Japanese American Identity in Literature

Introduction

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan, unlike China, responded to the challenges of the West by joining its ranks. When Emperor Mutsuhito, who reigned from 1868 to 1912, came to the throne, he inaugurated the Meiji era of political reform and technological modernization. The feudal system was eliminated and peasants were given land to farm. Also during Mutsuhito’s reign, Japan defeated China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905) in two wars and became the major regional power of East Asia, moving rapidly toward colonialism and global domination. This historical context has led some historians to speculate that the emigration of the Japanese was part of Japan’s imperialist project, but a more likely interpretation is simply that Japanese peasants were so heavily taxed that many soon found life in Japan impossible. In either case, many Japanese made the Pacific crossing to the United States (see Milton Murayama’s Five Years on a Rock, 1994). Haru Matsukata Reischauer’s family saga, Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage (1986), offers a century-long overview of the relationship between the United States and Japan.

The Japanese were first brought to Hawaii in 1869, but apart from these few immigrants and the several hundred students studying at American universities during the 1870’s, the Japanese did not leave for Hawaii and the United States mainland in large numbers until the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882 resulted in a short supply of cheap labor. In 1885, the Japanese government began to allow its nationals to emigrate. By the end of the nineteenth century some 160,000 were working in the United States and Hawaii, mainly as migrant farmers and plantation laborers. In 1908, the United States and Japan negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which restricted the immigration of the Japanese laborers. The family reunion provisions of this agreement, however, led to the introduction of picture brides. Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride (1987) and Murayama’s Five Years on a Rock tell of this circumstance. Hence, in contrast to the Chinese, who were the object of legal restrictions intended to prevent their forming families, the Japanese Americans rose steadily in population, from about 150,000 around 1910 to about 300,000 at the outbreak of World War II. More than half of the Japanese in America when World War II started were Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants). They were subjected to the same kind of discrimination that the Chinese suffered, but because of the relatively normal family life that the Japanese Americans could have, they settled down and concentrated on agriculture. Prohibited from owning land, they nevertheless became successful in farming cash crops and distributing produce. An activist group called the Japanese American Citizens League was founded by the Nisei in 1939 to combat racism and to promote Americanism.

Japanese American Experience, 1869-1942

Apart from materials in Japanese such as haikus published in Japanese-language newspapers, the literature documenting the first phase of the Japanese American experience (1869-1942) may be placed, for convenience, in three thematic groups. The first group may be called the cosmopolitan group, as expressed in the prolific writings of Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), born in Japan of a Japanese mother and a German father, and Yone Noguchi (1875-1947). They participated in the international literary scene, knew Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, and played an important role in the cultural exchange between East and West. Examples are Hartmann’s Tanka and Haiku: Fourteen Japanese Rhythms (1915) and Noguchi’s Japanese Hokkus, 1920. The second group is characterized by a sense of aristocratic nostalgia for the culture and tradition left behind. Typifying this impulse is the fiction of Etsu Inaki Sugimoto, whose A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) is filled with descriptions of fairy tales, legends, customs, and festivals that define the traditional culture of Japan, which the author regrets being lost to modernization. The book, followed by A Daughter of the Narikin (1932), A Daughter of the Nohfu (1935), and Grandmother O Kyo (1940), served a diplomatic function in explaining Japan and appreciating America. The third group, which overlaps with the first two to a certain degree, is the sociohistorical (whether biographical, autobiographical, or fictional) representation of Japanese American life. Examples include Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1901), The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid (1905), and The Story of Yone Noguchi, Told by Himself (1915); Shidzue Ishimoto’s Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935); Chiyono Sugimoto Kiyooka’s two autobiographies, Chiyo’s Return (1935) and But the Ships Are Sailing—Sailing— (1959); and Haru Matsui’s Restless Wave: An Autobiography (1940). As suggested in Nisei author Toshio Mori’s collection of short stories, Yokohama, California (1949; the volume was prepared for publication in 1941), an important trend in this material is the attempt to identify America rather than Japan as the homeland. Mori’s Japanese American characters have totally acclimatized to California and feel perfectly at home there. Hisaye Yamamoto’s short-story collection Seventeen Syllables (1988) captures the same sense of identification. Seventeen Syllables further enriches the definition of Japanese American identity by introducing generational, gender, and ethnic tensions. Contemporary writers continue to add to this sociohistorical archive by reconstructing, through reminiscences or research, the lives of their forebears. One example is Kazuo Miyamoto’s Hawaii: End of the Rainbow (1964), a historical novel about Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. Another example is the ambitious family saga by Milton Murayama, Five Years on a Rock and All I Asking for Is My Body (1975). This broad range of materials suggests an impressively well-defined sense of ethnic identity in the first phase of the Japanese American experience.

