 5541, 5613, 5625, 5814, 5881, 6106, and 6223, Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, MD, 1926–1929. 7 On the difficulty of finding historical sources that reveal sexual identities, see Estelle B. Freedman, “ ‘The Burning of Letters Continues’: Elusive Identities and the Historical Construction of Sexuality,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 181–200; and Sally Newman, “The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee’s Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 51–75. This challenge can be exacerbated in the history of medicine, where the patient privacy protection compliance places most modern sources out of scholarly reach. See, for example, Bert Hansen, “Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 1 (January 2002): 36–44. 8 See, for example, Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 9 Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart (New York: Viking, 2018), 101. 10 On the notion of Asian Americans as perpetually foreign, see Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

Naoko Wake     161

11 Karen M. Inouye, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1–3; Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 12 Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 13 Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 14 On the Asian American movement and Third World Awareness, see Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 15 Interview with Geri Handa, July 20, 2011, conducted by the author (unpublished). 16 Quan Manh Ha, “When Memory Speaks: Transnational Remembrances in Vietnam War Literature,” Southeast Asian Studies 5, no. 3 (December 2016): 463–489 (quote from p. 469). 17 Silverlake Life: The View from Here, directed by Peter Friedman and Tom Joslin, 1993. 18 Interview with Shih-ping Cho, June 6, 2007, conducted by Ken Klein and Lillian Yang (unpublished). I am grateful to Klein, archivist at the Special Collections at the University of Southern California, for kindly sharing this interview with me.

CHAPTER TEN

An Accidental Historian My Journey in Research on Japanese North American Community Activism

Masumi Izumi

In one of the earliest memories of my childhood, my family was lining up against the white paper screen doors (fusuma) in our house to have our photographs taken. It was not a family photo. My dad, mom, me, my younger brother, and my one-month-old baby sister were getting our individual photos taken so that we could apply for our passports. We were moving to Australia. My father, a medical doctor specializing in leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, had just received a scholarship to study immunology at the University of Sydney Medical School under the supervision of Dr. David Nelson. I was six years old when my family left Japan, and I remember bits and pieces of my days in Sydney. It was the summer of 1972, only half a year before the Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam announced the termination of the “White Australia” policy. Australia had been reconstructing its national identity since the mid-1960s. From being a loyal but distant daughter of the British Empire (contrasted to the elder daughter, Canada), Australia now saw herself geographically and economically tied closer to Asia. As the amount of export to Japan exceeded Australia’s net export to the United Kingdom, human interactions increased between Asia and Oceania. Without racial restriction in the immigration policy, it became more common to see Asians on the streets and in schools. Our stay happened right around this time of radical changes in overall racial perceptions in Australia. 165

166     Chapter 10

My parents put me in Lane Cove Public School instead of a Japanese school, even though our stay was only for one year. I had a good time, especially during the latter half of my stay. Mrs. Sinclair, our young and lively teacher, made sure that I was comfortable in class. I was recruited to join a school choir after a singing test all the kids had to take. I had lots of friends. One time, I invited a couple of friends to my house for my birthday without telling my mom. She had to ask them to go home because she was unprepared, but she arranged for a formal birthday party for me a week or so later, to which I could invite all my close friends at school. Well, not all. I don’t think the girl who befriended me first was there to celebrate my seventh birthday. Her name was Elenee, a South Asian girl. She was very kind to me when I first arrived at the school. She talked to me, showed me around, and played with me, while no one else came close to me, an Asian girl new in class who spoke no English. I do not remember how many months had passed since my arrival, when it happened. All I remember is, one day, when I was going to play with my white friends, Elenee approached me, and I told her I couldn’t play with her anymore. She called my name in teary eyes. But I instinctively knew that I had to push her away if I was going to play with the other girls. I had to choose. Do I play with her, just two of us? Or do I join the bigger circle of Caucasian girls? Sometimes there were mean kids at school who yelled at me, “Chinese! Dirty knees!” When that happened, my friends shouted back in protest: “She is not Chinese. She is Japanese!” Australia was shifting gears toward multiculturalism. I was comfortably surrounded by my Caucasian friends. I owe it to Prime Minister Whitlam as much as to my kind classmates who protected me for my fun days in Sydney. Thinking back, abolishing the White Australia policy did not end racism in school but created a new hierarchy based on the shade of our skin color: Japanese was better than Chinese, and Chinese was perhaps better than South Asian Indian. Kids know these things, even better than adults. I was lucky that I was old enough when I lived in Australia to retain English as my second language, unlike my brother, who was in preschool, and my sister, who was a baby. After we returned to Kyoto, I resumed my study at a local public school. I am to this day thankful to my dad that he did not put me in an international school or some place of that sort, so I got to secure Japanese as my native tongue, one of the most difficult languages to master for nonnative learners. I, my brother, and my sister all grew up

Masumi Izumi     167

thoroughly in the Japanese public education system from elementary school all the way up to university. At the same time, growing up in the 1970s, we had a lot of exposure to Western culture through television and books. My favorite TV shows were Sesame Street and Little House on the Prairie. For our generation, Kyoto was a unique place to grow up in, because the city had a progressive leftist mayor for almost three decades until the year I was about to finish elementary school, when the city government turned conservative. The teachers’ union was very influential, and we were encouraged to do critical thinking and lots of independent research projects in and out of school, through which we learned about peace and war, environmental pollution, ethnic and other discriminations, and issues of social justice in general. Our house had lots of children’s books, and I particularly liked authors such as Miyoko Matsutani, Ryusuke Saito, Satoshi Kako, Katsumoto Saotome, and Takashi Yanase. Some of their books told stories about children surviving tragedies and overcoming hardships such as war, poverty, and discrimination with their strong will and support from kindhearted adults.1 I also liked to read stories from faraway places. Since my dad traveled a lot in his profession, our house was filled with souvenirs from many different parts of the world: India, Africa, Indonesia, Holland, the US, the USSR, and China. All these factors combined led me to pursue my study in English and international affairs. I received my undergraduate degree from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) in Anglo-American Studies and English. My thesis supervisor was Professor Takashi Konami. A former president of the Japanese Association for Canadian Studies, he brought Canadian materials and issues into his American Studies seminar classes. When I was studying at TUFS, our department was divided into two courses: literature and linguistics (LL) major, and international relations and area studies (IR/AS) major. Discipline-wise, the former might be commonly considered humanities, and the latter social sciences. At TUFS, however, LL, particularly linguistics, seemed to apply scientific methods, while IR/AS seemed to combine humanities and social science methodologies, in contrast to most such programs in other universities that were inclined toward social science. Interestingly, a majority of male students in the Anglo-American Department chose the LL course, while our thesis seminar in American and Canadian Studies, which was housed in the IR/AS course, had about equal numbers of male and female students. Our professor encouraged us to discuss cultural influences on political and economic situations in nation-states. In

168     Chapter 10

other words, I was exposed to interdisciplinary methods already at the undergraduate level. In my senior year, I decided to go to a graduate school in Canada, not because I wanted to major in Canadian Studies but because I felt that Canada would be a better place to learn about international relations and politics because it was a small country adjacent to a superpower. The chances were, I thought, that if I majored in the study of the US, I would likely study only the US, whereas if I studied about Canada, I would also have to study about the US and other countries as well.2 Thinking back, engaging in both Canadian and American Studies has benefited my study even after I became a professional scholar. Although the critical American Studies field endeavors to be constantly aware of American exceptionalism, it is difficult to see America’s exceptionality at a paradigmatic level unless there is a comparative cognitive frame in your mind. In addition, Canadian Studies requires us to see North American history on a continental scale, and it almost becomes a habit even when we look at what happens in the United States. With the “continental turn” along with the “transnational turn” in American Studies, I am more aware of the advantage of having knowledge about the world north of the 49th parallel. With the full tuition waiver and a stipend in exchange for teaching the newly created Japanese language course, I joined the master’s program in political science and international relations at Queen’s University at Kingston, in Ontario. It was in the late 1980s, when Japan was perceived by North Americans to be an economic superpower and a threat; hence, studies of Japanese language and society were encouraged in higher education. I benefited from the institutional impetus to create such a program in a Canadian university, which had traditionally focused on European Studies.

Ditching Poli-Sci, Turning to History Although I had a relatively good command of English when I started my graduate work at Queen’s, it took me one whole year to figure out what we were expected to do in and for class in a North American postsecondary educational institution. We were assigned to read a couple of articles or book chapters every week, and it was a big challenge just to comprehend what was written in them. But what confused me most was that when we discussed the reading materials, everyone, including the professor, was pointing out what’s wrong with or inaccurate about what’s written in the texts. I kept wondering, “If they don’t like the content, or if what’s written

Masumi Izumi     169

is not accurate, why does the professor make us read all these books and articles?” I had a very blurry idea about what we were doing, and my grades were in the B-minus to C-plus range in the first year of my graduate work. The revelation happened toward the third term, when I was assigned to read a book on “the silent majority.” As I was reading, I realized that I didn’t agree with the author. I started writing in the margins the reasons for my disagreement. Then I wrote a book report, compiling all the points I made in the margins. A week later, the professor returned my paper, and I got an A! For the first time in my graduate work! I pointed out in the paper that the policies that the author was advocating did not arise from the general public, which the author claimed to be “the silent majority,” but they met the interest of the not-so-silent minority that was in power. Writing this paper made me understand that I was supposed to engage with and respond to the author, instead of simply extracting information from the text, which was the learning style I was used to in Japan. From this time on, my grades improved, and I successfully finished my master’s degree in political studies. And yet I realized that I was less and less attracted to the discipline of political science. I had chosen poli-sci to learn about what was going on in the world: how people lived, and how people tackled different problems we faced as members of the global community of humans. That was why I wanted to study IR, international relations. In the courses I took in my first term at Queen’s, I learned about the balance of power, game theories, the dependence theory, and so on, and I was frustrated that I was reading, not about people, but only about nation-states, international organizations, missiles and weapons, and model after model for diplomatic relations and geopolitics, which I felt had little to do with the reality of what it meant for an individual to live in a country at war or in a society that suppressed human rights. In subsequent terms, I took classes that dealt with nonmainstream issues, such as feminist political studies with Professor Abbie Bakan and development studies with Professor Jayant Lele. I found these classes more interesting. After I finished my master’s program, I moved from Kingston to Hanover, New Hampshire, to teach Japanese as a second language at Dartmouth College. I returned to Japan a year later, not really knowing what I would do next. I started working at a publishing company in Kyoto, and at the same time, I sought an opportunity to further my studies. I joined the newly established Japanese Association for Migration Studies (JAMS), because its first annual conference was held at Ritsumeikan University, which was very

170     Chapter 10

close to my house. Through this event, I got to know migration studies scholars in the Kansai (western Japan) area. Later I learned that the establishment of JAMS marked the official start of migration studies in Japan, until then conducted separately in various disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, geography, anthropology, and colonial studies. The significance was that the association created a space where researchers of overseas and/or colonial emigration from Japan, scholars of ethnic Japanese communities in the Americas, Hawai‘i, and other areas in the world, and those who studied Japanese experiences in former Japanese colonies could compare their findings and discuss new frameworks that might help to understand phenomena related to international migration. I started to regularly attend a local researchers’ group called Nikkei Bunka Kenkyu-Kai at Ritsumeikan University, an interdisciplinary group of scholars who studied Japanese overseas migration. I worked with a historian, Professor Toshiji Sasaki, because he specialized in the study of migration from Japan to Canada. At first I wanted to explore the cultural gaps between Japan and Canada, as I was suffering from serious reverse culture shock myself, but later I got more interested in the history of Japanese Canadians as an ethnic group, and particularly in their wartime experiences. Being a member without an institutional affiliation and neither a graduate student nor a lecturer/professor at a university, I often caused much confusion for other members of the academic organization. Someone engaged in an academic endeavor without having an institutional affiliation had no place in the cognitive world of Japanese academics. This affiliation limbo ended when I entered the PhD program at the Graduate School of American Studies at Doshisha University in 1995. The Graduate School of American Studies was established in 1991 as an independent graduate program founded on the academic and institutional resources accumulated by the International Institute of American Studies, which was established in 1958. The university has always had close ties with the United States, given that its founder, Jo Niisema, established the Doshisha English School in 1875 with financial and faculty support from the American Board, a missionary foundation in Asia. It is one of the most resourceful institutions on American Studies in Japan. When I said I was a PhD student at Doshisha University studying about Japanese Americans and Canadians, people had no problem remembering who I was. Being a graduate student also allowed me to apply for a scholarship. In the second year of my PhD study, I received the Government of

Masumi Izumi     171

Canada Award for graduate research, which was funded by the Canadian government to encourage the study of Canada in the world. I decided to study in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, or UVic, as an exchange student.

