Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: The fictitious Jack London College in Oakland, California

Principal Characters:

• Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt, a black conservative, son of career Air Force officers, professor of “Humanity” at Jack London College
• Ishmael Reed, the author himself, who appears as a character in the novel
• Dr. Yamato, Puttbutt’s Japanese instructor, who later becomes president of Jack London College
• Jack Only, the billionaire patron of a conservative think tank opposed to multiculturalism
• Dr. Crabtree, a conservative English professor who opposes multiculturalism (and Puttbutt’s tenure) but later has a change of heart
• Robert Bass, Jr., a student at Jack London College who edits the racist newspaper that lampoons Puttbutt
• Robert Hurt, the dean of Jack London College, who defends multiculturalism
• Bright Stool, the president of Jack London College, fired when a Japanese group buys the college
• Marsha Marx, the chair of the women’s studies department at Jack London College

The Novel

A satiric interpretation of Ishmael Reed’s America in the early 1990’s, Japanese by Spring is the story of a typical (though fictitious) California college in the final years of the George Bush administration. Japanese by Spring is written in three parts of unequal length, and concludes with an epilogue. Part 2 could be considered merely a brief interlude (at ten pages, it is half the length of the epilogue), except that it advances the plot sharply and is a focal point of the action in the novel.

The story begins with a brief biography and character sketch of the protagonist, Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt. The son of two African American career Air Force officers, Puttbutt was sent to the Air Force Academy in the 1960’s. There, Puttbutt went through a rebellious black consciousness stage, but he took a conservative turn after a tragic love affair with the wife of his Japanese professor. Unnerved by the experience, Puttbutt becomes a pacifist and ends up teaching English at Jack London College.

As the novel opens, a decision is pending on whether or not Puttbutt will be granted tenure. The tenure decision dominates the entire first section of the novel. Puttbutt does everything he can to appear to be a team player: When black students are lynched on campus, Puttbutt tells the press that the students deserved their beatings because of their excessive demands. Yet there are signs of trouble for Puttbutt.

The first sign is in the classroom. Some of the more bigoted white students, notably Robert Bass, Jr., the son of a local industrialist who contributes heavily to the college, openly ridicule him in class.

Puttbutt tries to be conciliatory on all fronts: Many liberal professors (especially the dean of “Humanity,” Robert Hurt) are outraged at the blatant racism of the attack on Puttbutt, but the college president, Bright Stool, quiets demands for Bass’s expulsion. The chair of the African studies department, Dr. Charles Obi, who should be most sensitive to attacks on a black professor, asks Puttbutt not to rock the boat. Puttbutt himself defends Bass’s racist cartoons and remarks as protected forms of free speech.

Other threats to Puttbutt’s security as a black conservative scholar arise from his past. His father, still an active-duty general, warns him that his grandfather, the only Puttbutt who did not serve in the military, and who in fact sympathized with the Japanese in World War II, may be trying to contact him. Grandfather Puttbutt in fact kidnaps his grandson with a gang of Japanese toughs and outlines a seemingly paranoid plan to side with the Japanese in an upcoming global economic conflict. Just as he is told that he may be on the losing side, Puttbutt returns to campus to receive the crushing blow that ends the first section: His tenure has been denied.

The pace of the plot quickens precipitously in part 2: Still reeling from his denial of tenure, Puttbutt learns that Bass’s father, angry over the threatened suspension of his son, has pulled his financial backing from the college, and his corporate friends follow suit. Japanese investors buy the college and institute radical changes, including hiring a new president and naming Puttbutt vice president. Part 2 ends melodramatically with the revelation that the new president is Puttbutt’s former Japanese tutor, Dr. Yamato.

For the first few chapters of part 3, Puttbutt enjoys his reversal of fates: People who once held authority over him are now under his authority. Robert Bass, Jr., apologizes to Puttbutt and becomes his household servant. Angry mobs who threaten Puttbutt are beaten back by Ninja warriors. Yet revenge is not sweet for Puttbutt, who grows increasingly uneasy.

At this point, Ishmael Reed himself becomes a character in the novel, reversing the point of view from Puttbutt’s Western cultural chauvinism to Reed’s embrace of multiculturalism. After Reed’s point of view is established, he meets Puttbutt in the faculty club at Jack London College. Returning to his office, Puttbutt finds the college’s name changed: Instead of being named for Jack London, who is presented in the novel as anti-Asian, the school is now named for Hideki Tojo, the prime minister of Japan during World War II.

