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Afterword
- University Press of Colorado
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KL 169 Afterword LaneRyoHirabayashi The George and Sakaye Aratani Professor of the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community Asian American Studies, UCLA Hiroshi Kashiwagi, his poetry, plays, and prose, are a national treasure that will prove especially valuable to the Sansei- (fourth) and Yonsei- (fifth) generation Americans of Japanese ancestry. In Starting from Loomis, Kashiwagi’s stories of the Japanese American experience are beautifully crafted, both minimalist in language and complexly textured . Though the stories have their own specific merit as literature, I am struck by their richness in terms of expressing a Nisei’s (second-generation person’s) sensibilities regarding the intimate history of the Japanese American experience in California’s agricultural hinterlands. My intent here is to reflect on these stories from a historical point of view, a crucial dimension to the stories’ value, which might not be readily apparent to a reader who has not lived in this particular milieu. Hiroshi Kashiwagi quite comfortably writes from personal experience . In the prewar world he and his characters inhabit, Kashiwagi is at home in Loomis—with all that “at home” implies. Certainly, a large part of that “home place,” as the historian Valerie Matsumoto puts it, is physical and temporal. As such, home entails not just a material structure but a sphere of comfort, filled with familiar sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes, all embedded in a particular time and space. Because of mass removal and incarceration following the Japanese afterword 170 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent fact that resettlement never actually repopulated the smaller rural prewar communities, Japanese American communities from towns that dotted Placer County, though not completely gone, have been radically transformed in their postwar manifestations. Yet as the historian Wayne Maeda has demonstrated, these were once solidly rooted, viable, dynamic communities, even though they did not become as widely known as the Nihonmachis (Japantowns) of their urban counterparts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Sacramento. In this context, it is evident that, when depopulated, the cultural meanings residents once ascribed to their community’s physical world are gone. Space, once inscribed as place, loses its content; and our task as cultural historians may become like that of the archaeologist. Thus while territory and buildings can be preserved, their corollary—the symbols, signifiers, as well as the feelings and affects that gave them their special meaning—cannot as easily be understood or even captured . What is more, the home places of first- and second-generation Japanese American families have a solid but very tacit feature, effectively captured by Edward T. Hall’s phrase “high context” culture. In this situation, relative stability and homogeneity mean that since culture is known and shared, much can remain unspoken. Therefore, nuance and implication become charged conveyers of meaning, and a subtle expression or movement of the shoulders can also convey the rationale or ethic behind a message. This is where Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s significance goes far beyond his literary contributions as a writer of short stories, poetry, plays, or related genre. Over half a century after the wartime incarceration of the Japanese American community, concerned residents, former residents, and activists are taking steps to preserve some of the last remaining historic structures of the Placer County Japanese American enclaves. Nisei, Sansei and Yonsei increasingly recognize Placer County as an integral part of Japanese America; and, along with allies, they are trying their [3.85.211.2] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:42 GMT) afterword 171 best to preserve the last large physical remains of that world. Books like Maeda’s Changing Dreams and Treasured Memories and the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council’s Japantowns of Placer County document the storefronts, boarding and bath houses, packing sheds and canneries, churches, schools, and association halls that helped stage the families and businesses that were at the foundation of the local ethnic economy. But if, beyond its material manifestations, a home place is a matter of language, discourse, and hexis encompassing sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch, we have to capture somehow all that as part of the complex we seek to preserve. The issue at hand here has to do with the nature of Japanese American culture, not in the broad, anthropological sense but in the sense of a specific regionalized, rural expression of a larger complex. While there is no doubt that the preservation and presentation of historically significant sites are of critical importance, the fact is that they provide only one dimension of the assemblage that...