My Personal Cultural Turn to Japanese Canadian Activism At UVic, my supervisor was Professor Patricia E. Roy, a well-known scholar specializing in Asian Canadian history.3 Professor Roy was a rigorous historian—one of those scholars who remembered all the call numbers of major primary sources in libraries and archives. Working with her gave me great basic training as a historian. My research project was on the Canadian Redress movement and how it affected not only the Japanese Canadian community but also civil liberties for all Canadians. I wrote a paper on the repeal of the War Measures Act and the concurrent passage of the Emergencies Act of 1988, to whose bill Japanese Canadians brought substantial revisions in order to strengthen human rights protection and to prevent governmental abuse of its war power.4 However, I was increasingly troubled by the existing historical, sociological, and economic studies on Asian exclusion in North America, because the explanations in those texts did not seem to really explain why Asians were considered a threat to the “white man’s province.” Some texts explained that Chinese were excluded because Chinese immigrants were bringing in social vices, such as opium, prostitution, and gambling. Others explained that white workers felt threatened because Chinese and Japanese were working for lower wages. Still others explained that Chinese were working too hard and Japanese were being too successful. I also learned about how immigrant communities struggled to alleviate anti-Asian sentiments by social reforms within their communities and refraining from working on Sundays. I read about how agricultural leaders, such as Yasutaro Yamaga in the Fraser Valley, persuaded fellow Japanese farmers not to sell their products at prices lower than prices that the white farmers’ unions, which excluded Japanese, had agreed upon among themselves. But no matter what the Asians did, racism continued. The white supremacists found one reason or another to discriminate against Asians. I began to think the research questions in conventional historical and sociological studies did not adequately address these issues. It was around this time that I became friends with other graduate students in the History Department. They asked me to join a group called

172     Chapter 10

HORG, History of Racialization Group. Together we read postcolonial theories, cultural studies, gender history, indigenous studies, and so on. Through our reading sessions and discussions, things started to make sense to me. For example, one difficulty I had with the existing Asian Canadian history scholarship was that it seemed to unintentionally naturalize racial prejudice. By faithfully quoting hateful messages against Asians in the pre– World War II newspaper articles and describing “facts” from historical papers and manuscripts without critical intervention, conventional works reiterated the stereotypes against the minorities. One of my academic advisers said that my reaction was presentist and that I should not judge people in the past by today’s ethical standards because that was “how they thought back then.” Discussions with other HORG members on racialization taught me that racial prejudice was not “natural” but an exercise of power, which was contested even “back then.” Postcolonial studies deconstructed the objectivity myth and exposed the intellectual violence it assumed. I was reassured that I was not being unprofessional when I felt offended by utterances in supposedly “objective” historical scholarship on racial exclusion. In addition to my archival research, I launched my oral history research in Victoria and Vancouver. I used the snowball sampling method, which basically meant that I would visit whomever I was referred to at the previous interviews I conducted. Since the Japanese Canadian community on the west coast was very small, everyone seemed to know everyone. One day I visited the office of Canaway Consultants in downtown Vancouver to interview a Sansei veteran community activist, Ms. Mayumi Takasaki. Canaway Consultants was owned by Mr. Gordon Kadota, who also ran the OK Gift Shop, a popular souvenir shop for Japanese tourists in Vancouver. Mr. Kadota was a Nisei who spent the war years in Japan and came back to Vancouver after the war to become a successful businessman and a community leader. I had known him for a couple of years already through Professor Sasaki and my research on the Canadian Redress, but it was my first time to interview Mayu-san, who worked in his office. Mayu coordinated the first Powell Street Festival, a Japanese Canadian community festival and the biggest ethnic festival held annually in the city of Vancouver. The festival started in 1977, and Mayu continued to work for it for many years. She and her husband, Tamio Wakayama, a photographer known also for his work on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) movements in Alabama, were among the core cultural activists in the Vancouver Japanese Canadian community.5 Mayu and Tamio not only

Masumi Izumi     173

became the focus of my study on Japanese Canadian cultural activism but also came to be dear friends through the years of my ethnography in Vancouver. I asked Mayu about her long career of community activism. She told me how she became politicized through a Japanese American professor at the University of British Columbia, who was a draft resister and expatriate from California. She and other Japanese Canadian youths formed an organization called the Wakayama Group to collect the elders’ stories and old photographs to resurrect the community history, which had been silenced through the wartime uprooting. She explained how the Japanese Canadian centennial celebration led to the birth of the Powell Street Festival, and she gave me many insider stories about the Canadian Redress movement. We finished the interview, and I switched off the cassette recorder. Then we started to chat casually, and I asked her, “I heard you played taiko. Is that right? I played taiko a little bit too.” Indeed, I had taken lessons in taiko drumming with a group of non-Japanese friends in Kyoto for about a year and had performed in a local music event just before I moved to Victoria. Mayu started to talk about her group, Katari Taiko, which was a pioneer taiko group in Vancouver that started in 1979. She said taiko was a tool to express her ethnic identity and her roots in a powerful way. She drummed to fight against the stereotypes of Asian Canadian women as being submissive and “cute.” She smiled as she said that taiko became the most popular attraction in the Powell Street Festival over the years. I had to ask her: “Can I come back tomorrow so that you can tell me more about the relationship between taiko and the Japanese Canadian community?” This is how my research on North American taiko started. Through this research I found out how taiko and the Powell Street Festival provided the impetus for Japanese Canadians to feel proud of their cultural heritage and to reorganize—not just to reclaim their heritage but to speak up—and eventually helped them pursue a governmental apology and compensation for the racial injustices that the community suffered during World War II. I studied at the University of Victoria for two years and returned to Doshisha to complete my PhD. In my dissertation, I focused on the US and analyzed the passage and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act (aka “concentration camp law”), which constituted Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950.6 But I also continued my research on Japanese Canadian cultural activism and post-internment community rebuilding. I was happy to work within the emerging academic community of Asian Canadian

174     Chapter 10

Studies. In one of the Association for Asian American Studies conferences, I was invited to be a part of an Asian Canadian panel. I presented on Japanese Canadian taiko drumming groups. At one of the receptions, I met Professor Gary Okihiro, one of the early student activists in the Yellow Power movement back in the 1970s and a pioneer Asian Americanist. He encouraged me to submit my paper to the Journal of Asian American Studies, which he was editing.7 I remember his smile when I told him about taiko: “It’s music and it’s subversive? Great!” This publication helped me land a teaching position at the Institute for Language and Culture at Doshisha University at the beginning of the year 2000.

Stepping into the World of Nobuko Miyamoto In early March 2003, I was on the Shinkansen (bullet train) heading toward Tokyo. I was on my way to a performance/presentation organized by the Ajia-kei Amerika-jin Kenkyu-kai (Asian American Study Group) that met several times a year to present movies, music, and other cultural and political activities by and/or about Asian Americans. This group was organized by Tatsuya Sudo, a lecturer of English at Kanda University of International Studies, and Mayumi Nakazawa, an independent journalist and biographer of Yuri Kochiyama.8 That weekend, the group was presenting “The World of Nobuko Miyamoto.” I had no idea who Nobuko Miyamoto was, and to be honest, her talk was not the primary reason for my deciding to take the two-and-a-half-hour trip from Kyoto to Tokyo. The main event for me was a Canadian Studies meeting taking place the following day, in which a Japanese political scientist was presenting on the Canadian War Measures Act and the Emergencies Act. I decided to go to Tokyo one day early to check out the Asian American cultural studies meeting. There were around thirty people at the gathering. Ms. Mayumi Nakazawa, a nonfiction writer known for authoring Yuri Kochiyama’s biography, introduced Nobuko to the audience: “You might be thinking, ‘Miyamoto Nobuko? The actress in A Taxing Woman?’ No. She is a Nikkei Sansei who has been active in the Japanese American community as a singer, dancer, and performance artist, and one of the major leaders of Asian American movement.” An elegant woman in her sixties in a colorful, hippieish long dress appeared on the stage with a large metal bowl. She softly rubbed its frame with a short wooden stick, creating a humming sound, and sang a melancholic melody: “Hey ya, hei yei, ya, wooo . . .” I felt a kind of bewildered curiosity spreading among the audience. She might

Masumi Izumi     175

have felt our bewilderment too. She started to speak: “Hello. I am Nobuko Miyamoto. This is my first visit to Japan, and I am extremely nervous!” Her voice trembled. Then, with a soft smile, she told us about her life journey. By the time she ended her talk, we were all fascinated not only by the content of her life story but also by the way she told it, mixing graceful movements and sometimes singing. She finished her presentation with the “Tampopo Ondo” (Dandelion dance) song. She invited the audience into singing and clapping in call-and-response: “We are dandelion . . . tampopo, tampopo, yay, yay, yay . . .” The gathering ended in a joyous atmosphere. Listening to Nobuko’s life story, I learned how she inspired a great number of Asian Americans into “the movement” through her cultural activism. I wondered, “How come I have never heard or read about this person after a dozen years of studying Asian American history?” Asian American and Asian Canadian cultural activism was the main theme of my research. I had interviewed Japanese Canadian and Japanese American drummers and community activists. I wrote about postwar reconstruction of Japanese North American communities, paying special attention to festivals and artistic productions. I was about to complete my PhD dissertation on the passage and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act. In the process of studying these topics, I had extensively read about the Asian American movement. And yet I had never come across Nobuko’s name. After I returned to Kyoto, I got an email from Mr. Minoru Kanda, who was hosting Nobuko during her travel in the Kansai area. An encyclopedic collector of Asian American music, Kanda-san held a dinner party at his house in Nara so that those who were interested in Asian American history and culture could have a chance to talk to Nobuko in a less formal setting. Only two people—a graduate student who was writing a thesis on Asian American music, and I—could make it. After a gorgeous dinner prepared by Mrs. Kanda, Nobuko, Mrs. Kanda, and I went to a spa nearby. This was the start of my hadaka no tsukiai (naked interactions) with Nobuko, a habit of rubbing each other’s back in a public spa or onsen (natural hot spring) that we still keep when we get together in Los Angeles or Kyoto. The next day, Mr. Kanda asked me to take Nobuko to Kyoto, show her around, and put her on the Shinkansen for Tokyo. We rushed through a couple of temples. She bought some utensils made of bamboo, and off she went on the train so that she could catch the bullet train to return to Tokyo. Spending two days with Nobuko and learning more about her life story, I decided that I had to visit Los Angeles to seriously research her

176     Chapter 10

activities and the history of the L.A. Japanese American community. I applied for a Fulbright scholarship and took a one-year sabbatical leave from my university to do an ethnographic study of Asian American community activism in Los Angeles. I made a preliminary trip in the summer of 2003 and started my Fulbright research program in August 2004. My first task in Los Angeles was to learn how “Nobuko’s world” worked. It soon became clear that, in her world, everything was pretty much up to contingency. Different people were constantly coming in and out of Nobuko’s world. People share their skills and talents and, more importantly, their energy and enthusiasm. Nobuko’s genius is to involve people from different communities and backgrounds in her activism. She runs several projects at the same time, and before you even know it, you are part of one or more of them. I first experienced this in person in the summer of 2003 during my preliminary trip. That summer, Nobuko’s performance arts company, Great Leap, was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. Great Leap hosted a party, which I attended with a friend from Japan and another big fan of Nobuko, Hiroshi Murakawa. We got there about half an hour before the starting time. Nobuko was working with several people on a song that was to open the event. She invited Hiroshi and me into the group, and we all practiced finger snapping and the chorus. When the party started, I was standing on the stage singing in back chorus, while Nobuko rapped the history of Great Leap. I was swaying with others, singing “Twenty-five years, twenty-five years . . . , ” although my involvement in Great Leap had been no longer than twenty-five minutes. From August 2004 to September 2005, I spent most of my time in Los Angeles following Nobuko around. We had several formal interview sessions, but I learned a lot more about her life through casual interactions (such as going to the spa) and working with her on various projects. At first I was mainly an observer. In To All Relations: Sacred Moon Songs (2004), I observed the last part of rehearsals for its residency and saw the three performances at the East West Players Theater in Little Tokyo. To All Relations: Sacred Moon Songs was an omnibus choral-poem based on stories from the Muslim, Japanese, Mexican, and African American experiences in Los Angeles and other parts of the world. The main performers were young activists from different ethnic communities. They were trained in an eight-month residency by veteran community artists—poets, dancers, and musicians— who supported the performance onstage as well. Observing the reflective

Masumi Izumi     177

sessions after the performances and interacting with the performers in person, I started to understand how Nobuko mentored young activists for artistic self-expression. She also taught them how to work with people of various ages, occupations, and different racial/ethnic affiliations. She guided everyone to cross boundaries between different religious, ethnic, cultural, and artistic genres. Soon I became more deeply involved in Nobuko’s work. The most memorable project was The Triangle Project: Journey of the Dandelion, an autobiographical three-woman show featuring Nobuko Miyamoto, PJ Hirabayashi of San Jose Taiko, and Yoko Fujimoto of Kodo. In fact, when Nobuko came to Japan in February 2003, one of her main purposes was to meet Yoko on Sado Island, where the internationally renowned Japanese drumming group Kodo was based. Their liaison was arranged by PJ, who had been connecting taiko communities in the US and Japan for three decades. The three “artistic woman warriors” decided to collaborate onstage, weaving together their life journeys. The Triangle Project started in 2003, and in 2004 they put together The Triangle Project: Journey of the Dandelion. I became the interpreter for Yoko. Since Yoko lived in Japan, the three artists got together only a couple of times a year for several weeks to develop their show. One time they had a one-week residency at Amherst College, hosted by the New World Theater of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I had the good fortune to accompany these amazing artists as their interpreter. The performance piece was based on their life journeys, combining movements, songs, and taiko drumming. Although they grew up on opposite sides of the Pacific, their life paths paralleled each other and often intertwined. For me, it was a challenge to bridge linguistic and cultural differences, but at the same time, it was a great learning opportunity. As they shared stories about their ancestors’ journeys and how they had found their own artistic voices within the rapidly changing world of postwar Japan and America, I could see the deep connection between Japanese and Japanese American experiences. Through their narratives, Japanese and Japanese American history began to merge in my perception. Another memorable project was a trip to New York City. Nobuko led a workshop at the Columbia Teachers College and then at the Brooklyn Bridge Women’s Group, to which about a dozen Muslim women were invited. All participants, including myself, performed our names, breathed together and shared our qi energy, and played out the roles of our families and

178     Chapter 10

ancestors, and through these activities we learned other people’s journeys, relocations, separations, and both joyous and painful memories. Nobuko’s workshops combined movements, breathing, and real stories, and as she created a safe space, soon we were sharing humor, laughter, and tears. The participants told stories about fleeing from Iraq, migrating to New York, or even being tortured by the thought police in Turkey as a schoolteacher. I cannot share the stories in my academic history work, because no recording took place. That is what a safe space means. These stories do not get written in history books. In her workshops, Nobuko provides sets of activities, but she does not have a blueprint of how things should go. She works with people, and things start developing. The result is unpredictable, and it is exciting as each project bears a different fruit. Nobuko’s projects combine art, spirituality, and politics, expressed through each participant’s own voice, and she maximizes one’s spiritual, artistic, and personal engagement. As a mentor for self-expression, Nobuko creates a space where people can open their spirit and share their worldview with others. Participants would each contribute to the circle in whatever way they could. My sabbatical leave ended, and I left Los Angeles in the fall of 2005. I kept in close touch with Nobuko, as her world continued to evolve. She developed a mentorship project called the Collaboratory for emerging community artists. Collaboratory included field trips, artistic and leadership training, and public performances. Through the program, participants learned how to combine art and activism and establish a voice of their own that would help them develop their ways to creatively change the world by getting involved and connecting to others. Nobuko believes that creativity and spirituality inspire people to open up, question, and confront the issues we commonly face in this hyper-capitalist world. Collaboratory took a great international leap in 2009. The interfaith coalition-building piece Leaps of Faith was performed at the Parliament of World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. In the past several years, Nobuko has been spending much time on writing. Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love and Revolution (University of California Press, 2021) tells her life story in her own words. Nobuko is passing batons over to a new generation of artist-activists. She urges us to find our own songs and voices, because before we can crush down the walls between nations, races, sexes, faiths, ideologies, lifestyles, and all the other differences dividing people in the world, we have to deal

Masumi Izumi     179

with walls inside ourselves. Simply breathing and humming together, listening to our inner souls, and feeling those of others, we start to realize that we all have distinct voices and we all deserve to be heard. I have not been able to directly adopt her techniques in my teaching at the university, but I am sure that my experience of working with Nobuko is helping my daily interactions with my students.