As the changes come more and more rapidly, Puttbutt becomes more and more opposed to the new administration. They institute new intelligence tests for students, with questions weighted toward Japanese culture. Japanese American students are expelled for having become too Westernized. When Reed protests, he is fired.

Organizing a faculty protest, the pacifist Puttbutt faces his first battle since leaving the Air Force Academy, but his father intrudes, bringing armed troops to subdue President Yamato. Yamato is arrested (the charge is not specified) but is soon free, showing up in Puttbutt’s house and telling him about an impending struggle for control of the United States. The novel ends with an epilogue describing the country in 1992 from Reed’s point of view.

The Characters

Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt represents a departure in characterization for Reed, whose protagonists are usually close to his own point of view. Puttbutt is very nearly Reed’s opposite in many areas: a conservative from a military family, opposed to multiculturalism, defending Western cultural values. Reed builds up readers’ sympathy for Puttbutt by making him the underdog but then undermines that sympathy when Puttbutt gains power. Puttbutt’s pacifism, which arises partly from chafing at the role his parents have chosen for him and partly from shock at his lover’s suicide while he is at the Air Force Academy, is shown to be mere capitulation to whoever is in power. The most subtly drawn of the characters in the novel, Puttbutt changes during the course of the book, learning how to rise above cultural parochialism. Nevertheless, the story leaves him just at the point of discovery of his limitations: His future is left open to question.

Ishmael Reed, the author appearing as a character in the novel, serves as a foil to Puttbutt—or vice versa. Their opposition is not antagonistic: Both are African American men of letters, both have been attacked by feminist groups, both are studying difficult foreign languages. Yet the differences are telling, and crucial to the plot: Reed has staked his career on a multicultural philosophy that Puttbutt has opposed as a threat to Western cultural values.

Dr. Yamato, who is first seen simply as Puttbutt’s Japanese instructor, is something of a mystery. His diatribes on the cultural supremacy of Japan are disturbing for Puttbutt, who sees them as cultural chauvinism and bigotry—though he does not see, as the reader does, that they closely mirror Puttbutt’s own claims for Western cultural supremacy. When Yamato becomes president of Jack London College, his contempt for Western culture becomes more overt.

Jack Only, a mysterious billionaire, is now so old and decrepit that his black chauffeur has to carry him around. Reed describes Only as “a giant, craggy-faced cucumber with flippers where legs and arms should have been.” He speaks through an electronic box. Only’s misshapen form represents the moral shrivelling resulting from his bigotry. His name suggests the exclusivity of his cultural ideal. Only believes that civilization is threatened by multiculturalism, and he pays his think tank to prove it. When Reed demonstrates that multiculturalism can be big business, however, Only listens. His love of money overcomes his aversion to minorities.

Robert Hurt, the dean of “Humanity” at Jack London College, is a passionate defender of liberal causes. This puts him in an ambiguous position when Puttbutt is attacked by Robert Bass, Jr., in the racist student paper Koons and Kikes. On one hand, Hurt cannot tolerate a racial slur against a black faculty member; on the other hand, the target of the slur, Puttbutt, believes that the attack is justified by white frustration.

Dr. Crabtree is a professor of English literature who secretly opposed Puttbutt’s tenure. A champion of the “classics,” Crabtree snubs Puttbutt until the tables turn and Puttbutt becomes his superior; then he curries favor, but to no avail. Puttbutt condemns him to teach “Freshman Yoruba.” Yet Crabtree learns from the experience, and changes: By learning the African language, he begins to appreciate another culture, and the scales fall from his eyes. Reed’s surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a white bigot suggests that Crabtree’s bigotry was only ignorance, not blind hatred.

Robert Bass, Jr., becomes another redeemed bigot in the course of the novel. The leader of student ridicule of Puttbutt, his humiliation and punishment result not in greater hatred toward the black professor but in the discovery that, like Crabtree’s, his bigotry was simply lack of understanding.

Critical Context

Chappie Puttbutt represents a new development in characterization for Reed. Protagonists such as the Loop Garoo Kid in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), PaPa La Bas in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Raven Quickskill in Flight to Canada (1976), while not autobiographical characters, represent Reed’s point of view: The values of these characters are the values of their respective novels. Beginning with the character of Ian Ball in Reckless Eyeballing (1986), however, Reed began to develop characters who did not completely embody the point of view of the novel or the novelist. Like Puttbutt, Ball had adjusted his beliefs to fit those of the people who could most help his career.

