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November 26, 2005

The Persistence of Caricature: Stoic, Forgetting Japanese Americans and Voluble, Obsessive Jews in the L.A. Times

I
wish I could recommend to you this lengthy article from the LA Times magazine in which a Jewish journalist author muses about the differences between his Japanese American wife's family's (and, by extension, all Japanese American families') effacing of their history and his own Jewish family's (and, by extension, all American Jewish families') obsessing over their history, but I can't. For both categories of families--Japanese American and Jewish--the author makes the classic mistakes of generalizing from too small a data pool, and of embracing rather than challenging cultural stereotypes.

There are plenty of Japanese Americans with crystalline memories of their wartime experiences, and plenty of Jews who recite and remember almost nothing. There were and are (contrary to the author's assertions in the piece) great Japanese American novelists (and other artists) who have chronicled and interpreted the internment experience, and there are a number of organizations "reminding us of internment."

Most disturbingly of all, the author writes:

As I thought about that conversation in the days that followed, I decided that I might have been looking at George and Nancy in the wrong way all along. Perhaps it wasn't that their long, self-imposed silence had somehow obscured their sacrifice; perhaps their truest sacrifice was the silence itself. After all, there had been those in the camps who rose up in revolt, just as there had been Japanese American draftees who refused to fight and litigants who challenged the internment. But George and Nancy had never condoned the airing of such grievances; if anything, they resented it. In the end, they wanted the same things for their children that all Americans want—a sense of belonging. Could they really have provided that and demanded justice at the same time? Perhaps it wasn't shame that swallowed their narrative. Perhaps they bore their burdens silently so their children wouldn't have to.
Set to one side the fact that this silence-as-sacrifice trope is a sixty-year-old resurrection of the same racial views that led so many in the government confidently to heap suffering on Japanese Americans, expecting that they would absorb it in the name of proving their Americanism. What exactly does this passage say about those (and there were many) who did resist internment in one way or another, and their relationships with their children? Did the author talk to any of them--my friend Karen Korematsu-Haigh, to take just one example--and ask them whether their "sense of belonging" in America was compromised by the example of protest their parents set? I suspect not.

I say something rather different about the supposedly silent suffering of Japanese Americans in the Afterword of my book Free to Die for their Country, which, like this recent article, is about the hundreds of young Japanese American men who resisted the draft in World War II. I comment on the message of silent endurance that is embodied in the Japanese American internment monument that stand a few blocks from the Capitol Building in Washington, DC:

"There is much here to celebrate. But there is also something sad, even tragic. What, ultimately, does this monument say to its visitors, the countless American tourists who wander through it? It teaches the lessons of the tanka poet: Bear the sting of injustice for future generations. Endure the unendurable, and you will be rewarded. Assimilate through silent suffering. Gaman suru. Perhaps this is part of what has led white America to look upon Japanese Americans as a 'model minority': when the nation punished them with its racism, they endured it.

"The Nisei draft resisters did not simply endure it, and in large and small ways, they have paid the price of their heresy ever since. There will never be a monument to the Japanese American draft resisters of World War II in our nation's capital, or for that matter, anywhere else. Yet these young men were patriots; in their willingness to risk the condemnation of their community, they showed courage. They were the nails that stuck up. True to the prediction of their Japanese forebears, they got hammered. Perhaps now, fifty-five years later, we can begin to hear in that hammering the construction of a truly American identity."


Posted by Eric at November 26, 2005 8:06 AM

Comments

I'm not sure I see the same negative connotations from the paragraph you cited that you do, but I may see what's rubbing you wrong. I think you are seeing a dichotomy between those who were silent and those who resisted, and fearing that if we appreciate the sacrifice of those who chose silence, we degrade the sacrifice of those who did not. Which indeed would be a shame, because injustice is injustice, and we should not fault the victims for having endured it in whatever way they felt they had to. Both ways were equally noble, because both entailed an enormous personal sacrifice no one should ever have had to make.

At the same time, I don't think it's just Japanese people who chose the silence against discrimination for the sake of assimilation, nor do I think that these choices are solely connected to injustices from the World War II period.

There is always a tension in America felt among its immigrants between holding fast to ones cultural identity and assimilating. And I think we may too easily underestimate the incredibly strong impetus to blend in, based upon what (I tend to think) has been an often-held belief by many (though certainly not all), that IF ONLY we could blend in, this discrimination would stop.

We who are assimilated, and who perhaps long for our own culture identities in the American melting pot, can more easily lament how our ancestors could have acquieced to discriminatory practices because we see it more exclusively as a matter of justice. "How could you not have fought back? It was WRONG!!!!"

But I think it might not be fair to hold them to the expectations our hindsight allows. In the face of persecution, there cannot be just one way to respond.