Translating the Tule Lake Stockade Diary As much as I was eager to interview and write about cultural activism in the postwar Japanese North American community, I was also interested in continuing archival work. I liked to excavate buried historical facts related to Japanese American and Japanese Canadian wartime incarceration. Cultural theories were cool and convenient with their explanatory powers, but through the years I realized that at the end of the day I was a historian. I can only explain things chronologically, and I do not have a thorough enough command of English or Japanese to write elaborate theoretical papers. My writing is plain and simple, and first and foremost, I take more pleasure in digging up obscure facts than in proposing new conceptual ideas. For several years after I returned to Japan to resume teaching, I felt that Asian American studies had turned too theoretical for my taste and talent. I went back to the archives to see the records about Japanese American incarceration. I wanted to know what the incarcerees ate, where they got their clothes from, what kind of entertainment they had, and how those Nisei women who appeared in the camp photographs got the perfect coiffure in the desert camps (I haven’t found the answer to the last question yet). I started looking at the high school yearbooks and farming records from the Gila River camp, because it was a camp that was least written about, and I happened to spend a lot of time in Tucson, Arizona, through my family connection.9 The Gila River camp had attracted little scholarly attention most likely because it was the “least oppressive” camp. The camp had no barbed-wire fences, no watchtowers. This was because the camp was placed in the Sonoran Desert. No one could have survived walking through the vast desert with no water. The soldiers would have died of heatstroke if they had had to stand on watchtowers in the 110-degree desert heat. At Gila River, the incarcerees built a baseball field with the materials delivered by the military to build the fences. The camp had a tremendous farming operation

180     Chapter 10

with seven thousand acres of vegetable fields and a substantial livestock industry. No riots or major strikes happened at Gila River. It was a prison camp nonetheless. I investigated how the incarcerees structured their daily lives, by looking at the records on their diet, schooling, entertainment, and so forth. I found out that the camp was relatively tranquil because the camp administration allowed Issei to take charge, which meant that the conventional power structure and leadership roles within the community were disrupted to a lesser extent than in those camps that allowed only Nisei to make decisions. After I researched the least oppressive camp, naturally I had to study the most oppressive camp. The most oppressive among the ten war relocation centers was the Tule Lake camp, which was first built as a regular war relocation center but later was turned into a segregation center for “disloyal people.” In the summer of 2013, I was invited to speak at a conference in Seattle, organized by the Japanese American National Museum. It was a gathering to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the redress agreement in the United States. I was asked to explain the Japanese Canadian uprooting to a Japanese-speaking audience from the local Seattle community. In the evening of the last day of the conference, I took the elevator up to go swimming in the hotel pool, as my friends were all gone already. Two elderly Nikkei ladies were also in the elevator, and one of them kept staring at me. Then the other lady said hello, and within that short time inside the elevator—less than a minute—somehow she convinced me to visit their room just to chat for a while before I went swimming. I might or might not have noticed the “Tule Lake” sign on their name tags. During the conference, everyone who was in the camp or whose families were in the camp had a sign on the name tag that showed which camp they were incarcerated in. The two women were sisters. The one who stared at me was Ms. ­Ernie-Jane Masako Nishii, and the one who talked to me was Ms. Nancy Kyoko Oda, the younger of the two. They told me that their late father, Tatsuo Ryusei Inouye, had kept a diary throughout his camp days and that the diary was written in Japanese. Inouye was detained in the Tule Lake Stockade between November 1943 and February 1944, and his diary included entries from his days in the stockade. He was involved in the hunger strike that took place in the beginning of 1944. After the war, the family moved back to Los Angeles, and while Inouye was alive, he wished to publish his diary to let the

Masumi Izumi     181

world know what happened inside the Tule Lake Stockade, a prison inside a prison camp. Nancy worked with her father to translate the diary while she studied at UCLA, but the Japanese text was too complicated and the project was left unfinished for decades. They needed somebody who could read handwritten Japanese and who also understood the historical context of the diary. That evening, I never made it to the swimming pool. Since I was leaving for Japan the following day, I asked Nancy to scan the diary pages, make PDFs, and send them to me electronically, so that I could take a look at the text and see whether the diary was intelligible. After I returned home, I checked the files and saw that the handwriting was clear enough to read and understand. I hired two graduate students to transcribe the text. The Tule Lake diary started in early October of 1943, when the family moved from the Poston camp in Arizona to Tule Lake. Inouye wrote almost every day, even before he was picked up from his barrack to be detained in the stockade. Inside the stockade, he meticulously recorded all the meals he had and the number of the inmates, which changed daily, and he described the horrible physical conditions and psychological anguish of the inmates he witnessed inside the prison. He included his thoughts and feelings toward his family and his anger toward the camp administrators, the soldiers, and the American government that mistreated him and other Japanese Americans. He also wrote about Japan, where he had spent his formative years. He had dual citizenship, and the diary revealed his complex sense of identity and loyalty. The transcription project took a couple of years, because of the large volume of the diary and because both the students and I worked on it on top of all the other tasks that we had to bear. In the meantime, Nancy looked for a publisher for the diary. She did not find one, but she met Professor David Yoo at UCLA, who was interested in including the diary in the Suyama Project collection. The Suyama Project was a digital archive in the UCLA Library—funded by a donation from Mr. Eiji Suyama, a veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—to collect and archive the records related to the “resisters” in Japanese American incarceration history. We decided to focus on the stockade part of the diary and publish the English translation of the Japanese text. The translation took another year or so, during which Masako’s health deteriorated. I finished the translation and presented the text to the family. Masako could still read it. The diary showed how much Inouye cared about his family and worried about his

182     Chapter 10

children, especially Masako, who was a preschooler when her father was taken away. Masako was devastated by her father’s absence, and this experience affected her for the rest of her life. She became a ceramic artist, and her art clearly showed the trauma she had carried. Masako read her father’s thoughts in Tule Lake seventy-three years after he wrote the diary. Shortly after, Masako’s condition worsened, and she passed away in June 2017. Putting the text on the Internet took almost another year. In late May 2018, the Tule Lake Stockade Diary was released on the Suyama Project website. Now it is open for the world to read.10 Besides publishing her father’s diary, Nancy Kyoko also works rigorously on the historical acknowledgment of the detention of Japanese aliens in the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, located in a suburb of Los Angeles. She is an active member of the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Community Center and is encouraging the youths to get involved in the community. As one of the babies born in the Tule Lake camp, she is working to make sure that the story of Tule Lake and Tuna Canyon gets passed down to the generations to come. *** As I reflect on my own journey to become an Americanist, I realize that the United States was the third foreign country that I lived in during my life. My exposure to the Western culture started with my stay in Australia as a young child. Even though it was only for a year, it was a significant experience, as it destabilized my cultural identity as a Japanese woman. I gained the habit of relativizing any phenomena I encounter in Japan against what is happening outside Japan. Also growing up in the 1970s, I developed ambivalent feelings toward the United States. As much as I enjoyed watching Sesame Street and loved the puppets, I was upset at the American soldiers who massacred Vietnamese villagers and orphaned many children. I became critical of America’s aggressive stance on world affairs as a very young person, and I still hold this position, which I think is shared by the majority of people outside the US. Studying in and about Canada helped me look at the United States from a wider perspective, as the two nations developed contrastive approaches to deal with the issues of diversity, violence, and social disparities.11 I advocate the “continental turn” in my papers on Nikkei activisms, as well as the “transnational turn” in my analyses of Japanese migration experiences to North America.12

Masumi Izumi     183

My academic career was filled with accidental encounters with activists and mentors in the Japanese North American community. These encounters have shaped my research topics as well, as if I did not find these research topics but the topics found me. I never had a set life plan for myself, and I became an accidental historian. But now it feels that my life career was meant to be, because as we are facing various crises on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, the stories of the activists and the elders give us lessons from history. It is up to us historians to dig up the buried human life stories and make them known to the world.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

One such book was Katsumoto Saotome’s Betonamu no Da-chan (Tokyo: Doshin-sha, 1974), which told the story of a Vietnamese girl who survived the massacre that happened in her village when it was attacked by American soldiers. The book was translated into English. Katsumoto Saotome, Little Da of Vietnam, trans. Miyoko Saito (Tokyo: San Yu Sha, 1975). The internationalism in Canadian broadcasting not only was achieved because of its geopolitical location but also was a fruit of visionary media producers such as Keiko Margaret Lyons, a Japanese Canadian Nisei and a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio executive who pushed the CBC toward international investigative journalism. Simon Houpt, “Margaret Lyons, 95, Was an Influential Executive Who Sparked CBC’s Radio Revolution,” Globe and Mail, October 11, 2019. Patricia E. Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989); Roy, The Oriental Question: Consolidating a White Man’s Province, 1914–41 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003); Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941–67 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). My research on Japanese Canadian history is now compiled in a book in Japanese: Masumi Izumi, Nikkei Kanada-jin no Idou to Undou: Shirarezaru Nihon-jin no Ekkyou Seikatsu Shi [The Japanese Canadian movement: The little-known transpacific history of Japanese migration and activism] (Tokyo: Takanashi Publishing, 2020). Wakayama published a book of photographs he took while he worked with the SNCC. See Tamio Wakayama, Signs of Life (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1969). He also published his photographs of Japanese Canadian community activism. See Tamio Wakayama, Kikyo: Coming Home to Powell Street (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 1992).

184     Chapter 10

6

The dissertation was later published as a book: Masumi Izumi, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019). 7 The paper was published in 2001. See Masumi Izumi, “Reconsidering Ethnic Culture and Community: A Case Study on Japanese Canadian Taiko Drumming,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no.1 (2001), 35–56. 8 Mayumi Nakazawa, Yuri: Nikkei Nisei, New York no Harlem ni Ikiru [Yuri: A Nikkei Nisei living in New York’s Harlem (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1998). 9 Masumi Izumi, “Gila River Concentration Camp and the Historical Memory of Japanese American Mass Incarceration,” Japanese Journal of American Studies, no. 29 (2018): 67–87. 10 Tatsuo Ryusei Inouye, “Tule Lake Stockade Diary,” trans. Masumi Izumi, ed. Martha Nakagawa (University of California, Los Angeles, Digital Archive), 2018, http://www.suyamaproject.org/?p=721. 11 Canadian prime minister Pierre E. Trudeau adopted multiculturalism as an official policy in 1971. It is also noteworthy that the Canadian social welfare system, which includes health care and pension plans, was devised and implemented by a Japanese Canadian Nisei, Thomas K. Shoyama. 12 Masumi Izumi, “The Japanese Canadian Movement: Migration and Activism before and after World War II,” Amerasia Journal 33, no. 2 (2007): 49–66.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An Americanist Who Sees the US from the Peripheries Mariko Iijima

As a historian specializing in the migration of Japanese people to the US, I am an anomaly in that I have never studied in a US institution or lived in the US for more than six months. Unlike most Americanists, I earned my graduate degrees in the UK. Unsurprisingly, most people I meet in academia ask me, “Why did you go to the UK to study American history?” This question vexes me greatly because there are multiple, intertwined answers. One of those answers goes back to my family history, which will unfold later in this chapter. As an academic, I have always tried to come up with a convincing, sophisticated, or even pedantic explanation for my career path and research trajectory. Even today, there is no answer that satisfies anyone, including those who interviewed me for academic jobs in Japan. The truth of the matter is that, like most others in the field, I did want to go to the US to study American history. I wanted to study at graduate school there, but that is not how things turned out.

America through Material Objects American Cookies Oreo, Ritz, and Chips Ahoy! Since I was born, I was surrounded by American confectionaries. While I was not at all fond of these cookies (ironically, I have eaten maybe just a couple of Oreo cookies in my life), they were

185

186     Chapter 11

a­ lways in my home. The boxes of Oreos were stocked in a grandparents’ storage room as if they had been kept for emergency. Ritz cans were repurposed into piggy banks or tea containers. In a typical middle-class home, it was normal to stock these kinds of confectionaries—symbols of modern food lifestyle in postwar Japan. Even with no knowledge that Oreo and Ritz were initially invented in the US, I definitely sensed that they were foreign. The reason I grew up in Japan keeping an excessive amount of American cookies at home lies in my family history. In 1979, two years after I was born, my maternal grandfather, Iijima Ichiro, became the president of the Nabisco Cookie Company Japan (current Yamazaki Biscuits Company), which used to produce Oreo and Ritz domestically, using recipes and formulas provided by US Nabisco (a subsidiary of Mondelēz International). These recipes have been kept as trade secrets, similar to those of Coca-Cola. Nabisco Japan was established as a goben gaisha, a joint-venture project with US Nabisco, Nichimen Jitsugyō, and the Yamazaki Baking Company. During the 1970s, in the midst of Japan’s economic boom, joint ventures of Japanese and American corporations became common, seeking to grow their business opportunities. While Japanese companies introduced new “foreign” products to Japanese customers fond of novelty, US companies perceived Japan as a promising market for international distribution. Keeping up with the times, my grandfather became involved in the joint venture between US Nabisco and Yamazaki. As part of the venture, he launched the production of Oreo, Ritz, and other cookies in Japan. In fact, my grandfather’s connection with the US began well before the joint venture was launched. In the prewar period, my grandparents taught at an elementary school in Tokyo, but after the war ended, instead of going back to teaching, they entered a promising business with my grandfather’s brothers. Immediately after the war, Japan’s food situation was still severe. As a result of the decline of its empire, Japan lost Taiwan and Korea as the most important suppliers of rice, a staple food. What was worse, in 1945 the people of Japan suffered a poor harvest due to damage caused by a cold summer, natural disasters, and a labor shortage. In response to a request from the Japanese government, the General Headquarters, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), decided to import from the US two million pounds of wheat flour. In early 1946, when the flour was delivered to Tokyo, it was quickly baked into koppe-pan (similar to an American hot dog bun), and two buns were

