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5. How the Irish Became Japanese: Winnifred Eaton’s Transnational Racial Reconstructions
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159 5 How the Irish Became Japanese Winnifred Eaton’s Transnational Racial Reconstructions In Winnifred Eaton’s 1906 novel A Japanese Blossom, war becomes a crucial testing ground for racial differences and similarities. The novel tells the story of Kiyo Kurakawa, a Japanese widower who returns to Japan from the United States with his new wife, Mrs. Ellen Kurakawa, an Anglo-American widow. Together with her two children , she experiences the challenges and novelties of moving to Japan and gaining a new family, for the widower already has children of his own. The dramatic conflict that finally unites the Japanese and American sides of the family results from the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), which raises mild tension between the two parents because of their initially differing ideas about war and sacrifice. While Mrs. Kurakawa thinks that her husband should put his duty to his family first, Mr. Kurakawa feels compelled to risk his life fighting for his country. As he explains his patriotic obligation to his wife, “I seemed to be a living example of the evolution of an Oriental mind long swayed by Occidental environment. . . . Now I know that I can never be other than what I am by every inherent instinct: a true Japanese.”1 This revelation might seem to confirm the opinion of Lafcadio Hearn and other early-twentieth-century “experts” on Japanese culture that Japanese assimilation to western civilization was merely a mask behind which remained an irredeemably Oriental mind.2 But in A Japanese Blossom, this unmasking provides, instead, a proving ground for the Kurakawas’ mutual affection and for American respect for Japanese militarism. Mrs. Kurakawa reacts to her new husband’s revelation not with dismay but with pride. She tells him she had not expected him to change, but that “I, as your wife, was willing to become one of you, if you would let me” 160 part iii (113), and the entire family, American and Japanese, rallies together to join in the Japanese spirit of patriotic self-sacrifice. That is, all of the family members except one: the Irish nursemaid Norah . In the novel’s ensemble cast, Norah provides the comic relief that audiences would expect from an Irish maid. She alone approaches Japan with the assumption that it is a “haythen land of savages” (68), and when homesick she wanders the streets in search of “the soight of the face of a foine cop” (63), humorously assuming that policemen in Japan will be Irish, like those she has seen in the United States. Like Mrs. Kurakawa’s American children, Billy and Marion, Norah gets into comic mishaps because of her cultural ignorance of Japan (for example, her fear of foreigners causes her to temporarily lose the Kurakawas’ infant). But unlike the American children ’s problems, the maid’s cannot be solved by herself and require the help of Mrs. Kurakawa. Significantly, Norah’s difficulty assimilating to Japan extends to her failure to join in the spirit of Japanese patriotism and selfsacrifice during the war. While the rest of the family eagerly arise on the morning that Mr. Kurakawa leaves for the front, Norah lies in bed grumbling and later threatens to leave the family in their greatest time of need. The Irishwoman’s difference from her Anglo-American employers is even marked on her body; when the Japanese Kurakawa children greet their new family, the foreign face that “frightened them most” was Norah’s (30). Eaton’s depiction of Norah as physically different and inferior to the English-descended members of the Kurakawa family is unsurprising: the Irish, like several other European ethnic groups during this period, were still undergoing the discursive and political process that would render them white in the public mind.3 But what role does the third term of Japan play in this contrast? In this racial triangulation, we see another example of the phenomena that this book examines: a writer using narratives of empire and international relations to modify domestic U.S. racial groupings and comparisons. In this instance, however, the dynamic is different from what we might suppose based on current scholarship on racialization and empire during this period. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s explanation of the “racial alchemy” that formed our twentieth-century U.S. conception of homogenous European whiteness, when contrasted with Eaton’s triangulation of Irish, Japanese, and Anglo-American characters, opens a new window onto the reconstruction of racial identity in the era of U.S. overseas empire. Jacobson...