What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.
What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.
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What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607324294 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 345 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Great Unknown
Japanese American Sketches
By Greg Robinson
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 Greg RobinsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-429-4
CHAPTER 1
A New Look at Issei Women
Issei Women: An Overview
This overview introduces a series of portraits from a whole class of "unknown greats": Issei women. Of all the ethnic Japanese in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, the lives and experiences of immigrant women have been arguably the least studied by family and community historians, despite notable efforts by such scholars as Akemi Kikumura-Yano and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. The reasons for this, even leaving aside simple sexism or denigration of women, are not hard to find. Most Issei women generally spoke and wrote English badly, if at all, and thus left few readily accessible primary sources behind. In keeping with popular ideas of the female role in both the American and Japanese societies of the day, they were largely relegated to the care of families and as unpaid labor on farms or in shops. Although I will focus on some outstanding individuals, comparatively few were able to establish themselves in careers. Yet it would be a great mistake to dismiss these women or to minimize their contributions. For Issei women, as a whole, were extraordinary.
First, they were a uniquely educated set of women. As a result of the establishment of universal education in late Meiji- and Taisho-era Japan, they were almost entirely literate — far more so than the average white American of that period. Further, a large fraction of these women continued their education in Japan beyond primary school into high school and normal school, where they studied to become schoolteachers, the only independent career open to Japanese women at that time. (Moreover, because the national universities were closed to women, they studied, in many cases, at Christian schools or with help from Christian missionaries, which facilitated their subsequent familiarity with and embrace of Christianity once in the United States.)
It was precisely these patterns that led them to marry overseas Japanese. That is, because of their extended studies, masses of Japanese women remained single into their early to mid-twenties, which was considered too old for a respectable bride in Japan. Thus, their only remaining option, if they wished to marry, was to look abroad and unite with Japanese immigrant men. Their prospective husbands, themselves generally much older, could not afford to be so choosy about the age of the women who would agree to leave Japan and join them in North America. They gladly tapped into this available pool of potential partners, even though it meant arranging marriages with women they had never seen — women whose educational background, and sometimes class origins, were generally superior to their own. The mass of Issei women wed by proxy came to North America as "picture brides," to be greeted upon entry by their new husbands. (Many are the stories of shock and disappointment experienced by women who discovered that their spouses were not so young or prosperous as they had made out, and had sent faked, misleading, or outdated photos.)
We can only begin to imagine the difficulties that these women experienced, suddenly stuck in a new country with an unfamiliar language and customs, trying to build new lives among foreign (and sometimes hostile) natives. Locked into wedlock with strangers, their adjustment to married life was difficult — as in other immigrant subcultures, wife beating and abandonment were legion in Japanese communities — and they had little recourse besides giving up everything and making the long trip back to Japan. Such drastic action became exceedingly more complicated once these wives became mothers; the immigrant women were at the height of their age of fertility, and so the average birthrate in Japanese communities was considerably higher than that among native-born whites. As Issei men, in most cases, did not participate in child care, the women had to shoulder alone the double burden of working and raising a family.
Still, whatever the rigors and trials of their existence, these women not only adjusted with fortitude to their new circumstances, but they pursued social and intellectual interests. Unlike their husbands, who generally had much less education, Issei women remained devoted readers and writers in their native tongue. They faithfully wrote diaries, a number of which survive. (For example, Susan L. Smith's Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, and Health Politics, 1880–1950 (2005), features the diaries of Toku Shimomura, a midwife in Seattle, which furnish considerable information on birthing practices.) They also wrote letters, especially to friends and family members in Japan. They composed a large proportion of the audience for Japanese-language newspapers and magazines, and they long remained impassioned contributors to the haiku and tanka poetry contests run by these newspapers, one of which is poignantly dramatized in Hisaye Yamamoto's famous story "Seventeen Syllables." In response to such demand, the West Coast Japanese press not only expanded its coverage of sections deemed "women's interests," but newspapers engaged feminists such as Mei Tanaka (Ayako Ishigaki) of Rafu Shimpo and Misatoshi Saijo (Miyatsa Asano Saijo) of Sangyo Nippo as regular columnists. Indeed, after the death in 1936 of founding editor Kyutaro Abiko, San Francisco's Nichi Bei Shimbun, the leading organ of the West Coast Nikkei press, was edited by his widow, Yonako Abiko (who was the sister of the notable feminist educator Umeko Tsuda, founder of Japan's Tsuda College), until its forced dissolution in spring 1942. Issei "aunts" also published in the English-language press.
The extraordinary creativity of the women of the Issei generation was most powerfully demonstrated, ironically, by their wartime confinement. Released from farm labor and shop duties and relieved of the need to cook by communal mess halls, these women were able to take advantage of a measure of leisure to cultivate activities they previously engaged in only in stolen moments. They both practiced and taught ikebana, Japanese dance, theater, and folk arts, all of which had been less present in communities during the prewar era.