Mariko Iijima     187

distributed to each citizen of Tokyo. While it strived to enhance its domestic rice production, the Japanese government realized that it was imperative to import grain such as wheat and corn flour to produce staple foods for its undernourished population. The challenge was that Japanese people did not know how to bake bread. Even worse, the people could not procure the necessary equipment and fuel for baking. This was around 1948, the same time that my grandfather and his brothers opened their first bakery in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture. It was a “commissioned bakery,” where bread was baked using rationed wheat flour brought in by people from the neighborhood. Most of the bread-manufacturing factories that had operated before the war were no longer available in the postwar period. Therefore, these local, small-scale commissioned bakeries flourished, by replacing defunct factories and serving malnourished people. Soon, this small shop at Ichikawa grew into a bakery company, the Yamazaki Baking Company. Indeed, its rapid expansion in later years would not have happened without the GHQ’s initiatives, along with the importation of US wheat flour. Although having no opportunity to talk about the company history with my grandfather while he was alive, I cherish a rather dark memory of him as a baker. It is a story about a crooked thumb on his left hand, which (according to him) happened “a long time ago,” before I was born. One day, when he checked a dough mixing machine, his thumb was injured and it fractured so badly that it never completely healed. I do not know how large the mixer was or how he got away with such a horribly broken thumb, but whenever I thought of bread making, mental images of the accident scared me terribly. It is far from the lighthearted images of a local baker making fresh bread every morning using a stone oven or some other innocuous method. My imagination was confirmed as reality when I was thirteen years old and visited a factory with my school friends. The Koga factory in Ibaraki Prefecture (established in 1971) is one of the largest factories that the company held. The factory manufactured both bread and cakes for Yamazaki, as well as cookies, crackers, and hard candies for Nabisco Japan. There I saw an industrial dough mixer for the first time. As its huge rectangular metallic vessel mixed dough, the machine looked like a giant mouth chewing gum. Obviously, the machine that swallowed my grandfather’s thumb must have been smaller, but, from this visit, I grasped the whole picture of bread making. At the factory, I also saw the process of producing

188     Chapter 11

cookies and candies. Each product had a special line to create tons of the same product in the same shape and of the same weight. It was quite satisfying to see the meticulously organized process of baking round and dark Oreo cookies; a long bar of candy being cut into small round pieces; and each stack of cookies being wrapped at super-high speed. Yet the mixture of monotonous, regular rhythms on the lines made me a bit sad; I realized that a real factory was different from the one that Charlie Bucket might have seen in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1971). Although later becoming a baker, my grandfather was born into a family of farmers, and he was an experienced gardener and vegetable grower. On weekends, we spent substantial time pulling up weeds in our garden, taking care of persimmon, plum, and loquat trees in our orchard, and growing seasonal vegetables, such as cucumbers, tomatoes, asparagus, eggplant, and broccoli. Having a fresh harvest at the dinner table with my family was rewarding. More than that, it was fulfilling to see the results of something in which my grandfather and I, together, had invested a lot of effort. A confectionary factory and a garden—they appear very different in nature. A factory is like a machine that requires limited human labor and is designed to produce an enormous number of products of the same shape and size. On the other hand, a garden is a process and a reflection of individual efforts to prevent and manage the risks of natural disaster and disease; but it is a pleasurable kind of hard work. For me, a factory and a garden share one particular similarity: in both, I learned where the things we eat actually come from and that their production processes were far more complex and elaborate. At the time, I did not realize that these experiences with my grandfather would later become a source of my academic inspiration. Friends from the US and Hawai‘i My grandparents also gave me opportunities to encounter people and cultures from outside Japan. Despite their limited fluency in foreign languages, they traveled abroad at least once a year. Mainly, they went to the US or Europe, for business or holidays. Whenever he traveled, my grandfather sent me a postcard every single day of his trip. On his postcards of the Philosophers’ Walk in Heidelberg, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Trafalgar Square in London, and the Statue of Liberty in New York, he wrote in elegant Japanese a brief history of the sites and his impressions. Especially when

Mariko Iijima     189

Postcards from my grandfather, dated June 1986.

I was younger, it was hard to read his old-style kanji Chinese characters, which I oftentimes had to ask my mother to read. Once, in the second grade, I lost a point in a kanji quiz because I wrote in the old style that I learned from his postcards. Until I traveled to Hong Kong with my parents when I was thirteen years old, his postcards were windows into a world outside of Japan that I had not yet seen for myself. Once in a while, my family had guests—mostly my grandfather’s business colleagues from the US. My mother taught me basic English greetings, such as “Nice to meet you,” “How are you?” and “Thank you very much,” so that I could communicate with our guests. In addition, my elementary school, which was established by French Catholic Dominicans, had two weekly lessons of English and French, respectively. Although I was not fluent in either language after six years of study, the exposure to foreign languages at an early age lowered my mental barrier to learning a new language and cultivated curiosity about the people who spoke those languages and lived in those cultures. The only opportunity I had to use English was when guests visited. One of the memorable guests was Mr. Frank Gurgone, an executive member of US Nabisco. He visited Japan once a year from the late 1970s to the 1980s and became our family friend. According to my mother, he was an immigrant from Sicily, the southern part of Italy. He eventually was

190     Chapter 11

promoted to vice president of the company and came to represent the success story of an immigrant in the US. Being almost the same age as my grandfather, he became like an “American” grandfather to me. Whenever he visited, he brought me very “American” presents. One of my favorites was a classic Vermont Teddy Bear that made a sound like a goat whenever I inclined its body. Another favorite was an elephant crystal made in Venice, Italy, which changed color from blue in the morning to purple in the evening. A few times a year, we also exchanged letters and greeting cards. He always replied to me with heartfelt messages in neat handwriting, like my grandfather’s. The exchanges with him motivated me even more to learn English. Other guests were “Carol-san” and her family from Hawai‘i, who visited us several times in the 1980s. Carol-san was the second generation of a Japanese immigrant family. She was married to a Chinese American man, and they had two adopted children. Their daughter was Ruthmarie, who had a multiethnic background, and their son was Matthew, who had an Asian background. Both kids were several years older than me. Whenever they came to our house, they took care of me like I was their little sibling. As a child, I was less interested in their fascinating family backgrounds than in what they wore, what gifts they brought, and how they spoke. Ruthmarie had curly light brown hair and wore a white T-shirt with a knitted purple tank top, which I had never seen in Japan. Matthew, in a navy blue polo shirt, was always calm and gentlemanly. Although he seemed more similar to me in terms of appearance, we could not communicate very well because of the language barrier. In fact, Carol-san was the most fluent Japanese speaker in the family because she had worked as a flight attendant for Pan American Airways in the early 1960s. It was always an exciting and delightful moment to see what they brought me from Hawai‘i. They gave me American-style clothes and dresses—usually brightly colored and with big flowers on the front. I was very proud to wear them because even my neighbors praised them. They also brought me things that epitomized American popular culture of the 1980s. One was an E.T. doll. The film E.T. was released in 1982 and became a great hit in the US and worldwide. I had been a little too young to watch it, and upon receiving the doll, I thought, “What an ugly doll!” I would say it was the only gift that disappointed me. When they gave it to me, they explained that he was an alien who came to Earth. This story scared me even more, and I had difficulty falling asleep when I realized that he was

Mariko Iijima     191

mingling with my dolls and stuffed animals in the corner of my room. Another memorable gift, more positive this time, was a stylish Swatch watch. Swatch was founded in Switzerland in 1983, a year after E.T. was released. The watch’s style and design were very different from what adults usually wore, with metallic or leather straps. The Swatch used transparent plastic for its strap and red and blue colors to accentuate the hands. Although it was Swiss made, to me everything that came from outside Japan represented the US. Without any experience abroad, my image of the US was conjured up mainly from the people I met through my grandparents’ network and their gifts of material goods—cookies, postcards, dolls, and clothes. Some of the goods were not even made in the US, but because they were brought from/via the US and introduced by the American guests, I understood them as part of American material culture. These objects seemed to me like the fragments of beads, colored glass, and mirrors inside a kaleidoscope. Just as the pieces of reflective materials move and turn freely, my image of the US or American culture was dynamic and came with great excitement and curiosity.

Studying the US, Encountering Hawai‘i Meeting Mr. Gurgone and Carol-san’s family fostered my love for the English language and American culture. It was a natural step for me to choose the Department of English Studies at Sophia University to pursue my academic interests. The first year at Sophia was exciting, but at the same time it was a period of struggle. Many of my classmates had experienced studying or living abroad, mostly due to their parents’ businesses, and were already fluent in English. With no experience living abroad and no confidence in speaking English, I felt for the first time that my English was far behind that of my classmates. In a desperate attempt to improve my English-speaking skills, I asked myself questions like “Is achieving fluency my ultimate goal, after my four-year college education?” and “What would I gain if I were able to speak like a native English speaker?” These questions hovered in my mind like chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. With no doubt that mastering English would help me become an “international person” (in today’s parlance, a global citizen), I confronted these questions as a process of finding a whole new purpose for studying at the Department of English Studies. It did not take me long to find a new purpose. The English language was a research tool, not an ultimate goal. During my second year in college,

192     Chapter 11

I enrolled in courses on American history taught by Professor Matsuo Kazuyuki, who developed my passion for US immigration history. His history courses covered the periods from Columbus’ “discovery” of the American continent to the Clinton administration. What intrigued me most were his personal stories from when he was working in the US State Department. Once he told us that he met the president in an elevator and exchanged greetings. More importantly, as a social historian, Professor Matsuo shared with us his excitement of seeing history from the perspectives of the grassroots; I was particularly intrigued by the history of the Japanese American internment during World War II, which I had never been taught at high school. Attending his lectures was definitely a turning point in my early academic career. I decided to write my senior thesis on some aspect of American history. It was during the summer vacation of my third year at Sophia that Kona coffee came into my life. I spent the summer holidays with my parents in Kona, on the western coast of the Island of Hawai‘i. In the late 1990s, the districts of North Kona and South Kohala were filled with newly developed resorts with hotels, condominiums, and golf courses overlooking the coastlines, tinted with dark lava against the gradations of blue. By contrast, on the mauka side (mountain side) of North and South Kona, the groves of glossy, dark-green coffee trees with a glimpse of some papaya, avocado, and macadamia nut trees spread across the coastlines. It is referred to as the “Kona coffee belt.” Various migrant groups came to Kona, including people from Scotland, the US, China, Japan, the Philippines, and more recently Latin America. They have been involved in coffee farming and production since the mid-nineteenth century. Among these migrant groups, Japanese have been the most conspicuous even today. Visitors still see Japanese temples, hotels, restaurants, and stores that were established before World War II. Our favorite driving routes included coffee tasting at estate farms, having lunch at Teshima’s (one of the restaurants that has been run by a local Japanese family for four generations), and strolling farmers’ markets in search of locally grown fresh vegetables and fruits. One day, when we explored Kailua-Kona, a historic seaside town of North Kona, my parents and I found a coffee shop called Country Samurai Coffee Company. There we met a gentleman who looked like a typical, middle-aged Japanese man, but he did not sound like a native speaker of Japanese. It turned out that he was Mr. Walter Kunitake, the owner of the coffee shop. With no customers in the shop at the time, he was willing to

Mariko Iijima     193

share his family history with me in English. He spoke about how his grandparents arrived in Kona from Fukuoka in the late nineteenth century. He continued to talk about himself as a third-generation, or Sansei, Japanese in Hawai‘i. He was, still is, the only coffee farmer who tended his coffee trees in the same way that the first generation of Japanese migrants had tended them. In the old style of cultivation, coffee trees grow as tall as eighteen feet, which requires a large ladder to pick the fruit, while other coffee farms prefer to keep their trees short, five to six feet tall, for easy harvest. Our two-hour conversation in his local Kona coffee shop in the summer of 1999 gave me another push to make myself an Americanist. In the 1990s in Hawai‘i, when my family vacationed in Kona annually, ethnic Japanese made up slightly more than one-third of the total population of the Hawaiian Islands; they were the second-largest ethnic group after the Caucasian population. In this sense, Hawai‘i was the closest foreign tourist destination to Japanese people in terms of distance and demography. However, as is often the case, the vast majority of tourists from Japan were more exposed to the beaches and shops than to the local Japanese community and its history. Besides, the history of Japanese emigration to the former Japanese colonies and to foreign nations has almost completely been neglected in the history classes in Japanese middle and high schools. Thanks to Mr. Kunitake, I became one of the few tourists who would know the history of ethnic Japanese in Hawai‘i. At the end of the summer vacation, I recounted to Professor Matsuo my experiences in Hawai‘i. Of course, I included my encounter with Mr. Kunitake. Listening to my story with nods of approval, he immediately said to me, “You have just found a wonderful topic for your senior thesis!” Never having expected that my personal experience would be important enough to become an acceptable topic, I was surprised and encouraged by his unexpected endorsement, which totally changed my view toward what can and should constitute academic research. To this day, choosing a topic that I feel passionate about has become a criterion for deciding what I research. This is also what I tell my students who choose me to supervise their senior theses. Anyway, that was how my academic passion for writing a social history of Japanese coffee farmers in Kona, Hawai‘i, was ignited. Along with the strong influence of Professor Matsuo’s guidance and lectures, I was captivated by the lives of the people on the peripheries, who delineate the complicated and contested history of the US. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), the first American history book I read in English in college,

194     Chapter 11

inspired my academic interests concerning migration and race. Who was involved in the process of coerced migration or the slave trade? Why were nations and societies allowed to create the chattel slavery system? In the novel, Kunta Kinte mentioned that after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Black people did not just obtain freedom and had to endure poverty and unemployment. What happened to them after being freed from slavery? How and when did society stop perceiving Black people as slaves? These perspectives and questions concerning marginalized people, despite differences in the levels of coercion and oppression, also applied to my senior thesis on the social history of Japanese coffee farmers in Kona. In nearly eighteen months, I completed the senior thesis in English. Never had I thought about pursuing an American history major when I enrolled at Sophia. Yet my thesis research changed the course of my life. At the final stage of writing my thesis, I became interested in graduate school in the US.