Japanese American Experience, Since 1942

The second phase (1942 onward) began with the dispossession, relocation, and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans residing on the West Coast in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The internment was the most revealing moment of Japanese American identity because it not only deprived Japanese Americans of their livelihood and civil rights but also shattered their assumptions about themselves, their nationalities, and their loyalties. The ordeal spawned a whole range of literary responses and expressions that haunt the memories of the Japanese American community and challenge the conscience of America as a democracy. Japanese Canadians went through a similar persecution; the most well-known literary recounting is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981). The literature of the internment experience expresses three types of sentiment. The first is defiance and anger, which is typified by World War II veteran John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), in which some Nisei characters refuse to prove their loyalty by serving in the United States military. No-No Boy was the first of a stream of protest literature among younger Japanese American writers. Examples include Edward T. Miyakawa’s Tule Lake (1974), and Janice Mirikitani’s Shedding Silence (1987) and We the Dangerous (1995). The second sentiment is more complex in that although outrage is present, it is subdued and sometimes diluted with humor or stoicism (and even shame and self-abnegation), with implications that justice can be entrusted to the good will and good judgment of the American public. Examples of this approach include Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953), and Farewell to Manzanar (1973) by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston. The third sentiment overlaps with the first two but is distinguished from the protest of the first and the resignation of the second by a realism that concentrates on the factual aspects of the lives of the internees. Examples of this sentiment include Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp (1993). The significance of this approach lies in the fact that the internment is used as a framework for the meditation on and exploration of Japanese American identity. In the process of such meditation, the generational, cultural, and national differences between the Issei and Nisei are also bridged, thus reaching a cohesive sense of community.

At the end of World War II, by which time the valor of Japanese American veterans, who suffered extremely high casualty rates in missions intended to demonstrate their loyalty, had laid to rest the question of the loyalty and allegiance of Japanese Americans, an assimilationist sentiment began to emerge in the literature, even to the extent that the internment experience was enveloped by a veil of shame and silence. Sone’s Nisei Daughter, although it does not evade issues of racism and oppression encountered in her life (part of which was spent in the internment camp), focuses on the humorous dimensions and cultural conflicts in the dualities of her almost innocent existence. Gene Oishi, in In Search of Hiroshi (1988), also eschews bitterness in documenting his camp experience and in chronicling his career as a journalist. Further examples of this approach include Daniel Inouye’s Journey to Washington (1967), Daniel I. Okimoto’s American in Disguise (1971), and The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida (1972) by Jim Yoshida and Bill Hosokawa. Some critics have disparaged these books on the ground that their assimilationist approach grants that Americanness needs to be emphasized and that the Japanese part of one’s heritage needs to be diminished, lest it arouse suspicion. The assimilationist success story, which tends to exact the price of repression and self-denial, finds its counterpoint in the works of authors who believe in breaking the silence. One such author is Janice Mirikitani. Kogawa’s poignant Obasan offers a unique approach to the tension between repression and breaking silence by demonstrating that neither speaking out nor keeping silent about the wartime injustices is easy.

In 1989, the United States government closed the case of wartime internment with an apology and a cash payment to some 60,000 Japanese American victims who were still alive. The closure of the case appears to have encouraged Japanese American authors to look beyond the internment and assimilation for additional themes. Japanese American literature has diversified as a result. Many writings have been inspired by the history and memory of immigration and settlement. These include Wakako Yamauchi’s Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994) and Jessica K. Saiki’s From the Lanai and Other Hawaii Stories (1991). A variety of works testify to the high level of maturity and confidence in Japanese American literature. Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) is a futuristic novel about a young woman’s struggle to survive and love in an absurd and destitute world. Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) is a satirical allegory about the monstrous operations of multinational corporations. Garrett Kaoru Hongo’s Volcano (1995) is a lyrical memoir of Hawaii that interweaves personal memories and appreciations of poetry and the environment. Gail Tsukiyama’s Women of the Silk (1991) is a novel with strong feminist implications in its portrayal of an autonomous women’s community in early twentieth century China. David Mura’s roots-searching memoir Turning Japanese (1991) and Lydia Minatoya’s travelogue Talking to High Monks in the Snow (1992) indicate that the issue of ethnic identity continues to visit Japanese Americans, who, despite their survival and triumph, often find themselves surprised by the persistence of the identity issue. This persistence is clear in the case of recent Japanese immigrants such as Kyoko Mori, who fitfully interrogates her Japanese identity and diffidently assumes her American identity in Shizuko’s Daughter: The Dream of Water (1995). Native Japanese writers such as Yoshimi Ishikawa, who has written about the United States, add international insights to the issue of Japanese American identity.

In the twenty-first century, the legacy of Japanese internment has continued to loom large over Japanese American literature in books such as Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's Harmless Like You (2016), which deals with the way this trauma has reverberated through the following generations. Like that of many other immigrant groups, Japanese American literature has also begun to include narratives of American-born individuals who return, temporarily or permanently, to their families' countries of origin and reconnect with their roots. One such novel is A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki, which chronicles the struggles of Californian teenager Nao Yasutani to adjust to life in Tokyo and the eventual strength and growth she finds in her relationship with her Japanese great-grandmother, Jiko. Another strain of Japanese American literature that has become more prominent in the twenty-first century is works that explore the way this identity intersects with other identities, such as being mixed-race, a woman, or a member of the LGBTQ community. These works include transgender writer Ryka Aoki's poetry, short-story, and essay collection Seasonal Velocities (2012) and Julie Otsuka's novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011), which aims to give a voice to the Japanese women who came to the United States as "picture brides" in the early 1900s.

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