Finally, the Issei women, to the extent that they could communicate with their Nisei children, were responsible for passing on their interest in education and its value. The stellar educational record of the Nisei generation, especially women, very soon became evident; despite areas of discrimination and exclusion, such as quotas for ethnic Japanese in West Coast medical schools, Nisei attended institutions of higher education in disproportionate numbers well before Pearl Harbor. Researchers in American education have long agreed that the most important variable in determining the educational success of children is the educational level and interest of their parents. Because fathers were more often absent or emotionally distant in Japanese communities, mothers bore responsibility for their children's achievement and encouraged them to succeed.
Shio Sakanishi: Library of Congress Official and Scholar
In his April 1939 New York Times column, Edward Larocque Tinker offered a laudatory account of a new book, The Spirit of the Brush: Being the Outlook of Chinese Painters of Nature, from Eastern Chin to Five Dynasties, A.D. 371–960, a collection of commentaries on art by Chinese classical painters. Tinker noted that the editor of the collection, Dr. Shio Sakanishi, was to be congratulated. He had not only edited and translated the pieces but had added a set of richly anecdotal biographical essays on each artist that explained their work and ideas on art and nature, thereby transforming the Chinese artists from foreign and exotic figures to accessible ones. Two weeks later, Tinker made a shamefaced apology after discovering that Sakanishi was a lady — and a scholar — and not a gentleman as reported! Tinker was not alone in his astonishment at Sakanishi's gender, for she ultimately spent a lifetime challenging conventional ideas of women's role and abilities.
Shio (Shiho) Sakanishi was born to a Christian farming family in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1896. She achieved distinction in her early twenties, when she became the first Japanese woman ever hired to teach at a boy's preparatory school. She came to the United States in 1922 and enrolled at Wheaton College, where she graduated in 1925 with a degree in aesthetics and literature. During her time at Wheaton, she attracted publicity because of a speech at Mount Holyoke College on the need to encourage women writers, and she announced that she had undertaken a Japanese translation of a biography of that school's founder, pioneering educator Mary Lyon. After leaving Wheaton, Sakanishi enrolled at the University of Michigan, where she received her doctorate in 1929.
In 1930, after a short stint as a professor of English at Hollins College in Virginia, Sakanishi was hired by the Library of Congress as a librarian in its Asian Reading Room, then called the Orientalia Division (as a noncitizen, her hiring by the federal government required a special act of Congress). Her first task was to sort through some 15,000 Japanese books collecting dust on back shelves. Her skilled and thorough organization of the collection led to her being named director of the division in 1935. In this job, Sakanishi mixed and grew friendly with government officials as well as writers and intellectuals such as Archibald MacLeish (who became her boss as librarian of Congress in 1939) and Ezra Pound. In addition to aiding researchers, she offered public programs on events such as Buddha's Birthday and gave outside lectures on Asian literature, especially women writers. For example, in 1935 she served as a lecturer at Yale University's Institute of Human Relations. While researching the origins of printing and papermaking, her passion turned to science. In 1941 she supervised a series of experiments designed to duplicate the process of the "million paper charms," a set of Buddhist prayer charms printed by order of the empress of Japan in AD 770 and thought to be the oldest extant examples of woodblock printing. The team discovered that the printing involved baking clay tablets carved with a stylus, then pouring metal over the tablet to create a crude form of type.
Meanwhile, Sakanishi continued translating and began selecting outstanding pieces of Japanese literature for rendering into English. Her first effort, a Japanese comedy called "The Ribs and the Cover," appeared in the Golden Book Magazine in 1932. (Soon after, she undertook a multiyear project with collaborators to produce an authoritative list of translations of Japanese drama into English, French, and German, which was released in 1935.) Meanwhile, she received a contract for a set of translations of modern Japanese poets. The first of her translations to appear was that of Meiji-era poet Ishikawa Takuboku's A Handful of Sand, in 1934. The next year, she completed a translation of Yasano Akiko's Tangled Hair and Sachio Ito's Songs of a Cowherd followed in 1936. A small volume of comic playlets, Kyôgen, appeared in 1938. Sakanishi served as a regular book reviewer of Chinese and Japanese literature for the Washington Post and in 1939 she was invited by the New York Times to report on contemporary literature in Japan in a set of articles, "The Japanese Literary Scene." Both her incisive criticism of literary movements and her polished English prose drew respectful attention.
In addition to her translations of Japanese works, Sakanishi turned to a compilation of Chinese art criticism — in the process, demonstrating an impressive command of classical Chinese. Her first effort in this field, which appeared in 1935, was an English edition of Kuo Hsi's An Essay on Landscape Painting, a short book in which the eleventh-century Chinese landscape painter conveyed his aesthetic doctrines. The Spirit of the Brush, Sakanishi's best-known work, followed four years later.