Being in the Periphery Here my compass started to orient me in an unexpected direction. The bottom line is that I went to Oxford, in the UK, for graduate school. It was through my grandfather’s connections that I had a chance to meet a professor from the University of Oxford and hear about a graduate program. Being the only grandchild of my grandparents, I grew up under protected circumstances. I went to a Catholic girls’ school, and my grandfather dropped me off at school every day for twelve years. As a source of financial support for my graduate studies, my grandparents insisted that—though the US was their business partners’ country—I go to the UK instead. They felt that the US was too dangerous. To satisfy my grandparents, I agreed to fly to the UK in November 1999 to have an interview with the Oxford professor and to hear about graduate school life there. “You will not be accepted to Oxford because you are Asian.” After this shocking statement, the professor continued, “If you are accepted, you will not be able to graduate because you are Asian.” These two sentences hurt me a great deal. The professor later explained that many students from Asia were not trained in the Western educational system and thus were not used to critical thinking and academic discussions. Nevertheless, the statements were a sudden and devastating blow to me. The experience of being labeled as “Asian” was the first shock. The deterministic, biased opinion of Asians in Western academia was another

Mariko Iijima     195

shock. I do not remember how I coped with these statements, but they strengthened my determination to complete my master’s degree at Oxford. This was my first experience of being racialized and feeling powerless to authority. I began to have some understanding of what it meant to be a minority, and this gave me a strong sense of purpose. A year later, I received an acceptance letter for the MPhil program in Economic and Social History at Oxford. I also was accepted at other graduate schools in the US. I chose Oxford mainly for two reasons: reassuring my grandparents and completing a degree in spite of the professor’s prediction. At the time, the Oxford economic and social history program was organized mostly by economic historians, who had turned from economics to history. Having been more interested in the actual lives and experiences of people in the past, I found the economic history-centered program challenging. However, there were several social history courses, including courses on witchcraft in the UK, Continental Europe, and the US; social class and space in the eighteenth-century UK; and crime and punishment in the nineteenth-century UK. Although these courses barely touched on American history, they showed me how historians approached lived experiences, not only through the lens of ethnicity and race, but also through various frameworks such as social class, material culture, landscape, and behavior. Being a part of the UK academia, I assumed that in order to establish myself as an American historian I should do some research that covered both the UK and the US. I decided to write a master’s dissertation on the migrations of the Pilgrims from Nottinghamshire in the UK, to Leiden in the Netherlands, and to the Plymouth Colony in the US. Traditionally, the Pilgrims were considered the founders of the US and were a religious group that fled to the US for liberty in consciousness. I decided to see them as immigrants from Europe to the US and conducted analyses on the backgrounds of these settlers—religious leaders and their followers, their family members (women and children), traders, and adventurers. In hindsight, my thesis had room for further research, but I felt reluctant to pursue this topic as a doctoral dissertation and wanted to have a more personal connection between my research and present-day society. When I started my master’s program, my plans for the future were vague. But I was determined that—were I eventually to decide to go on to a PhD program—I would go to the US. However, two years of study in the UK again resulted in a new plot twist, which made me want to stay in the

196     Chapter 11

city of dreaming spires. The unique system of Oxford was one of the primary reasons. The students have two main affiliations—one in college, which provides them with accommodation, the library, the Hall, and the Chapel. At the Hall, the members of the college—undergraduate, graduate, and faculty members—eat together. I was a member of Merton College, which offered breakfast, lunch, supper, and “Formal Hall” every day. Formal Hall was a particularly stunning experience. In the dark room, like the world of Harry Potter films (although without floating candles), dinner started with a prayer in Latin recited by one of the undergraduates. The faculty members sat at the “high table” laid out on the stage in front of the Hall. Farther down the stage, students sat on an extended bench—which signifies that Merton College was an old college; they had a three-course dinner served by the college staff. What made the formal dinner even more Harry Potter– like was that every member had to wear a black academic gown. Different styles represent status—undergraduate, postgraduate (masters’ and doctorate students), and scholars. Latin prayers, people in gowns, a three-course dinner—it sounds very ceremonial, but it was an opportunity to meet and socialize with new members of the college. As at regular colleges and universities, the students also belong to a faculty, which represents the field of their major. I was a member of the faculty of Modern History. Most of the friends I met at Merton were not history majors. They studied a wide variety of fields—computer science, archeology, theoretical physics, zoology, economics, and so on. I, therefore, had dinner with people of different academic and cultural backgrounds almost every day (at the graduate level, Oxford has a high proportion of international students). Dinner conversation typically started with complaints about the gloomy weather. Then it ranged from Shakespeare, to the latest popular novels and films, to the world’s political and economic situations. We frequently shared our anxieties and difficulties with the research process—writing a thesis, applying for grants, and job hunting in academia. The social network at Merton functioned as a tight-knit and mutually helpful community across fields and disciplines. I did not want to leave this community behind, so I decided to remain at Oxford to pursue my DPhil, the Oxford equivalent of a PhD. However, I changed my research topic. More precisely, I returned to my old topic of interest—a social history of Japanese coffee farmers in Kona. It seemed that the Faculty of History had difficulty placing me. I was in the division of Imperial and Commonwealth History (currently called

Mariko Iijima     197

Global History) under the supervision of Dr. Ann Waswo, a specialist on modern Japanese history who had been born and raised in the US. I found my placement quite surprising in that the faculty did not see my research topic as part of American history, even though they had a division of American history in the faculty and the Rothermere American Institute had just opened in 2001 with an invitation to former US president Bill Clinton. I felt as if my academic connection with American history was completely curtailed. It took me nearly a decade to identify my field of study. I thought that if I went to the US, it would have been easy to see my research as American history, Asian American history, or US immigration history. Another difficulty was that in the UK, located on the opposite side of the world from the Hawaiian Islands, many people did not know about Hawai‘i. Even Professor Robin Cohen, the author of Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997), was no exception. Luckily, I had an opportunity to meet him in Oxford. One of my professors introduced my research to him, and he found it interesting. One weekend morning, Cohen invited me to his home in Oxford. When I entered his house, I smelled a lovely breakfast—crispy bacon, fried tomatoes, and eggs. Passing the kitchen, where his family and friends gathered to chat and eat, he kindly took me upstairs to his study, where I felt complete tranquility. Like a typical academic’s space, his study was surrounded by a myriad of books neatly lined up on the wooden shelves. After listening to a brief explanation of my research on the ethnic Japanese community in Hawai‘i, he walked to one of the shelves and pulled out a heavy, oversized book—a world map. After a while, we located the Hawaiian Islands. When we found them, he said to me with a surprised look, “It is really far!” As the author of Global Diaspora, I had expected he would have known more about Hawai‘i, but the islands were off his radar. The meeting ended with encouragement from him regarding the importance of migrations in the Pacific Basin. He reassured me about the validity of my perspectives and insights regarding my doctoral research. My six years of graduate study at Oxford never made me feel that I fit into the mainstream. I was an Asian who presumably could not think, argue, and debate like Westerners. To overcome this misperception, I tried hard to acquire Oxford English, to master the “Western way” of thinking and argumentation, and to complete master’s and doctorate degrees. However, my six-year graduate studies in the UK led me to another question: “Why

198     Chapter 11

did I research my topic from within a UK research institution, rather than studying at a university in Hawai‘i, the US, or Japan?” This question positioned me in the periphery—not only at Oxford, but also in academia as a whole.

A Missing Piece of a Jigsaw Puzzle After I completed my DPhil in 2006, I came back to Japan and started to teach the English language and the history of Japanese migration. Teaching more than ten courses a term deprived me of time to research. I felt as if I had exhausted all my passion and energy to continue postgraduate research. It took me around six years to resume serious study of coffee production and Japanese migration. My interest was rekindled unexpectedly when I saw a film called Taiwan Jinsei (Life in Taiwan), directed by Atsuko Sakai in 2008. The film documented interviews with Taiwanese people who were born under Japanese rule and who had to learn the Japanese language. The film captured their lives in the late 2000s and identified their nostalgic feelings toward Japan. While watching the film, I noticed Arabica coffee trees behind one of the female interviewees. Renowned for its high-quality tea cultivation, Taiwan has never been a coffee-producing area, or so I thought. From a quick Google search, I learned that coffee trees had been planted during the time of Japanese rule. But where did the coffee trees originate? Who transplanted them? From further research, I learned that the involvement of Japanese coffee farmers in Kona and the cultivation of coffee in Taiwan emerged from the forgotten past. All of a sudden, the meaning of having studied imperial and colonial history at Oxford made sense to me. Hawai‘i was not only a US colony but also a “colony” of the Japanese Empire. Conventional histories had studied Japanese migrants based on their destinations—within or outside the territories of the Japanese Empire. Yet I came to realize that in the prewar period, or the period of Imperial Japan, Japanese migration and coffee production connected the US, Hawai‘i, Japan, and Taiwan. In 2008, I became reunited with Martin Dusinberre, who wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Dr. Waswo during the same period that I had. He had trained as a Japanese historian, and after completing his DPhil, he had also conducted research on Japanese migrants in Hawai‘i, which I found out when we met in the summer of 2008. As we both were interested in the involvement of Japanese migrants in the sugar

Mariko Iijima     199

manufacturing industry in the Asia-Pacific region, we started to talk about the possibility of a joint research project. In 2015, when he was appointed the chair for global history at the University of Zurich (UZH) in Switzerland, we launched a project on the transplantation of sugar in the Asia-Pacific. Starting in April 2018, I was granted a sabbatical for the first time in my ten-year teaching career, and I planned to spend most of the time doing research abroad. With no experience living in the US, except for six months of research at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2004–2005, I had been thinking about going to the mainland US. However, after the launch of the joint project with Martin, all of a sudden Zurich became the most sensible and feasible choice. Once again, I decided not to go to the US. From April to November 2018, I was affiliated with UZH’s Historisches Seminar, as a visiting scholar. The university has the largest history department in Switzerland, so I was blessed with opportunities to meet historians in German-speaking academia. Martin’s research team, which consisted of two postdocs, two doctoral students, and one MA student, majored in the history of different parts of Asia (the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan’s Nan’yō, or Northern Mariana Islands), but they were all attempting to add an element of global history to their own research. We had lunch together almost every day and shared our research interests. We even discussed how to survive the current academic environment, in which the humanities faced a large cutback in their budgets and faculty members. These routines and conversations reminded me of my graduate years at Oxford. Coincidentally, 2018 was the 250th anniversary of the British captain James Cook’s voyage to launch his first exploration to the Pacific. The celebration coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration. During my stay in Zurich, four exhibitions relating to the Pacific Islands were organized: “Ein Bild für den Kaiser: Japanische Arbeiter auf Zuckerplantagen in Hawai‘i” (A painting for the emperor: Japanese laborers on sugar plantations in Hawai‘i), at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, which was co-curated by Martin; “Hawai‘i: Köningliche Inseln im Pazifik” (Hawai‘i: Royal islands in the Pacific), at the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, Germany; “James Cook: The Voyages,” at the British Library in London; and “Oceania,” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Although each exhibition had its own uniqueness and originality, what surprised me the most was the enormous collections of the Pacific Islanders’ art, ornaments, and canoes that had ended up in European museums. Even in Hawai‘i, I had

200     Chapter 11

never seen such collections before. One may call it a legacy of European exploration of the Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, but these artifacts being given as gifts vividly delineates a history of multilayered colonization of the Pacific Islands. Also, these four exhibitions started to convince me that placing myself in the periphery, or in a field that was seemingly unrelated to my research, could also have an important meaning. It felt like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

Completing a New Jigsaw Puzzle Looking back on the paths that made me who I am as an academic, I have to admit that the US has kept slipping through my fingers. Of course, I have been to Hawai‘i numerous times for my field and archival work, as well as to the US mainland to attend conferences. In addition, at Sophia University, I have taught courses, such as the history of Hawai‘i and the history of Japanese migrations to North America. Collectively, these realities imply that I am an Americanist. My experiences with the US have always been acquired from the periphery. How should I assess these experiences? I would say that because I was in a third country, I was able to enjoy my rather unfiltered academic situation, which I might not have had inside the US. In the US academy, my research on the history of Japanese migrations to Hawai‘i and the US could have been placed in the field of Asian American Studies, which emerged in the 1970s as part of political activism in and outside the universities. Scholars of Asian American Studies have been driven to protest their marginality in society and academia, as well as to research and teach about the difficulties and hardships their ancestors and contemporaries have experienced. In this context, Asian American Studies scholars have tended to direct their attention to domestic issues. Being an academic outside the US, I was less exposed to the influence of that particular political agenda, which reflected the relationship between ethnic minority and nation-state. My academic surrounding therefore seemed to allow me to conduct my research from a different vantage point by combining frameworks and perspectives of imperial, colonial, and global histories in the Asia-Pacific. As time passes, my self-identification as an academic on the periphery fades. Instead, I have become interested in creating a new jigsaw puzzle, using pieces I obtained from different times, places, and people. For example, my latest research on the history of sugar production in the Asia-Pacific (covering Hawai‘i, Taiwan, and Okinawa) in relation to Japanese migrants

Mariko Iijima     201

would not have developed without my childhood trips to Hawai‘i, my graduate studies in Oxford (where Hawai‘i is placed in the context of British, not US, colonial history), and my exposure to global history scholars in Zurich. While writing this chapter, I also repeatedly have flashbacks of visiting my grandfather’s sweets factory whenever I read about sugar-manufacturing factories in my current research. Memories of my grandfather’s orchard came back to me when I visited Kona coffee farms for my doctorate thesis. These fragments of memory seem to be important sources of inspirations for my research. Put differently, for me research is a way to give new meanings and interpretations to my past.

Note I owe a special thank you to professors Martin Dusinberre, Kazuyuki Matsuo, John Y. Okamura for reading earlier drafts and providing helpful comments.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Making of a Transpacific Americanist via Latin America Myself Discovered through Immigration History

Yu Tokunaga

In the spring of 2016, at my one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, I interviewed my parents about their personal histories. I did it because, as their son and also as a historian, I wanted to better understand who they were. At the time, I was still a doctoral student at the University of Southern California and lived in Los Angeles with my wife and our newborn baby. I bought flight tickets for my parents and invited them from Kyoto, Japan, to Los Angeles and took them sightseeing and to my favorite restaurants as an expression of my gratitude for supporting me for the choices I had made in my life. They stayed at our place for ten days, and one night I came up with an idea of interviewing them about their lives. It was truly fun to hear about things I did not know about my own parents, and they seemed happy to talk about themselves. I could hardly imagine that my father would die of cancer just five months later. He did not know it either. Los Angeles became a special place for me to learn not only about the city’s history but also about my family history before my father passed away. In the 1970s my parents lived in Boston. In September 1974 my father began to pursue a doctoral degree in Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University and my mother also flew to Boston to support him. Back then, a US dollar was worth about three hundred yen, and they could barely make ends meet, let alone fly back to Japan before he finished his PhD. After they returned to Japan, I was born as their third and last child 202

Yu Tokunaga     203

in 1982 in Yokohama when my father was teaching at a university in Tokyo. When I was three years old, he got a position at Kyoto University, and our family moved to Kyoto. The 1980s was the period of Japan’s strong economy, which led some to call the nation “Number One.” But I grew up without knowing much about the Japanese affluence, since the bubble economy collapsed in my early childhood. I did not know much about the United States either, partly because my parents did not tell me much about their experiences there. The United States, however, appeared to me to be a very attractive country, based on the information I got from TV. A popular Japanese TV show was called Amerika Ōdan Urutora Kuizu (Trans-America ultra quiz) where Japanese participants traveled across the United States answering quizzes. I was not interested in quizzes per se, but I liked watching American cities, landscapes, and people on TV. When I was a fifth grader, I had a chance to visit Boston on a family trip and saw where my parents had lived in the 1970s. We also visited New York and Washington, D.C. Ethnoracial diversity in the United States did not leave a strong impression, since everyone looked like just an American or a foreigner to me back then. Yet I was surprised and excited by the huge size of cokes and the dispenser of free ketchup at McDonald’s. The scale of everything in the United States continues to impress me even today. The United States became the first foreign country I visited.

