Letters to Memory Read online

  Ishi, that intuition in my gut is that which you long ago recognized as a critical de-centering, the gaze of another unmasked. This is the dance my folks and those who came to their aid danced together in a dark time of war and justified injustice.

  They: These people are loyal. Race has nothing to do with loyalty.

  Us: Yes, look how loyal we are! Please notice what kind of loyal.

  They: Only such a group of people can be this loyal in this way. They are culturally loyal.

  Us: Yes, yes, loyalty flows in our very blood and is our birthright.

  They: But more importantly, their loyalty has been cultivated on American soil; it’s a fully assimilated loyalty.

  Us: Our loyalty is fully assimilated.

  This is perhaps a dance that could not have been otherwise, but it is a dance that forever defines my folks, narrates who we become.

  The prefaces of The Spoilage and The Salvage are instructive in laying out the intent of the study. Thomas and Nishimoto explain that spoilage refers to those Japanese Americans who were repatriated to Japan, stigmatized as disloyal to the United States, and segregated at the Tule Lake Center. Salvage refers to those Japanese Americans “whose status in America was, at least temporarily, improved through dispersal and resettlement in the East and Middle West . . . many participating directly in the war effort.” There was a third classification, residue, to include the net effects of spoilage and salvage; that is, those classified as spoilage who anyway were reabsorbed into a more tolerant America; those as salvage were individuals who failed to assimilate into the American workforce through resettlement, plus those who remained in the camps until the war’s end in 1945, when they were forced out finally to homelessness. If the designation informant bites, think about the garbage narrative here invoked. Waste, debris, trash, wreckage, refuse. I note here that The Residue is a third volume yet to be written.

  The Yamashitas were for the most part the salvage. By the end of 1943, the seven siblings had left or were in the process of leaving Topaz. Chizu and her husband Ed and little son Kiku, who the family called Kix, moved to harvest sugar beets on a farm in Idaho. Kay found a job in Philadelphia to work for the Quakers and Nisei Student Relocation. Iyo married Min Tamaki and headed for Chicago, then Philadelphia. Tom got into the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and John into the seminary in Evanston, near Chicago. Kimi’s husband Bob left to teach Japanese language to American soldiers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with Kimi and daughter Martha following later; son Ted left for college in Saint Louis. Susumu and Kiyo had the most difficult time leaving camp, and the records show that Sus was blacklisted as a kibei and former employee of Mitsubishi. By the end of the war, Sus and Kiyo had three children, two of them born in Topaz. Sus left pregnant Kiyo and two daughters behind in Topaz and went to find work while enrolling in the New York Technical Institute. Mother Tomi took up painting and became a student of the artist Chiura Obata. Despite the circumstances, for the first time in Tomi’s life, she found herself released from constant labor. I realize that because of this gradual dispersal—this process of salvage—our archive of letters exists, the family network constantly tugging and crossing the desert camp Topaz, that jewel of a garbage dump. With this history in mind, the meaning of salvage anthropology for me takes a strange turn: not to salvage physical, narrative, linguistic, or practiced artifacts, but to salvage what is understood to be American.

  On June 1, 1942, a month before the Independence Day discussions at Mills College, Caleb Foote wrote to John Nevin Sayre at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York:

  I was very much interested and stimulated by what you wrote me about Bayard Rustin, and I feel some similar tactics must be adopted by us at this time when our democracy is going down the spout and a “ghetto psychology” created among both the Japanese minority and the Caucasian majority. What should these tactics be? One part is speaking out, even more openly than we have. Another, it seems to me, is direct non-violent opposition to carrying this program out. My imagination is very poor on the latter point, but I can think of a few examples, such as camping outside one of the evacuation camps, sharing their living conditions and privations, and perhaps picketing the gates; or even lying down across the entrances so that army and other evacuation officials would be made to realize what they are doing . . . If some young people could be brought out from the East and Middle West, so that we could have, say, a total aggregation of 25, given some careful training by someone like A.J. . . . My own feeling is that many more of the Japanese should be doing what Gordie Hirabayashi is doing in Seattle—going to jail rather than obeying the evacuation orders. But obviously we cannot call upon them to do this unless we also are prepared both to offer them a way out and an example. I also have a feeling we might do better to go to jail for something like this than for violating Selective Service Act.

  Caleb Foote’s proposal for direct non-violent opposition did not happen, though its possibilities were alive and planted for the future. And yet I wonder what might have happened had twenty-five young people laid their bodies across the gates of Tanforan or Topaz. I imagine that this event would have been a great failure, but I want to embrace the young man who urgently and passionately proposed such action. Foote and Rustin believed that their pacifism was made of the boldest stuff of human integrity and courage, or it was nothing.

  But to return to Foote’s request from Kay for information. Kay and others contributed in large and small ways to the results of his research to create a pamphlet entitled Outcasts! Foote believed that decisions made on the basis of racism could not ultimately hold up in a court of law based on rights under the Constitution. The legal apparatus would turn to evidence, and the evidence demonstrated what Japanese Americans seemed primed to represent: the most loyal and democratic Americans on Earth. Other pamphlets about the Japanese evacuation were written and distributed, but no other so clearly connected Japanese American evacuation to the racism of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism, and the larger context of social justice and incarceration, while also anticipating future struggles for legal redress.

