Traveling Voices

During the war, my father was imprisoned in the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah until he left to study at the Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, outside of Chicago, Illinois. Just prior to the war's end in 1945, he returned to California to be ordained a minister and quickly reopened and converted the Oakland West Tenth Methodist Church into a hostel to shelter Japanese Americans returning to the Bay area from camps. Every day he met individuals and families at the train station, offered them the interim resources of the church until they could reestablish contacts, discover what had happened to their homes and possessions, find suitable housing and jobs.

By the time he married my mother in 1948, the church was no longer needed as a hostel; however a new group of visitors, seminary scholars and students from Japan, arrived hoping to complete their education and training in America. Many of these scholars were associated with Aoyama Gakuin, a university founded by the Methodist Church in Tokyo. My mother, living in the parsonage next to the church, remembers having one or several such visitors every evening for many years. Often they were passing through on their way to religious institutions further east, in Chicago or New York. My mother recalls those difficult years after the war when her living room became a momentary rest stop and meeting place for two communities displaced and scarred by war.

Staring up at the massive statue of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, who guards the gate of Aoyama Gakuin, I wondered at the curious coincidence of this invitation, in the year 2000, to speak at the 50th anniversary of the founding of that university's department of English and American studies. I had sent a message to Peter Robinson, professor at Aoyama: Did they understand that I did not speak Japanese? That I was not a literary academician? That my focus on American literature would be narrowed to Asian American literature? I was encouraged not to worry; I was the appropriate speaker. But then, what to speak about? In fact, I should have known to speak about Brazil-Maru, my novel about a band of Japanese Christian socialists who immigrated to Brazil in the 1920s, but I felt loath to speak about myself in a plenary that proposed to cover something as broad as American literature. But then again, what is American literature? In fact I found myself in this odd middle place between two literatures: American and Japanese. I have always considered myself a Japanese American writer, but having to consider the nature of my work in translation, the idea of Japanese American began to have another meaning, less as a political identification for an ethnic minority, increasingly as a kind of transnational identity.

On the nine-hour flight to Tokyo, I read John Dower's history of postwar Japan, Embracing Defeat, and began to think about a larger picture of that period. The postwar I knew was framed by my family's return from camp and forced relocations to places like Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia. I knew the story of how my uncles reopened the family fish market and grocery on Post Street in Japantown, San Francisco. Miraculously the truck they had left inside the boarded-up store was still there and in running condition. My uncles put it to work to re-supply the store with produce. In a time of scarcity and rationing, they were able to buy from wholesalers who remembered that the Sakais could be trusted to pay their debts. My mother remembers their first customer, an African American man who bought a watermelon. He placed the melon on the scale for her and said, "I don't really want this. I just wanted to welcome you folks back again."

My mother's story is perhaps one positive memory among many very negative stories about this period. John Okada's No-No Boy, probably the best-known literary representation of that time, questions the ideal of loyalty in an unjust and unequal society. Okada's hard-edged prose describes the bitter realities and emotional conflicts...