(I do also recognize that your post also highlights the expectation that Japanese-Americans would naturally accept the silence-for-assimilation belief, and that this expectation itself had discriminatory effects. I can certainly see why you would want to dispell the stereotype. But I think the broader problem results from expecting anyone to absorb these horrible things in any specific way. The focus should be on the injustice, because, as you point out, when we focus on the reaction to it we end up inflicting more injustice on top.)

Posted by: Cathy at November 26, 2005 10:16 AM

As a separate, but related thought:

I never fail to be amazed by the secrets families can keep, and their motivations for keeping them. But I also find, almost universally, that after enough time these motivations turn to dust and are easily blown away. But it does take time, and it doesn't mean that the people who once hid those painful memories didn't think they had good reason to do so at the time -- even if today the choice may seem so unwise.

(Note: implicit in all these comments is my sense that it's not just internment about which the described dynamics can occur. A painful history is a painful history, and who wouldn't want to feel justified in how they chose to handle it.)

Posted by: Cathy at November 26, 2005 10:30 AM

Cathy, the paragraph that I quote is what sets up the dichotomy; it's not me doing it. There are strong normative statements in the paragraph I quote: silence was the best strategy--indeed, the only possible strategy--for Japanese Americans in WWII, and the silent bearing of burdens is also the best strategy for taking care of the next generation. Both of these strike me as deeply, deeply contestable.

In a paragraph I didn't quote here, the author makes the comparative intergenerational point even more clearly: he notes that the "history obsession" of Jews holds their children back, keeps them stuck in the mindset of victims, and hinders their freedom to take chances. The point he does not state explicitly, but is essential to his thesis, is that the Japanese American strategy has succeeded in producing generations of more confident, freer, and more risk-taking children.

Why doesn't he make that point explicitly? Because he can't; it's absurd.

Posted by: Eric at November 28, 2005 8:27 AM

Eric, if you can point out other fiction, since WWII, than John Okada's excellent novel, No No Boy, which addresses these topoi, please do so. Many of "us" would welcome this knowledge.
Second, while I agree that the article way, way over generalizes, it does have some historical weight. Perhaps it is time that we surveyed the survivors about their attitudes, activities, actions and activism back then, from Pearl Harbour forward. It would be interesting to see what shakes out. Within my own family, seventeen, at least, were forced from home and forced into a camp. Two of the men were drafted, and one (my own father) saw active combat duty in Europe. I have personally surveyed all the siblings of my father, and almost all the cousins. None of my father's siblings EVER spoke out, expressed a protest, did anything but go along like sheep. And of the eight (not counting my father) only one has ever continuingly voiced opposition, anger, resentment, and any support of the legal activism. None of the married siblings discussed the "internment" with their children, and the few statements they did make, which I have verified with my cousins, amounted to something like, "it was no big deal", or "it was Ok once we were there". Several of my own relatives have expressed surprise, shock, dismay, and sometimes disgust that I have pursued these matters as history and oral history, and none of them have ever cracked one book on the subject. Most of them do not go to camp reunions, either, which is the one place and activity that does draw out their anger and emotions, and the one sibling most involved in the reunions, was born in 1930, and due to age, her perspectives are not those of her elder brothers and sisters. Now, the other side, which in my family, is only represented by a few who married in, is quite different. One aunt by marriage got out early, went to U Denver, and became involved with Min Yasui's legal ordeals. A few other relatives by marriage protested in the camps, and brought whatever protests and legal complaints they could against the entrenched authorities, including the JACL. A few correctly suspected the JACL of compromising and spying on internees, and attempted to make leadership changes and position changes while in the camps, mostly to no avail. But even the aunt who was radicalized and close to Min Yasui and his legal travails DID NOT DISCUSS ANY OFF THIS WITH HER CHILDREN. Our interviews in the 1980's were, according to her, the first time she had ever talked about this, and much of this was unknown to even my uncle, her husband. So, while I agree with you that the main of this article is awful, and untruthful, there certainly is some historical and emotional reality to it; how much, we may never know. With people like you on the case, maybe we will someday, as your interest in the whole affair seems unflagging, and exceptionally perceptive. And of course I applaud your work and the comments you made which led to this reply.

Posted by: paul yamada at November 28, 2005 4:36 PM

Although there is a degree of generalization in the original article as pertains to the Japanese mindset, I think it is somewhat accurate. There certainly was an ideal of "silent endurance" encouraged in Japan from at least as far back as the early Edo period, up to the Second World War. That has largely changed today ,but was still somewhat prevelent even when I lived there in the late 1970's. Most of the japanese who came to the US during the last part of the 19th century until immigration was limited by law in 1924 brought that with them as a matter of culture and worked to instilled it in their children.

Posted by: John Abe at December 15, 2005 10:53 AM