PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Human rights activict Mei T. Nakano is the author of Japanese American Women: Three Generations; Riko Rabbit; and Curriculum Guide:The Japanese American Wartime Experience, Grades 4-12. She is a  Board Member of the Sonoma County JACL.

She presented this paper as part of a panel at the April 18, 2009 oral history event at the Emanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol, CA, which PANA co-organized as part of our Pilgrimage to Manzanar.

Introduction

Most of us Nisei—i.e., the second generation Japanese born roughly between 1920-1940 in the U.S.—I would guess, have dealt with racism and inequality from the time we popped out of the womb.  And for most of our lives, we were only aware that we didn’t matter as much in the society as white people, but were quite unmindful that that was not O.K. and certainly not acting as if it  weren’t O.K.  I think we decided that was the way the world worked, and we had to make the best of it.  We took our cues from our parents, the Issei, who forbore  racism at a personal level and hardcore institutional racism which barred them from gaining citizenship, owning land, and for the most part, preventing them from living where they chose and working at their preferred occupations.   Treated as “alien” immigrants from the time they set foot on U.S. soil, they acted like good guests, many of them harboring hopes of returning to Japan, the promise of their dreams of “making it” in the promised land.    

“Strangers”

    Not so, with us Nisei.  We perceived that we were American, and dealt with the world outside our homes in school, at play, and in the workplace.  Bilingual and bicultural, we spoke to our parents almost exclusively in Japanese and to our friends and siblings, exclusively in English.  We seemed forever to be walking the tightrope of conflicting values which that situation produced.  Our parents stressed self-restraint, filial piety, duty and obligation to individuals and society, deference to authority and making decisions that would serve the greater good of the group rather than oneself.  Those values seemed hard-wired into us, bound by a strong sense of family.  But as we grew older, we began to understand that in order to be successful in this society, we needed to be more ambitious, more assertive, more individualistic.  For many of us, cultivating these characteristics would be a long time in coming, fettered as we were by a society that did not recognize us as bona fide citizens, and by us, ourselves, who were reluctant to acknowledge that fact.

    I remember vividly an incident which happened when I was perhaps six years old.  My mother and the four youngest of the eight children of our family were traveling on a train to a new home in another part of Colorado.  Living a hardscrabble farm life, traveling wasn’t something that we didn’t do ordinarily, and riding on a train was something we’d never done .  I sat in the hard wooden seat, absolutely enthralled at being in this amazing vehicle, one that I’d only seen from afar, across the fields.  Breaking my wide-eyed wonder, a young girl with blond curls bounced up the aisle to where I sat.  She stopped short right in front of me, contemplating me with her large blue eyes.  “You’re ugly,” she pronounced in my face, then ran back to her seat where her mother sat.

    That girl will never know how much her pronouncement had hurt me, how sharply it had been seared into my brain.  For years, it lingered there, and emblem of how the other world felt about me: foreign, inferior, ugly.  And at times, that consciousness would paralyze me, silence me. 

     Now, in my adulthood, I like to think that that little girl thought me ugly because she’d never seen a person like me (Colorado had few Asian faces then), a stranger.  Further, I think by now she has come upon many other folks who don’t look like her, and that maybe she even counts them as friends, not “ugly” strangers.  

Growing up Nisei

    As I grew into my teen years, (by this time living in the city of Los Angeles), I strove to be like “them,” and to deny my Japaneseness.  I struggled to superimpose a hotcha American girl image over the “cherry blossom” girl.  Clad in sloppy joe sweaters, short skirts, saddle shoes, and red, red lipstick, I tried to show that I deserved my American badge and like most Nisei, spoke English only to my friends and siblings, earned A’s on my report cards, and generally put myself on good behavior.  I also learned to do a hot jitterbug.

Pearl Harbor

    Well, the American girl image didn’t work, of course.  We could never become “American” enough.  When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we Nisei with our Japanese faces, were stripped of our badges and herded into camp, our citizenship ignored.  And conditioned, as we were, to accept our “faultiness,” we trooped lockstep into camp.  Spectacularly ignorant of what that meant—I fell into the median age of the Nisei hovering around 17—I spent three years in the concentration camp without complaint and two more in the Midwestern states of Minn.and Ill., before I was permitted to get back to my home in California.

    Camp was, for me, filled mostly with paradoxical memories, the greatest of which was the joy of marrying the man of my choice there, then  having  that happiness wrenchingly replaced by the painful fact that my new husband was soon drafted right out of camp to serve in the Military Intelligence Service.  It came to me only with a mature consciousness and motherhood, how incongruous, how brutal, how arrogant  those acts perpetrated by the U.S. government were, finding it fit to put a powerless group of persons behind barbed wire as a menace to society, then with little explanation, pluck men like my husband out of that enclosure to protect that same society.

      (I should mention parenthetically here that much later on, in 1980, a commission set up by that very government, would find that the incarceration came about for three main reasons: 1) race prejudice; 2) war hysteria; 3) failure of leadership.  After careful study and a volume of testimony, it recognized that a “grave injustice” had been done, and offered a national apology in the form of compensation for the internees and a fund for the purpose of educating the public on this shameful period of history. )

Afterwards

     After camp, because we found the scars of our humiliation painful, we Nisei didn’t talk about out concentration camp experiences for years.  For me, the humiliation that the little girl had inflicted on me, had been played out in fact.   

    Then, the miracle of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement happened during the 60s and 70s, and suddenly, like that, it became okay to have a Japanese face.  Suddenly being a woman, didn’t have to mean that you were automatically locked out of  certain doors.  

    I went to school, then, after raising three children, earned a Master’s Degree in Language and Literature at age 51, and became a school teacher, something that was forbidden Japanese Americans before 1949.  Afterwards, I wrote a book at age 67.

Conclusion

     The Japanese American community finally began to claim its history during the 1970’s in the foment of the liberation movements.  Simultaneously, we began to feel the full rights of citizenship and entitlements due us.  By the 1980s  the third generation of JA’s, the Sansei, had matured and planted their feet firmly in the soil of their birth.  The majority of them college-educated, they outmarried in significant numbers and are, today, nearing retirement from their professions and businesses, and have achieved middle-class status.  But as far as I can tell, the majority of them do not identify with their history and racial heritage in significant ways.       

    At the same time, many Japanese Americans do step up to make it their duty to  to educate the public about the World War II camp experience.  That is of signal importance, since it can still be told by those who lived it or by those who directly inherited the psychological consequences of it.  But, in my opinion, we often fail to take that story a step further and use it for the purpose of lending direct support and resources to other persons and groups who face like injustices and indignities, as in the case of new immigrant groups and the like.  

    The salient point to be made is how pernicious and destructive racism is, how anti-human.  It can cause people to defer their aspirations, lose hope, and, at times, strike out in anti-social behavior.  Others may go down that sinkhole of safety of “having done well enough.”    And what a tragic waste of human  resources.  It inflicts damage not only to the individual, but to the society as a whole.  

    No.  The issue of injustice because of “otherness” is not done.  It takes vigilance to recognize it, a commitment to be moved to do something about it.

    Finally, I need to say that I rejoice in the fact that we’ve come a long way here in America regarding the issue of “otherness,” not the least of which is the extraordinary fact of electing an  African American president.  For me, the  “foreign-ness” which I felt so starkly in childhood and in my growing years, has gradually dissipated as I find myself tossed in the salad bowl of American society, proud to be in the skin I’m in.