Perhaps one reason for an avoidance of what Reed elsewhere calls a “Neo-Hoodoo,” or Africa-conscious, protagonist is that characters such as PaPa La Bas or Loop Garoo, steeped in African tradition, might upset Reed’s carefully crafted cultural balance in the novel. Reed’s earlier Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic championed African art forms as they appeared in African American works. The aesthetic of Japanese by Spring is subtly different: It champions all cultures, never one at the expense of another. While it is possible to celebrate African elements in American art and letters without becoming Afrocentric—in fact, elsewhere Reed has done so—it would be easy for an audience to misread such celebration as cultural chauvinism, which would be contrary to the spirit of Japanese by Spring.

In turning away from the biting satire and wild fantasy of his earlier period, Reed is also turning away from much that gave his fiction its power. A devil’s advocate for this novel might say that its satire is more subtle, more sophisticated, and therefore represents a sharpening of Reed’s powers. To critics such as Gerald Early in The New York Times, however, this mellowing is merely a blunting of Reed’s rapier. Evidence for the former view, and perhaps a reason for it, may be found in the epilogue to the novel, which is written from Reed’s own point of view.

The epilogue is as broad in focus as the whole novel. In essence, it is a picture of the multicultural America of the twenty-first century, imaged in the California Reed saw in 1992. The epilogue centers, however, around a single plot element, a specific ritual of an African church in Oakland, California, on June 7, 1992. The ritual involves the resurrection of a god of the Yoruba people with whom Reed says, African Americans have lost touch. Reed’s fiction in the 1960’s and 1970’s demonstrated the influence of the African Vodun (“voodoo” or “hoodoo”) religion on American popular culture; Japanese by Spring notes the importance of recovering another “lost” religion.

This time, however, there is a difference: Reed is presented as an impartial observer at the ritual, not as a partisan in the struggle between African gods and Jahweh. In fact, it is in the context of the ritual that Reed experiences a change of heart toward the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of his stepfather. He realized that this African American church, founded forty years before American slaves were freed, preserved many of the Nigerian religious practices in a different form.

This change of heart affects the whole tone of Reed’s satire in Japanese by Spring, but it does not in any way lessen the intensity of his denunciation of injustice in his culture. It only makes it less shrill. There are no villains in Japanese by Spring, at least, none who cannot be redeemed by learning to appreciate other cultures. Reed continues to challenge the way readers see themselves and others, and Japanese by Spring does so in a more subtle way than do his other novels, but no less effectively.

Bibliography

Dick, Bruce, ed. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Focusing on Reed’s nine published novels, this volume features a wide range of critical opinion concerning Reed’s writings, including Japanese by Spring. A detailed introduction surveys the response to Reed’s works, a chronology lists the major events in his life and career, and a bibliography suggests books for further reading.

Hume, Kathryn. “Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control.” PMLA 108 (May, 1993): 506-518. This essay’s academic jargon may pose a problem for some readers, but it is valuable as a cogent summary of many attacks, largely feminist, on Reed’s fiction. Viewing the theme of power and control as one of Reed’s major contributions to contemporary fiction, Hume demonstrates that Reed’s use of the theme reveals as much about him as it does about America. Reed’s frequent use of grotesque violence is explained as a function of the theme of control.

Kato, Tsunehiko. Review of Japanese by Spring, by Ishmael Reed. MELUS 18 (Winter, 1993): 125-127. Explores Reed’s satirical tone in Japanese by Spring, which is targeted toward “reactionary elements that have clout over power structures.” Although Reed fights against Eurocentrism in the novel and supports multiculturalism, Kato takes him to task for overlooking the many accomplishments of black scholars and feminists.

Playhell, Benjamin. “The Gospel According to Ishmael.” World and I 8 (August, 1993): 320-327. Playhell argues that Reed’s novel takes to task nearly all deeply held beliefs stemming from the multicultural movement, including radical feminist and African American ideological views.

Singh, Amritjit, and Bruce Dick, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1995. Interviews with Reed that cover his life, career, and reasons for writing. Reed discusses several of his works in detail.