Curiosity for the Unknown: Living in Costa Rica I was a very curious child who loved new experiences. When I was about twelve, I was intrigued by the things that might exist beyond the planet Earth, and I wanted to go and live somewhere in outer space. I seriously wondered how I could be part of the community of extraterrestrial beings and understand something beyond the common knowledge on earth. At night, I slept near the balcony to make it easier for aliens to come down from their spaceship and take me back to their world. But I did not want to make my mother worry. So I told her, “Don’t get upset even if you can’t see me again next morning. I would just have been taken by aliens.” I was glad that my mother was supportive about my dream voyage to outer space. But I also began to think of alternative life plans in case aliens never showed up. Considering joining the extraterrestrial community might have reflected the mood that prevailed in Japan in the mid-1990s. In January 1995 a huge earthquake hit an area that included Kyoto and destroyed parts of

204     Chapter 12

nearby Kobe City, killing more than 6,400 people. Just two months later, a Japanese cult group, Aum Shinrikyō, committed a terrorist attack with sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring more than 6,000 people. These tragedies added to an uneasy feeling in Japanese society during the depression. The year 1995 was notable in terms of Japan-US relations because it was the half-century anniversary of the end of the Pacific War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war memory was gradually fading. In the same year, the release of Windows 95 marked the beginning of the Internet era and would soon drastically change the way we lived and communicated with each other. Since my father was a computer person, we soon began using the Internet at home. I could not foresee how great an impact this new infrastructure would have on our lives. When I entered high school, I still wanted to go somewhere I knew nothing about. I met one of my sister’s friends who had been to Australia as a high school exchange student, and he told me about an international youth exchange organization called the AFS (originally the American Field Service). Almost immediately I decided to send my application to the AFS to study abroad. At first, I was thinking about going to Australia simply because my sister’s friend went there. But soon I realized that I was not interested at all in learning English or living in a well-known English-speaking country. What I wanted was a whole new cultural experience. When I was thinking about my destination, Costa Rica in Central America occurred to me because I knew nothing about this country. As always, my parents supported my decision to go to Costa Rica. After studying Spanish with a short textbook for a month, I took a flight to Costa Rica with other seven Japanese students in 2000. My pure curiosity for the unknown paved the way to Costa Rica and, more importantly, to the Americas. My journey to Costa Rica would have an unpredictable impact on my career as an Americanist. My life in Costa Rica did not begin easily. I was there not as a tourist but as a resident. Cultural differences were not something to enjoy for a short period of time but something to live with and understand deeply and slowly over time. Spanish was the only language, and gallo pinto (a traditional rice-and-beans dish) was a breakfast dish almost every morning. The first entry in my diary I kept there read, “Everyone is good here. There are no bad people. Yet, everything is different.” I missed Japan so much. The Internet network had not yet reached most parts of my town in Costa Rica at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took me a month to send a letter and receive a reply between Japan and Costa Rica. My diary

Yu Tokunaga     205

was almost the only space where I could immerse myself in the Japanese language. I decided to keep my diary “only [in] Japanese.” It took me three months to be able to communicate more or less smoothly in Spanish and get used to Costa Rican culture and society. Once accustomed to the Costa Rican way of life, everything became easy and joyful, leaving little time for me to think about Japan. Gallo pinto and other local dishes my host mother cooked became my favorites. I loved drinking flavorful Costa Rican coffee with a lot of sugar every day, talking and laughing with my host family and many relatives. At my high school in Costa Rica, which was an agricultural school, I enjoyed studying and working with my classmates at the school farm, where we cut grass, fed pigs, and did other agricultural tasks as part of the curriculum. Mangoes were literally everywhere so that we could enjoy them while working. In January 2001, my study abroad was about to end, and I was preparing to go back to Japan. One night I was making the last entry in my diary. I wrote down sincere gratitude to my host family and friends. Surprisingly, I wrote part of it in Spanish, “It is truly incredible how fast time passed by.” I continued to write in Spanish, “In Japan, it’s not like this. They don’t speak Spanish. What is normal is not normal in Japan.” By this time, Costa Rican culture had become an important part of my own culture and identity. This was my firsthand experience of acculturation and multicultural identity formation, even if to a limited extent. In retrospect, this process of acculturation had significantly influenced my worldview and later affected the way I studied US history. First, it gave me a completely new geographical and cultural perspective on the United States. From the Japanese perspective, the United States was a country located to the east of Japan across the Pacific Ocean. But after living in Latin America for one year, in my mind I came to see the United States from the south and thus realized that the United States was at the intersection between Asia and Latin America. Second, it helped me to better understand the historical impact of European and American interventions on this region. In Costa Rica, I enjoyed coffee with a lot of sugar and fruits but did not know how these products were historically related to the colonization and monoculture plantations of the Western Hemisphere. But now I understand some of these historical legacies by looking back at my experiences in Costa Rica. The United States still has a powerful economic and cultural presence in Latin America, which generates both pro- and antiAmerican sentiment there. In particular, an uneasy feeling or frustration

206     Chapter 12

toward Americans sometimes, if subtly, seems to be expressed with the word gringo or gringa. On the way back to Japan from Costa Rica, I had an overnight stay at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport with seven other students before taking a connecting flight. At night, I had a big hamburger with a lot of French fries at the hotel restaurant, feeling an excitement of being in the United States because of the size of the burger. I could not speak English well but was able to communicate with the hotel employees in Spanish. I knew that many Latin Americans lived in the United States. In Costa Rica, every weekend I watched a very popular Spanish-language TV show called Sábado Gigante, broadcast from the United States, where many Latin American immigrants appeared as the audience and had fun interacting with the host, Don Francisco. But it was not until that night in Los Angeles that I clearly recognized the United States as a Spanish-speaking country.

Real History Classes Off Campus Soon after returning to Japan, I graduated from high school in Kyoto and started to study for university entrance exams. It was during this period that the 9/11 attacks took place. On TV I saw the World Trade Center collapsing to the ground when I was studying at home. One year later, I was admitted to the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University, where my father was teaching. Kyoto University historically prides itself on academic freedom. In the Faculty of Letters, class attendance was not taken strictly, so we could spend our school years on whatever we wanted to do on or off campus. There seemed to be a tacit consensus between professors and students that real education happened outside classrooms. I spent a lot of time on my part-time job as a waiter at a long-established and well-known Chinese restaurant in Kyoto. The elegant Western-style restaurant building, which was built in 1926 and designed by American architect William Merrell Vories, was a landmark in Kyoto’s central shopping area. When I saw the restaurant’s hiring information on the Internet, I thought working in such a beautiful building was simply exciting. I was very happy when they hired me. I worked there for three years and loved it. I could learn many things about the modern history of East Asia and the current situation of Chinese immigrants in Japan by working with Japanese and Chinese elderly people, Chinese international students, and descendants of prewar Chinese immigrants, including the restaurant owner’s family. One of my colleagues was a Japanese woman who was one of the so-called chūgoku zanryū koji

Yu Tokunaga     207

(Japanese war orphans left in China). These people lived in Manchuria as small children during World War II and were later taken in by Chinese families due to the turmoil following the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945. She shared with me her experiences in China and Japan. It was difficult for her to survive in postwar China as a descendant of Japanese settlers; after she returned to Japan as an adult, it was hard to survive in postwar Japan with her limited Japanese fluency. As an undergraduate history major, I felt like I was taking real history classes in this restaurant. I also kept working in the restaurant in order to save money to study in the United States. The more I learned about difficulties faced by immigrants and their descendants in Japan, the more I wanted to study about immigration and the history of the United States as a nation of immigrants. In Japan, a friend of mine who had Korean roots taught me about the situation of Zainichi Koreans, who still faced discrimination in the ethnically Japanese-dominant society even though ethnic Korean families had lived in Japan for generations. I was also aware of an increasing number of Latinos, particularly from Brazil and Peru, who were living in Japan as low-wage workers. I did volunteer work as a Spanish-Japanese interpreter for a Peruvian family that needed to see a doctor. And the Chinese restaurant taught me the importance of working together with people of different ethnic backgrounds. The United States seemed to be the best place for me to study about how immigrants faced and overcame difficulties and how people with different ethnoracial backgrounds could live together. When I was a sophomore, I applied to an exchange program between Kyoto University and the University of California. Working in the Chinese restaurant, I saved one million yen (approximately nine thousand dollars in 2004) to cover part of my living expenses in California. But obviously it was not enough. My parents agreed to pay for my rent in California, while paying tuition fees for Kyoto University. I was assigned by the exchange program to study at the University of California, Riverside, which had a strong Ethnic Studies Department and a racially diverse student population. It was exciting to study the histories and present situations of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans. I got a chance to study the history of the ethnic Japanese wartime experience for the first time. I also studied about the 1992 Los Angeles riots and took a trip to Koreatown in Los Angeles to deepen my understanding of interracial conflicts and cooperation. Even outside the classroom, I had great teachers: my African American and Jewish American

208     Chapter 12

roommates. They not only helped me learn English but also introduced me to the everyday life of American people. They always called me in their rooms to chill and sometimes took me out to their family homes elsewhere in California. Spending nearly ten months living with them was the best part of my days at Riverside. But ten months was not enough to understand the history of multiethnic California. “I will come back,” I said to myself as I walked to class. In Riverside, I also made friends with Japanese students who came to study English or to get a degree. One night I visited the UC Riverside Extension Center, where many Japanese students studied English. There I was talking with three friends. All of them came from Japan and spoke fluent Japanese. But their roots were in Korea, China, and Peru, respectively. One of them told me, like a joke, “You are the only Japanese” in terms of roots. This casual conversation struck me. In Japan, most people do not study the history of immigrants, and they tend to regard non-Japanese roots or nationalities as unconditional markers of foreignness. The conversation I had with my Japanese-speaking friends in Riverside made me aware of the ancestral diversity of the people living in Japan, urging me to rethink what it meant to be Japanese. This question continues to be as important to me in exploring what it means to be American, particularly in the history of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans.

Reporting Internationalization of Japan as a Journalist I returned to Japan in June 2005 and began to write my senior thesis, which compared the Japanese American experience with the Korean American experience during World War II. Meanwhile, I had begun to look for a job. I liked US immigration history and wanted to study abroad again in the future. But before deciding whether I would continue to study, I wanted to have some work experience outside academia. Journalism appeared to be a very attractive profession. I thought that newspaper reporters could play an important role in building an inclusive society by reporting on and calling attention to problems faced by immigrants in Japan. At job interviews, my experience in Costa Rica helped me a lot. The first question company interviewers asked me was, “Why did you go to Costa Rica?” My Costa Rica episode served as a hook to an engaging conversation in job interviews. I got an offer from the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper. In April 2006, I was assigned to the Asahi Shimbun branch office in Tottori Prefecture, the least populated prefecture in Japan. I reported on a

Yu Tokunaga     209

variety of issues ranging from crime to high school baseball tournaments. But I kept paying attention to issues regarding immigration and internationalization of Japan’s countryside. There were Americans in Tottori, although their number was quite small. I had a chance to interview some of these American immigrants. When Barack Obama won the US presidential election in November 2008, I interviewed some Americans in Tottori about their reactions. A white woman from Tennessee demonstrated her joy and excitement in tears, saying that Obama’s victory proved that the American dream was not an illusion. An African American woman hoped for a better future but cautioned that diplomatic and economic problems would not improve overnight and Obama would face obstacles, some of them because of his skin color. The local economy in Tottori was increasingly dependent on immigrant labor, as globalization affected every corner of the world while the rapidly aging Japanese society needed a new source of workforce. In January 2010, I wrote two articles for the New Year’s special report that covered immigrants in Tottori. The first article featured an Indonesian woman working as a caretaker at a large welfare home to support elderly Japanese. She worked hard and sent remittances to her husband and two children back in Indonesia. Her husband had quit his job to take care of their children in his wife’s absence. Her work in Japan and her husband’s support in Indonesia were part of the transnational family effort to support their children with sweat, tears, and love. Another article was about a Japanese Brazilian young man working at a local TV station in Tottori as an intern. He had come to Japan to learn how to make TV news programs, but a deeper reason was to search for his family history in Tottori. His grandfather had been born in Tottori and migrated to Brazil in 1930 at the age of eighteen with his parents and seven siblings. I went to visit his relatives in a village surrounded by mountains and to visit the tomb of his great-great-grandfather. Immigration to Latin America was not his own experience, but it was an integral part of his identity as a Japanese Brazilian that brought him all the way to Tottori. By writing stories about these people, I tried to describe the sentimental and historical connections between Japan and other parts of the world across oceans and beyond generations, so as to raise awareness of the ongoing internal internationalization of Japan and the importance of building a more inclusive society in Japan. Tottori is also one of the prefectures that sent many Japanese emigrants to the Western Hemisphere before World War II. In 2008 the prefectural

210     Chapter 12

government published a book about the history of Japanese emigrants from Tottori to Latin America. When I reported about the book, I felt like visiting Brazil to write more articles about Tottori’s immigration history and the long-lasting relationship between peoples in Tottori and Brazil today. But it was very difficult for a young journalist like me to leave all my routine work behind and fly to the other side of the Pacific Ocean for many days. I also wanted to have more time to study the history of immigration in the Western Hemisphere. It soon became clear to me that I would not be able to do so if I continued to work as a newspaper reporter. I recalled that I had said to myself in Riverside, “I will come back.” I made a decision to quit the Asahi Shimbun. My girlfriend, then working for a railway company, accepted not only my study plan but also my marriage proposal, knowing that I would become a student again and thus soon lose my income.