  Our liberties and the sincerity of our repudiation of the monstrous doctrine of a master race depends upon our success in removing from our legal system the possibility that under any circumstances any Executive can have the awful power asserted by the President in the order of February 19, 1942, a power intended to be used against the members of one particular race, but nonetheless applicable in stormy years to any unpopular minority. That way lies death to our democracy.

  Foote prefaces Outcasts! with the header “The Tyranny of a Word,” the word being Japs, an enemy label that negated and disparaged our citizens, our Americans of Japanese descent. But what about the designations outcast or dispossessed, refugee or salvage? These words, utilized by advocates and anthropologists to provoke action and empathy, also defined the shame of the Japanese American self, crafted in a dance of loyalty and disloyalty and finally performed in order to survive.

  Ishi, I have wondered about your idea that ethnography could be a surrealist project enacted on a science of cultural jeopardy. I don’t imagine that my enactment here of juxtapositions, not really surreal, is necessarily what you had in mind, but it is true that this shuffling of realities has begun to unmake my old world. It has anyway been my creative method to contort or at least humor the mind toward revelation. I do not entirely understand your meaning—cultural jeopardy, a kind of anthropological game of risk taking—though I sense that I am about to lose something. If that something is my culture, it seems to always have been a dynamic thing constantly in its death throes, nearing extinction.

  Perhaps I should consider hierarchical structures. In the Yamashita clan of seven, the sibling lineup was significant. The first two children, Susumu and Kimi, were sent to be educated in Japan; they were entirely bilingual kibei, returning to the United States in the decade before the war. We called them Neech and Neich, for niichan and neichan, literally older brother and older
sister, the “-chan” suffix being familiar, endearing, linked to childhood. As a kid, I called them Uncle Neech and Auntie Neich; I never knew their real names until much later. The next two children were Chizu and John. Then Iyo, Kay, and Tom. Of course this is my interpretation, but Neech and Neich, having lived away from the family in Japan, seemed to be titular or honorary first son and first daughter. The practical job of elder sibling authority was assumed by Chizu and John, the first fully American daughter and son. And when the war broke out, perhaps it became understood that the kibei relationship to Japan must become quiet or invisible. But the letters themselves reveal varying degrees of formal or counselor authority and emotional dependence. Kay and Tom would always be the young ones. Iyo in her middle position, I think, was happily the most free. And this brood gathered around the widowed matriarch Tomi. The letters over many years were the necessary fabric that wove the Yamashita family together. They reveal an intense assumption of blood connection and loyalty but also the necessity of making it in the world independently.

  Kay’s letter to Tomi, written in Japanese romaji, suggests the crisis that may have occurred when Kay attempted to leave the family at Tanforan. In one last visit to Barrack 20, Kay may have become hysterical, and more than frank words were exchanged.

  Last Saturday—what might have made Kay look foolish—no, I was—I now wish I had understood better what I heard everyone say. Knowing that the people I love think of me that way is so disheartening to me . . . I can’t stop thinking about last Saturday’s Experience; it left a deep impression in me. It’s impossible to forget. If there’s anything I could do about this, it’s doing whatever is necessary to remove this suffering, unhappiness, and frustration . . . Only you Mother know how I feel, what I am capable of thinking. If you trust me, I don’t care what others think of me. Please Mother believe in me and God will do the rest.

  When her brothers and sisters derided her idealism, Kay pleaded to higher authorities: Tomi and God. My grandmother’s reputation was that she was a tough and demanding old lady, but Kay must have found refuge there. As a grandkid, I couldn’t really tell; I knew she was formidable, the obligatory family center, and that for me she represented Japan: its language, pretensions, aesthetics, social and cultural values. Tomi was for me a proud Edokko, my samurai grandma, the chrysanthemum and the sword.

  What nisei family in the 1950s did not own a copy of Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword? Well, perhaps that’s overstated, but I would argue that book and Harry Kitano’s Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, published in 1969, were the sociological foundations for what we popularly define to be us, Japanese Americans. Benedict gives us our variations of obligation, on and giri, our shame rather than guilt, plus our complex idea of revenge—Chushingura or the 47 Ronin, and Kitano gives us gaman (perseverance), shikataganai (don’t cry over spilled milk), and enryo (ceremonious hesitation). I especially appreciated that enryo is a syndrome. But it’s been around a half century since these books were published. Does anybody care about this anymore? In fact, quite recently, the Los Angeles Japanese daily The Rafu-Shimpo published an article with the obligatory lineup of gaman to hazukashii: Caregivers: Japanese Americans at Risk. Make sure your non-JA in-laws read this so they understand the intricacies of caring for us as we all ease into Alzheimer’s.

