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Camp Scatology A Comparative Study of Body (as) Waste in Japanese American Literature 22 / Intercut on Asian Anus 2 Suspected as enemy aliens following the surprise attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, 120,000 Japanese Americans and 21,000 Japanese Canadians were rounded up and incarcerated in internment camps in the western part of North America.1 These internees were caught between West and East: their Eastern ancestry clashed with a paranoid, racist West. As memoir and fiction, internment narratives have colored a large number of Japanese American writings concerned with their ghettoization, alienation, and abjection during the war as well as after it. Historically, Japanese Americans were treated as undesirable waste to be expelled from the American body into internment camps, a collective trauma manifested here as “camp scatology,” or the body (as) waste. In such classics on the internment as Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), the Japanese American body is but body waste, as it is irreparably tainted by rejection and shame. The body is feces, “foreign matter” to be extruded. Such imagery should not be taken as Kogawa’s or Okada’s “eccentric” poetic metaphor for Japanese American subjectivity , for what happened was a case of extremity in the human condition, during the time of World War II. To highlight the unique Japanese American predicament, one that precariously inhabits the fissure between East and West, the opening section of this chapter, “Existential Puke, Jap Shit, Mao’s Manure,” compares Japanese American camp scatology to two other types of camp from the West and the East. The second section, “Amputee,” gives a metonymic spin to the thesis of “body (as) waste,” where missing or ineffectual body parts—waste matter literally—document in their disuse the internment. This section also contrasts Japanese American amputees with Western and Eastern counterparts. While physical deformity has been deployed in literature as a sign of evil (the lame Richard III) or of divine power (blind prophet Tiresias), disabilities in Japanese American texts, as self-representations, differ from their misshapen predecessors. Body mutilation is not imagined as in Camp Scatology / 23 Shakespeare and Sophocles, but experienced in Kogawa and other Japanese American texts. A comparative project, this chapter juxtaposes three strands of texts and three sensibilities on undesirable bodies and body functions, connecting West, East, and their borderland, Asian America.2 Research on the Japanese American internment experience has shed considerable light on that collective trauma from the perspective of history, sociology , anthropology, psychology, but this chapter examines it from the angle of affect.Itconsiderstheemotionsofinternees,whichstandoutinsharpcontrast to Western and Eastern “shadows.” We can do this most appropriately by analyzing literature, where the intangible and, indeed, mysterious human emotions are richly portrayed, unlike the writings of the social sciences, which are dominated by empirical, quantifiable evidence. For instance, in “Children of Inmates”(2000)YasukoTakezawatellinglyoptstoexplore“effects”ratherthan “affects.” Although her entire essay hints at the emotions of shame and guilt, she concludes with only a single articulated instance: “One Sansei said that, to the Nisei, camp means ‘shame,’ and to the Sansei, it means ‘guilt’” (p. 312). This endeavor picks up from where Takezawa and other eminent social scientists left off.3 Existential Puke, Jap Shit, Mao’s Manure Philosophically, wartime and postwar European existentialists lived in a camp called life, which nauseated them to the extent of “puking.” Racially, “Japs” in America during World War II were expelled to cesspools of camps. Ideologically , intellectuals in Maoist China were sent down to the countryside and detained in “cow sheds,” their wasted years likened by themselves to night soil to fertilize the “motherland.” Unlike the existentialist’s philosophically based camp or the Japanese Americans’ race-based camp, however, Maoist reeducation camps can be set up anywhere. Anatomically, existential puke is associated with stomach acid, Jap shit with “crap” from the bowels, and Mao’s manure with the earth’s aroma that suggests the cycle of life. Retching takes place in the upper body, involving organs principally above diaphragm (despite the fact that stomach lies below diaphragm), that muscular membrane separating abdominal and thoracic cavities. The mouth, esophagus, diaphragm, and stomach are key in respiratory and digestive functions. Since breathing, eating, drinking, and speaking sustain life, “heaving” acquires more “stature” by virtue of its association with these essential functions. The mouth, in particular, is primarily for talking and eating and only rarely as the conduit of vomit. At times we have to induce vomiting by sticking a finger...

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