Exploring Japanese-Mexican Relations to Understand US History In April 2010, I entered a masters’ program at Kyoto University to study under Professor Brian Hayashi, whom I knew from my undergraduate years. This time I wanted to study the history of Latinos in the United States, particularly Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who had historically been an integral part of the American Southwest. I was particularly intrigued by the history of undocumented Mexican immigrants, because their huge numbers in the United States seemed to me the best manifestation of the United States as a nation of both legal and irregular immigrants. Two years later, in 2012, I submitted a master’s thesis on the history of a volunteer organization for undocumented Mexican immigrants called the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, using Spanish- and Englishlanguage sources. Here again, Costa Rica helped me. My experience in Costa Rica almost unconsciously directed me to look at the United States from the south and to pay attention to historical documents written in Spanish. Since then, using Spanish-language sources became my strength as a historian. Meanwhile, from the beginning of my master’s program, Hayashi sensei encouraged and helped me to apply for a doctoral program in the United States. I received the Fulbright scholarship and managed to be admitted to the doctoral program of the History Department at the University of Southern California in 2012. By this time, I had decided to explore the history of Japanese-Mexican relations in California. The choice of this research subject, which would weave together the Japanese and Mexican

Yu Tokunaga     211

immigration histories, was a natural extension of what I had been learning through my undergraduate and graduate studies in Japan. The USC History Department was my first preference because the department had a great combination of faculty members specializing in Japanese American and Mexican American Studies and the history of the American West, such as Professor Lon Kurashige, Professor George Sanchez, and Professor William Deverell. Since the first year of my graduate program, my adviser Professor Kurashige, whom I call Lon sensei with respect and affection, has been a great mentor in both my professional and private lives. I also found it ideal to live in Los Angeles because the city had been receiving large numbers of Japanese and Mexican immigrants since the early twentieth century. History was visible in the everyday life of Los Angeles. My life as a graduate student was not much different from that of other American students. But it was an interesting experience to me and my wife, who accompanied me, to become part of the ethnic community of Japanese-speaking immigrants in Greater Los Angeles, the largest concentration of the overseas Japanese (71,435 in 2012), followed by Shanghai and Greater New York. We shopped at Japanese supermarkets such as Mitsuwa, picked up Japanese-language free magazines such as Lighthouse that were available in newspaper boxes in front of these supermarkets, used a wellknown Japanese community website called Vivinavi, and sometimes visited the Japanese Consulate-General in Downtown Los Angeles. Meeting with Japanese friends who lived in Los Angeles was also fun and important for gaining helpful information for our life in the city. Living in Los Angeles this way made me imagine the life of prewar Japanese immigrants who shared information with each other through Japanese-language newspapers such as the Rafu Shimpo, a continuously operating paper that I use as an important primary source. My wife and I also socialized in the Japanese American community, particularly in the South Bay Area. We visited Japanese American community festivals in Gardena such as the obon matsuri, a Japanese Buddhist tradition, and events at the Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute (JCI), an important ethnic nonprofit center for a variety of social and cultural activities. As we got acquainted with the community, I heard that the JCI was looking for a Japanese-language teacher for Japanese American children in the area. My wife volunteered to serve as a teacher and, through her work, learned a lot about the community. We even went on a short trip with a Nisei woman born in Los Angeles in the 1920s to visit her Nisei

212     Chapter 12

friend whose son operated their family farm. At my request, the Sansei farmer kindly showed us around his farm, where many Mexican workers picked strawberries. The Sansei farmer talked to his Mexican employees in Spanish. With a smile, he said, “I don’t speak Japanese, but I speak Spanish.” Visiting his farm and seeing him interacting with Mexicans gave me insight for my doctoral research about the history of interethnic relations between Japanese farmers and Mexican workers in Los Angeles before World War II.

Los Angeles and My Son In the 1920s, when anti-Japanese sentiment reached its peak, Japanese nationals were deemed aliens who were ineligible for naturalization and racially undesirable for the future of the United States. They and their descendants faced severe difficulties, culminating in the tragedy of forced removal and relocation during World War II. In comparison with the prewar Japanese immigrant experience, our life in Los Angeles in the twenty-first century involved no real hardships. On the individual level, I was a privileged graduate student surrounded by highly educated and liberal-minded people. On the local level, Los Angeles has become one of the most liberal cities regarding immigrants, now claiming itself to be a “sanctuary city.” On the national level, the United States has no anti-Japanese immigration policy. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made Japanese and other Asian nationals eligible for naturalization as part of Cold War policy. Being ethnically Japanese does not conflict with being American, as it did in the prewar period, largely thanks to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And finally, on the international level, Japan is an important ally of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region, removing the international tension that could otherwise fuel anti-Japanese sentiment. By simply living in Los Angeles and comparing the past and the present, I was able to learn how historical contexts dramatically change what it means to be Japanese in Los Angeles. Although we lived in the period when Japanese were eligible for naturalization, we did not need US citizenship because we were planning to go back to Japan after I completed my doctoral program. US citizenship, however, became something personal to us when our first son was born in Los Angeles in 2015. His birth marked the best moment of our life in Los Angeles. I could not be more thankful to my wife for every effort she had made until his birth in a foreign country. At the hospital, we were told to

Yu Tokunaga     213

fill out a worksheet with his birth information, which would be used to issue his birth certificate, a document indispensable for his US citizenship. I had looked at prewar certificates of Japanese Americans during my archival research and knew that birth certificates were crucial to defend the rights of ethnoracial minorities in the United States. By filling out the worksheet, I felt I was experiencing a historically important moment to make our son an American citizen. However, at that time, we knew that our son would be raised in Japan without speaking English or knowing American culture. In this sense, Japanese citizenship was more important for him than US citizenship. And we needed to file the paperwork within three months after his birth to assure his Japanese citizenship. We visited the Japanese Consulate-General to register his birth abroad and declare our intention to retain our son’s Japanese citizenship. If we had not expressed our intention to retain his Japanese citizenship through this paperwork, he would have lost his Japanese citizenship automatically. Both the Japanese Ministries of Justice and of Foreign Affairs warn Japanese overseas residents not to forget to retain Japanese citizenship of their foreign-born babies. This procedure to retain Japanese citizenship for babies born outside Japan, called kokuseki ryūho no todokede, has much to do with Japanese American history. In fact, the creation of this procedure was a direct result of anti-Japanese racism in the United States. In the early twentieth century, a child who had a Japanese father was considered a Japanese citizen according to the Japanese Nationality Act, regardless of his or her birthplace, which automatically made the US-born Japanese baby a person with dual citizenship. But US-Japan dual citizenship gave anti-Japanese nativists in the United States a reason to claim that Japanese American citizens were disloyal to the United States because they retained Japanese citizenship. Japanese immigrant parents thought that this situation was problematic for the future of their children and the entire ethnic Japanese community. In order to appease antiJapanese sentiment, Japanese immigrant parents demanded that the Japanese government amend the Nationality Act to solve the legal problem faced by Japanese Americans regarding dual citizenship. In response to their demand, the Japanese government amended the law in 1916 and 1924 to facilitate the denationalization of US-born children of Japanese immigrants by letting them lose Japanese citizenship unless an intention to retain it was expressed. About ninety years later, my wife and I expressed our intention to retain our son’s Japanese citizenship because we thought it was important for

214     Chapter 12

our son’s future. When I signed the box saying “Retain Japanese nationality” in his birth registration for the Japanese government, it made me think of the many hardships Japanese immigrants and their children had to go through in the prewar period, and I realized the direct historical connection between our life in Los Angeles and Japanese American history. The meaning of retaining or not retaining Japanese nationality has changed over generations. But what immigrant parents wish for has not changed. In the 1920s, Japanese parents wished a better future for their US-born babies by demanding the amendment of the Nationality Act, and in the 2010s my wife and I wished the same for our baby as I signed to retain his Japanese nationality. Now I can see better that love for children or for parents is an important sentimental factor in understanding the history of immigration. About four months after our son was born, my parents came to Los Angeles from Kyoto to see their grandson and the place where we lived. We took my parents to Joshua Tree National Park. My father brought along my camera and took pictures of us three. One of the pictures was taken when I put my hand softly on our baby, held by my wife, with a Joshua tree and rocks in the background. This picture is my favorite one that I am using for my profile on a Kyoto University website. They had a great time and especially enjoyed eating their favorite things such as fruits, steaks, ice creams, and many others. My father passed away five months after their trip to Los Angeles. According to my mother, he said that their trip was one of the best memories of his life. I am thankful to my son for being a reason for me to bring my parents to Los Angeles.

Korea and My Grandfather In March 2016, I returned to Japan with my wife and son to start working at Kyoto University. After interviewing my parents in Los Angeles, I continued to explore my family history in Japan. One day, my mother told me that my aunt, her younger sister, was going to move into my grandparents’ house. The house had been vacant since my grandmother passed away several years before (my grandfather died many years earlier when I was four years old), and after she moved in, my aunt wanted to clean it up by throwing away old stuff that had been left in the house. I felt it urgent to visit the house to do “archival research” on remembrances of my grandparents and to keep some of them from being discarded. What I discovered there was amazing. I found several dusty old photo albums of my grandfather. In one was a picture of my grandfather as a pupil, labeled with the name of his

Yu Tokunaga     215

elementary school, Keijō Nanzan Shōgakkō. “Keijō” was the Japanese name for Seoul in Korea when it was under Japanese colonial rule, so that meant he had spent his early years there. Other pictures indicated that he had lived in Korea until he was around seventeen years old. And he was raised by a single mother. Then he and his mother moved to Tsingtao in China to live for one year. In 1944, a year before the end of the Pacific War, my grandfather landed on the Japanese archipelago for the first time to go to work and later study in a school for train engineers. Surprised and excited about my findings, I wanted to pinpoint his birthplace, so I ordered the family registry of my grandparents. Their family registry showed that my grandfather was born in the Japanese district in Seoul as a son of Japanese nationals who migrated to Korea in the early twentieth century. My mother knew that her father spent some time in his childhood and youth in Korea but did not know exactly where he was born or how long he was there. She did not ask him about his birthplace and upbringing simply because she was not interested. And perhaps my grandfather found it difficult to talk about his experiences in former Japanese colonies in postwar Japan with a democratic constitution where everything related to the country’s imperial past was deemed wrong. But it was stunning for me to know my grandfather’s past as a Korean-born child of Japanese immigrants. Until that time, I had never thought of myself in connection with prewar Japanese immigration history. My grandfather’s photo albums also taught me about what he was initially doing after Japan’s defeat in 1945. He found work as a postwar recovery worker in Osaka. Like many other Japanese cities, Osaka was largely destroyed by American air raids. In fact, my paternal grandmother grew up in the central area of Osaka, and almost all her family members were killed in the raids during the war. She survived because she lived in the outskirts of Osaka at that time, while my Korean-born grandfather was engaged in recovery efforts. I found pictures of my Korean-born grandfather working in Osaka. These pictures are proof of how the histories of Japan, Korea (which was once colonized by Japan), and the United States (which destroyed and later occupied Japan) were interwoven and crystallized in a personal history. Meanwhile, during the war, my maternal grandmother became a teacher at an elementary school. I vaguely remember she told me about her memories of wartime militaristic education, as she had taught her students how to use a Japanese weapon (probably a naginata, a long-handled sword).

216     Chapter 12

My maternal grandfather with his mother in Korea, circa 1940.

My paternal grandfather was a Buddhist priest. He walked around Osaka to pray for the dead. I am grateful that my four grandparents survived that very difficult period, which made it possible for me to exist and write about them. By looking back at my life, I see myself as a product of historical contingency. Having lived in Japan, the United States, and, most importantly, Costa Rica gave me a transpacific perspective to better understand how people’s experiences in different areas around the Pacific Ocean have intersected and interconnected. This perspective has helped me focus on the history of interethnic interactions between Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans in California and do archival research in Japan, Mexico, and the United States. In short, I became a transpacific Americanist via Latin America.

Yu Tokunaga     217

Now I regard California as a central site of transpacific history, where the shared experiences of peoples in Asia, Latin America, and the United States remind us of the importance of the everyday interplay between different groups of people in nurturing mutual understanding and crossing boundaries. In addition, I discovered myself through immigration history across the Pacific Ocean, thanks to our US-born son and my Korean-born grandfather. Yet, without primary sources, I could not argue anything meaningful as a historian. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the people, including my Korean-born grandfather, who have left behind or preserved documents for historians like me to explore the past in order to understand the present for a better future.

Contributors Mariko Iijima is an associate professor in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo. After graduating from Sophia University, she obtained her MPhil and DPhil in modern history from the University of Oxford. She specializes in global history, Japanese migration history, and the history of commodities (coffee and sugar) in the Asia-Pacific region. Her recent works include “Sugar Islands in the Pacific in the Early Twentieth Century: Taiwan as a Protégé of Hawai‘i,” in Historische Anthropologie (2019), and “Japanese Diasporas and Coffee Production,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Yuko Itatsu is a professor in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. She received her PhD in history from the University of Southern California. Her research interests lie in the intersections of social and cultural history of early twentieth-century transnational American history, particularly media representation, minority studies, and leisure studies. Her work includes “Leisure in Desperation: The Alliance and Axis of Rhetoric in the Global Recreation Movement, 1930–1945,” in Japaneseness across the Pacific and Beyond, edited by Tomoko Ozawa (2019). Masumi Izumi is a professor of North American studies in the Department of Global and Regional Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Her research focuses on the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians as well as their post-internment community activism. She has written numerous articles on these topics in English and Japanese. She is also the author of The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (2019) and Nikkei Kanada-jin no Idou to Undou: Shirarezaru Nihon jin no Ekkyou Seikatsu Shi (The Japanese Canadian Movement: The Little-Known Trans-Pacific History of Japanese Migration and Activism) (2020). Ikue Kina is a professor at the University of the Ryukyus. She is the editor of volumes 1–3 of Okinawa Jenda Gaku (Gender studies in Okinawa) (2014–2016) and the author of Kokyo no Toporoji: Basho to Ibasho no Kankyo Bungaku Ron (Topology of home: Ecocritical sense of place and belongingness) (2011) and a review essay entitled “Subaltern Knowledge and Transnational American Studies:

219

220     Contributors

Postwar Japan and Okinawa under US Rule,” in American Quarterly (2016). Her research interests include gender and ethnicity in American literature, multiethnic US communities, ecofeminism, and indigenous women writers. Hiroshi Kitamura is an associate professor of history at the College of William & Mary. He is the author of Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (2010). His current research examines Hollywood’s transpacific operation during the Cold War. He is also writing a book about the politics of media consumption through a study of film critic Yodogawa Nagaharu. Sanae Nakatani is an associate professor at the University Education Center at Tokyo Metropolitan University. She received her PhD in 2017 from the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for her dissertation on the lives and works of Isamu Noguchi, Minoru Yamasaki, and George Nakashima. Her research interests include Japanese American history and art and architectural history. Writing an essay for Unpredictable Agents has added the transpacific formation of Seattle’s Japanese American community to her list of future research projects. Yohei Sekiguchi is an assistant professor of English language and literature at Ferris State University. He received his PhD in American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2018. He is currently working on a book project that explores the melodramatic representation of nurturing fathers in late twentiethcentury American culture and its interaction with neoliberalism. Eijun Senaha, born and raised in Okinawa, earned English degrees at the University of the Ryukyus (BA), the University of Missouri–Kansas City (MA), and the University of South Carolina in Columbia (PhD). He teaches British and American literatures and cultures at Hokkaido University, Sapporo. His research interests include gender and sexuality studies, film studies, and autobiography and biography studies. He has published, in English, “A Translation of Her Own: Hillary, Japan and the Pivot to Asia,” in The Global Hillary: Women’s Political Leadership in Cultural Contexts, edited by Dinesh Sharma (2016), and “Radical Manhood and Traditional Masculinity: Japanese Acknowledgments for Literary Obama,” in The Global Obama: Crossroads of Leadership in the 21st Century, edited by Dinesh Sharma (2013). Yu Tokunaga received his PhD in history from the University of Southern California in 2018 and is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies with a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University. He is the author of “Japanese Farmers, Mexican Workers, and the Making of Transpacific Borderlands,” in Pacific Historical Review (2020), and “Japanese Internment as an Agricultural

Contributors     221

Labor Crisis: Wartime Debates over Food Security versus Military Necessity,” in Southern California Quarterly (2019). His first book, Transborder Los Angeles: Cultivating Japanese and Mexican Relations, 1924–1942, is under contract with University of California Press. Naoko Wake is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. She specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, illness, and disability in the Pacific Rim and is the author of Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (2011) and the coauthor (with Shinpei Takeda) of Hiroshima/Nagasaki beyond the Ocean (2014). Her forthcoming American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2021) explores the history of Japanese American and Korean American survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings, with a focus on hibakusha’s cross-national and gendered memory, identity, and activism. Yujin Yaguchi is a professor of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies of the University of Tokyo. He received his BA from Goshen College and his master’s and doctoral degrees in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. He was also a Fulbright visiting scholar to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the East-West Center (Honolulu). He has published and presented widely in Japanese and English on the intercultural dynamics of Japan-Pacific-US relations. His most recent publication in English is “Tolerance, Reconciliation, and the Alliance of Hope: Pearl Harbor Narratives in Japan,” in Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History (2019), edited by Beth Bailey and David Farber. Katsunori Yamazato is a professor of English at Meio University, Okinawa, where he teaches American literature. He is one of the founding editors of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is also the author of Reading Gary Snyder: Poetics of Place (2006, in Japanese) and A Narrative History of the University of the Ryukyus, 1947–1972 (2010, in Japanese) and is a coeditor of and contributor to Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa (2011), an anthology of Ryukyuan/Okinawan literature in English translation. Mari Yoshihara is a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003), Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007), and Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro (2019), as well as numerous books and articles in the Japanese language for both academic and general audiences. Since 2014 she has served as the editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association.

Index activism, 6; Asian American and Canadian movement, 156, 171–179, 182, 200; civil union, 113; Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i, 114; Okinawa, 28–29, 48–49, 69; racial justice, 140–141 Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, Army (ARIA), 38, 41–42, 44 AFS (American Field Service), 204 Akiyoshi, Toshiko, 149–150, 159 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 76 American Quarterly, 11 American Studies, 2, 5–7, 9–12, 16, 17n5, 112–113, 130, 133, 140–141, 144, 168 American Studies Association, 11, 17n5, 144, 168 Amerika Gakkai (Japanese Association for American Studies, JAAS), 6, 11–12, 17n5, 144 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 69–70 Aruga, Natsuki, 12 Asahi Shimbun, 208–210 Asian American Studies, 92, 155–157, 174, 179, 197, 200 Asian Canadian Studies, 174 Asian Studies, 147 Australia, 165–166, 182, 204 automobile industry, 2, 64, 146

Boyer, Paul, 141 Brown, Rita Mae, 132 Brown University, 2 Bryn Mawr College, 130–133 Buckwalter, Ralph, 84–85

Battle of Okinawa, 27, 34, 41, 49, 69, 71 Beiryu, 29–30, 37–47, 51 Birky, Wilbur, 81

Dandurand, Karen, 65–66 Department of Defense (US), 29 Dickinson, Emily, 56, 65–66 Dicky, James, 51

Canada, 167–174, 182 Carleton College, 140–141, 145 Central Missouri State University, Warrenburg, 44, 46, 52 Christianity, 43, 75–76, 84–86, 101, 138 CIE Libraries, 10 Cisneros, Sandra, 110 civil rights movement, 28 civil union, 113 Cohen, Robin, 197 Cold War liberalism, 5–8, 10, 28, 147 College of William & Mary, 137, 143–147 College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ), 134 colonialism and colonization, 200, 205; Japanese, 15, 39, 41, 53, 90, 94–95, 198; US, 27–28, 57, 60, 69, 71, 94–95 Costa Rica, 16, 204–206, 208, 210, 216 Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship, 112 cultural diplomacy, 5–8, 10, 148

223

224     Index

Doshisha University, 9, 170, 173–174 Dusinberre, Martin, 198–199 East-West Center (Hawai‘i), 2 Eliot, T. S., 34 Emergency Detention Act, 173, 175 English: acquisition of, 1–2, 24–26, 31–34, 59, 67–68, 76, 79, 84, 89, 91, 102, 107, 136, 138–139, 191; majoring in, 26–30, 44, 50, 52, 56, 59–65, 106–111, 129–130, 191 father, 14–15, 54, 104–105, 112, 114–118; author’s own fatherhood, 115–118, 212–214; author’s relationship with father, 52–54, 59, 105, 109, 111, 214; life of the author’s father, 39–47, 50, 59, 83–86, 89, 138, 165, 202–203 FBI, 99–101 feminism, 56–58, 60–61, 65–71, 115, 152–154 Fort Missoula, MT (incarceration camp), 99–100 Fujimoto, Yoko, 177 Fulbright program, 6, 10, 38–39, 44, 60, 134, 138–139, 176, 210 gender: American gender roles and relations, 45–46, 65–67, 112, 116–117, 132, 152; gender as subject of study, 52–53, 56, 62–66, 69, 110, 112, 114–117, 152–154; Japanese gender roles and relations 90–91, 116, 126–127, 129–130, 152–154, 159, 167; Okinawan gender roles and relations, 48–49, 52, 56, 60–61, 68–71. See also father; feminism; marriage; sexuality General Headquarters (GHQ), 26, 186–187

Gila River, AZ (incarceration camp), 179–180 Golden Gate Club, 39 Goshen College, 79–81 Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) program, 10, 38, 41–46, 51, 60 Grew Bancroft Foundation, 10 Gurgone, Frank, 189–191 Ha, Quan Manh, 157 Hall, Basil, 31–32 Hawai‘i, 2, 11, 15, 25, 38, 60–61, 79–80, 94–96, 111–118, 190–194, 196–201 Hayashi, Brian, 210 Hemingway, Ernest, 53 Higa, Mikio, 39 Hirabayashi, PJ, 177 Hiraishi, Takaki, 109, 111, 113 Hiroshima (atomic bombing), 84–85, 141, 143–144, 204 Hitotsubashi University, 89 Hokkaido, 53, 75–76, 84–85 Hokkaido University, 53 Honma, Nagayo, 10 Hoshi, Hajime, 54 Hoshi, Shin-ichi, 54 Houck, Beatrice, 66–67 Iijima, Ichiro, 186–191, 194, 201 Indiana University, Bloomington, 150–154 Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), 56–58, 65–66 Indigeneity, 60–61, 69 Inouye, Tatsuo Ryusei, 180–182 Institute of Pacific Relations, 10 International House, 10 Iriye, Akira, 10 Iwakura Mission, 9

Index     225

Japan bashing, 64, 82 Japanese American National Museum, 180 Japanese Americans: author’s interactions with, 79–80, 96, 134, 156–157, 174–182, 192–193, 211–212; history of, 90–102, 96–101, 153–154, 179–180, 192–193, 212–214; Japanese Americans as subject of study, 89–90, 91–97, 101–102, 179–183, 196, 198–200, 207–208, 220–211. See also Asian American Studies; migration studies Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS). See Amerika Gakkai Japanese Association for Migration Studies (JAMS), 169–170 Japanese Canadians, 170–174, 180 Japanese corporations, 2–3, 81–82, 86, 105, 117, 122–123, 186 Japanese incarceration (World War II), 96–101, 179–182, 192, 207, 212 Japan-US Security Treaty, 48 Kadota, Gordon, 172 Kamei, Shunsuke, 10 Kanda, Minoru, 175 Keio University, 139–140, 142 King, Rodney, 64, 141 Kitamura, Mitsuyo, 138 Kitamura, Takao, 138 Kochiyama, Yuri, 174 Kometsu, Okifumi, 26–27, 29, 34–35, 61–63 Konami, Takashi, 167 Korea, 215–217 Korean War, 44 Koza Riot, 28 Kubota, Kinuko, 12 Kunitake, Walter, 192–193

Kurashige, Lon, 211 Kyoto University, 9, 150, 203, 206–207, 210, 214 Latin America, 16, 107–108, 204–206, 216–217 letters, 1, 91, 95, 102, 122, 188–190 LGBTQ history, 154–155. See also sexuality Los Angeles, CA, 108, 121–125, 128, 130, 133–135, 176–179, 202, 207, 210–214 Makishi, Chochu, 32–36 marriage, 49, 67–68, 91, 98, 113, 115, 135, 151–153, 158, 210 Marxism, 6, 11 Matsuda, Takeshi, 5–8, 11 Matsumoto, Takuo, 84 Matsumoto, Yuko, 12 Matsuo, Kazuyuki, 192–193 McCormick, Thomas, 17n2, 141 Mennonite, 15, 75–87 Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, 210–212 Mexico, 69, 108, 114, 215 Michigan State University (MSU), 28, 59, 63–65, 154–155, 158 migration studies, 169–170, 194–201, 208–211 military base, 22–26, 34–35, 48, 57–60, 69–71, 83–84 Minidoka, ID (incarceration camp), 99–100 Ministry of Education (Japan), 62 missionaries, 75–76, 84–86, 170, 189 Miyamoto, Nobuko, 174–179 multiculturalism, 56, 64, 69–70, 166 Murakami, Haruki, 108–109, 114–115, 149

226     Index

Nabisco Cookie Company Japan, 186–188 Nakanishi, Otokichi, 90–91 Nakaya, Kenichi, 10 Nakazawa, Mayumi, 174 New Left, 10–11 Niijima (Niisema), Jō, 9, 170 Nishii, Ernie-Jane Masako, 180–182 Nitobe, Inazō, 9 Nixon, Richard, 29 Noguchi, Isamu, 96–98 O’Brien, Tim, 109–112, 115 occupation: Allied occupation of Japan, 5–6, 27, 141–142, 186–187; US occupation of Okinawa, 27–28, 37–50, 58, 60 Oda, Nancy Kyoko, 180–182 Okihiro, Gary, 174 Okinawa, 14–15, 21–71; indigenous language, 30–31, 61; Okinawa Human Resources Development Foundation, 51; reversion to Japan, 27, 29–30, 37–38, 48–50, 58, 71, 72; theater, 30–31. See also Beiryu; Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) program; military base; soldiers Okiyama, Eikichi, 90–94, 98–102 Orientalism, 7–8 Ota, Masahide, 69 Oxford University (UK), 194–198 parenthood, 115–118, 212–214 Perry, Matthew, 31–33, 35, 102 Queen’s University (Ontario), 168–169 Redress movement (Canada), 171–173 Ritsumeikan University, 169–170 Roche Harbor, WA, 90–91

Rockefeller Foundation, 5, 10 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 83 Rotary Foundation, 10, 50 Roy, Patricia, 171 Said, Edward, 7–8 Saito, Makoto, 10 Sakakibara, Yasuo, 10 Sakiyama, Tami, 70 Sands, Kathleen M., 113, 115 Sato, Eisaku, 29 Sato, Hiroko, 12 scholarship (for study abroad), 26, 29–30, 34, 37–38, 41–46, 51, 60, 63, 76, 108, 112, 134, 170–171. See also Fulbright program; Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) program; individual scholarships Schwartz, Delmore, 44–45, 53 Seattle, WA, 90–94, 97–98, 100–101, 180 Senaha, Eiki, 39–47, 50, 53, 61–62 settler colonialism, 94–95 sexuality, 130, 132–133, 151–155 Shibata, Motoyuki, 106–109, 113 Shimazu, Nariakira, 33 Shimizu, Hiroshi, 10 Smith, Misako, 67 Snyder, Gary, 62, 76–77, 85, 87 soldiers, 21, 27, 34, 47–49, 57–58, 68–69, 71, 83, 182 Sone, Monica, 92–93 Sophia University, 191–194, 200 State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, 76, 78 Sudo, Tatsuya, 174 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 151 Suyama Project, 181–182 taiko, 173–174, 177 Taiwan, 198–200

Index     227

Takagi, Yasaka, 9 Takahashi, Yuko, 12 Takasaki, Mayumi, 172 Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), Hawai‘i, 114 Thoreau, Henry David, 27, 34 Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), 167–168 Tonawanda, NY, 78, 86 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, 48 Tsuda, Umeko, 9, 130 Tsuda University (formerly Tsuda College), 9, 129–130 Tule Lake, CA (incarceration camp), 180–182 Tuna Canyon Detention Station, 182 Uchimura, Kanzō, 9 United Kingdom, 46–47, 88–89, 135, 165, 185, 194–198 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 92–93, 181 University of California, Riverside, 108, 207–208 University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2, 11, 94–96, 104, 110, 112–117, 199 University of Missouri-Kansas City, 52 University of the Ryukyus, 25–30, 34, 41, 44, 50, 52, 59–62, 69 University of South Carolina, 51–52

University of Southern California (USC), 133–135, 202, 210–212 University of Tokyo, 2, 9, 94–95, 106–111, 116, 135 University of Victoria, 171–173 University of Wisconsin-Madison, 17n2, 141–142 University of Zurich, 199 US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR), 38, 43, 48 Uzawa, Yoshiko, 12 Vietnam War, 23, 25–26, 46, 48, 68, 111 Wakayama, Tamio, 172 war brides, 51–52 War Relocation Authority (WAR), 100. See also Japanese incarceration Williams, Samuel Wells, 32–33 Wordsworth, William, 26, 46–47, 52 World War II, 27, 34, 40–41, 49, 84, 92, 94, 98, 144, 173, 208, 212, 215–216. See also Battle of Okinawa; Japanese incarceration Yamaga, Yasutaro, 171 Yamazaki Baking Company, 186–188 Yamazato, Katsunori, 62 Yeats, William Butler, 26–27, 29, 34–35, 61