  I check out a library copy of Benedict’s book, microdust rising off the yellowing and acid-eaten pages. I cough, comforted by the thought that I’m similarly allergic to my family’s archive of letters. It’s all dust from the same period. These days I tuck Benedict into my bag and snatch paragraphs while sitting with my mother Asako at the hospital. She is ninety-six years old and, by marriage, the last Yamashita of her generation. She’s fractured her hip, and they’ve drilled screws into her thighbone. The surgery is a great success, but the morphine, the IV drip, the catheter, and the stress on her heart knock her out for days. She’s down to about eighty-five pounds, a small mound in the bed, and my sister and I sit on either side, waiting, listening to the rhythmic spit of the oxygen machine, the beep and dings of the monitors, the melancholy of some TV soap opera, and a lady named Eleanor two doors down who tries to escape, yelling, Call security! The doctor is a fake! I wander into the corridor to check out Eleanor in yellow skid-free socks, her hospital gown with her backside indecently exposed, corralled by nursing personnel. Why not; I’m bored. When the nurses apparently strap Eleanor to the bed, she shouts out repeatedly, I am bound! I am bound! Asako can’t hear any of this anyway, but we figure the last time Asako was locked up with folks going loony was back in 1942.

  I pick up the Benedict and read sections of it out loud to my sister. Check this out! Japanese are a bundle of contradictions: polite but insolent, rigid but adaptable, submissive but uncontrollable, brave but timid, robotic but insubordinate, western-leaning but conservative, loyal but treacherous, kiku but katana! I reenact ritual suicide over the book. I wave my wrists around like I could have been a bona fide anthropologist too. She’s not describing Japanese, she’s . . . I gesture toward Asako and burst into laughter.

  My sister narrows her eyes. That’s not funny.

  Okay. Okay, I pant, So Benedict says that Japanese differentiate between obligation and duty. Which is it that we are doing here?

  We stare at the two creases that line Asako’s forehead above her nose and between her brows; on a scale of pain, one to ten, it’s a seven.

  Oh geeze.

  Weeks later when Asako emerges from her stupor, I test her long-term memory. Did you ever read Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and Sword?

  Oh yeah.

  So what did you think?

  She never went to Japan. Ridiculous. And then they occupied Japan based on that.

  I think about this. Japanese internment / Japanese occupation. The WRA camps were like prequels? Minicrucibles? Yikes. If the JAs could maintain their dignity under conditions of great shame and humiliation, why not an entire mother nation? Oh, I take a breath. In the day, did others think like you?

  I don’t know. Asako shakes her head.

  I press my lips together and attempt a pious look of conjecture. Well, if Benedict studied the Japanese in camps, maybe she was describing . . . us?

  Asako is offended. We are not Japanese.

  Maybe we are Benedictines. Like you’ve quoted William Carlos Williams, the pure products go crazy. Literally. Meanwhile my cousin Ken e-mails me to let me know that cousin Kix is traveling to Hong Kong to give Sus’s grandson a samurai sword that Kix has stored in a locker for a decade. It’s not exactly first son to son of first son, but you get the picture. I hope they perform some kind of elaborate exchange ritual. Plus in order to get our family registered as samurai, we have to turn in our family tree with all the birth, death, and marriage dates. I write to my cousin and say that I think the Yamashitas were landed merchants who probably bought sword rights from an impoverished daimyo. No way some old Yamashita died nobly on the battlefield of Sekigahara. But Tomi who only married a Yamashita—she was probably the real thing. I say, Did you ever see that Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai? If it were Tomi, she’d have slit Cruise’s skinny white throat. Like Benedict says General Yamashito [sic] said when the Americans reinvaded the Philippines: Now the enemy is in our bosom.

  What I get from Benedict is that the reason Japan went to war was for respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. And be cognizant of the fact that if you humiliate or shame a Japanese, his revenge will be virtuous. I understand this; it is rather like being a fiction writer. And then I relearn from Benedict that the Japanese cultivate the habitual, the pleasurable, and the painful in elaborately artful rituals: drinking tea, sleeping, fornicating, bathing, shooting arrows, playing the violin, wrestling, planting miniature trees, killing, eating, committing suicide. Anyone can learn the habit, which means that it can be predicted, and that unlearning it can also happen. This is the anthropological lesson: social behaviors are patterns. It’s just that Japanese patterns are more intricate, t
rained into efficient thoughtlessness, selflessness, or as they like to say, nuance.

  Of all the things I could say about your namesake, I can’t resist quoting this passage by Theodora Kroeber:

  Ishi was orderly by nature probably, and by old habit certainly . . . This easy competence and pleasure in well-ordered arrangements of the tools and possessions of living suggests the Japanese flair for raising mere orderliness to an aesthetic of orderliness. There is a temperamental, and possibly a kineaesthetic something in this trait not to be explained by poverty in the variety of things owned, or difficulty of replacement and consequent need to take good care of them . . . The aesthetic of order and arrangement would seem to be rather something in-born, deep-seated in the individual psyche. Some cultures turn this preference and capacity into an approved value: thus the Yana and the Japanese.