Although Sakanishi expressed approval of American democratic society, her exalted government position did not isolate her from suspicion due to her Japanese ancestry and Japanese embassy connections. As 1940 dawned, war broke out in Europe and relations between the United States and Japan grew increasingly strained. Sakanishi found ways to assist her adopted country and ease tensions. First, she engaged in historical research that underlined the ties between the United States and Japan. In 1940 she published an edition of the private journal of John Glendy Sproston, who accompanied Commodore Matthew Perry on his historic mission to "open" Japan. The following year, Sakanishi edited an edition of the unpublished letters of Townshend Harris, the first US consul in Japan.
She also engaged in more confidential intelligence work. In 1941 William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, who had been selected as Coordinator of Information, started putting together a team (his agency would soon morph into the Office of Strategic Services, wartime ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency). In desperate need of agents to collect information and offer advice on Japanese threats to French Indochina, Donovan recruited as his Southeast Asia regional expert Kenneth Landon, who had recently returned to the United States after he and his wife, Margaret, had served for several years as missionaries in Thailand. (Margaret would draw on her experience in Asia for her 1944 bestseller Anna and the King of Siam.) Sakanishi immediately offered Landon, a fellow Wheaton College alum, an office at the Library of Congress and assisted him in his intelligence work. Indeed, in his 1967 book The Broken Seal, historian and intelligence officer Ladislas Faragó asserted rather doubtfully that Sakanishi had been a double agent aiding the US Office of Naval Intelligence (Farago claimed that she fingered a Japanese courier carrying the keys to diplomatic codes, thereby enabling naval intelligence officials to copy the documents and break the code).
Whatever the extent of Sakanishi's efforts to assist the federal government, she was targeted once war broke out between the United States and Japan in December 1941. Arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she was detained indefinitely without charge. Archibald MacLeish protested unavailingly on her behalf while First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote Attorney General Francis Biddle to ask if anything could be done to help her and whether naval intelligence files revealed any suspect conduct. Her political opinions and the reasons for her custody are unknown, though it is likely that her name figured on a list of Japanese immigrants (plus a few Nisei) whom Tokyo demanded be repatriated. What is certain is that, realizing that the war would be protracted, she accepted repatriation, and in August 1942, sailed on an exchange ship to Japan, where she had not lived for two decades. Sakanishi maintained a low profile during the war, though according to one source, she was conscripted into service for Japan's war effort as a translator and propagandist.
Following Japan's defeat, Sakanishi emerged as a liberal and pro-American voice. The occupation government selected her as an advisor, and she was appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Councilors of the Japanese Diet as a specialist on women's issues and international relations. Drawing on her familiarity with American society (a rare commodity in occupation-era Japan), she published a trilogy of studies on American women and popular history: America no josei (1946), Jugonin no Americajin (1946), and America shi (1947). In the years that followed, she produced some two dozen books on social reform issues such as child-rearing, young people, and women's rights, plus translations of numerous American books (as well as the daily Blondie comic strip). Sakanishi became best known as a broadcaster and television interviewer. She would question foreign visitors in English, then interpret both questions and answers for her viewers.
In 1963 Sakanishi made a triumphal return visit to the United States. She died in Japan in 1976. Her unique career and success provoked admiration and challenged easy assumptions about gender roles among Japanese.
Fuki Endow Kawaguchi's Diary
As I mentioned in the overview of Issei women, one field of creative work common among immigrants was keeping a diary. We are fortunate to have various surviving journals. Beyond their value as literature, they help fill a significant gap in our historical understanding of the removal of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II: how ordinary people perceived events as they occurred.
In the decades since the war, former camp inmates have produced an enormous corpus of literature dealing with their wartime experiences, including oral histories, memoirs, essays, plays, poetry, and fiction. These have provided valuable insight as to how the government's policy played out in the lives of its victims and included a store of information useful in reconstructing the overall camp experience. Still, memoirs are, by nature, products of hindsight and recollection, formed of material drawn from the untidy storehouse of human memory. They inevitably give an incomplete and less than trustworthy accounting of past sensations, especially the traumatic emotions and painful human relations that characterized the camp experience. In contrast, the contemporary written record of wartime Japanese Americans is both relatively sparse and uneven. Surviving letters, essays, and journals stress the experience of the Nisei, who comprised the majority of camp inmates. Members of the Issei generation, less long-lived and fluent in English than their children, have produced much less accessible material despite various oral history collections and a few published memoirs.
Nowhere is the documentary record, for both groups, barer than that for the period before mass confinement took place. Although government documents and newspaper accounts provide a certain amount of data regarding developments within Japanese communities during this turbulent time, it is very difficult to determine what was happening "on the ground," in ordinary people's lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great Unknown by Greg Robinson. Copyright © 2016 Greg Robinson. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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