Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (review)

252Fourth Genre Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist by Kazuko Kuramoto Michigan State University Press, 1999 189 pages, cloth, $28.95 It's the Fourth ofJuly and I'm sitting with thousands of other spectators in a long grass field watching the Cincinnati Pops play a medley ofArmed Forces anthems. I'm hiding my face because I don't want anyone else to see me getting choked up. My friends make fun of me for being patriotic. They say, Why'sAmerica better than otherplaces?They say, What about Vietnam? What about the GulfWar? They say, Would you love it here so much ifyou weren't white? Ifyou weren't middle-class?'They say, Come on already. But I can't help it. My affection doesn't always feel rational, but I feel it anyway. And it is that confusion— how does one love a people, a place so historicaUy socially and politicaUy flawed—that draws me to Kazuko Kuramoto's Manchurian Legacy. In the Author's Note, Kuramoto sums up the book's narrative in this way: This memoir includes my childhood memories of a then colonial city, Darien, at the south end of Manchuria. . .; how I saw World War II as a teenager, how we survived the hellfire of Manchuria at the time ofJapanese surrender; how we were finally rescued and shipped back to Japan; how as a repatriate I survived in the ruins of postwar Japan; and how I came to the United States as a young girl. Certainly her memoir is about aU of these things, but more importandy it's about a difficult defining and redefining ofnationaUty/nationaUsm, class/classism and selfhood. Kuramoto was born in 1927 to affluent Japanese parents and raised in Darien, Manchuria—a Japanese colony on mainland China won from Russia in the Russo-JapaneseWar of 1904-1905. Her story begins, more or less, with the onset ofWorldWar II, when she decides to join the Red Cross Nurses corps. Brought up on a steady diet ofJapanese nationaUst rhetoric, Kuramoto argues vehemently with her parents to aUow her to go: "It was not hard for me to recite what I had been taught aU of my life. World War II in the Pacific theater was then called Dai To-a Senso, the Great East Asia War. It was a sacred war, of course, and Japan was the self-appointed savior and leader." Kuramoto's entire family pleads with her not to go. Her brothers have already joined the army, are already headed for the front. Her mother says, weeping, "... and I thought the girls were safe from the war." But Kuramoto "had fallen in love with patriotism: self-sacrifice, total dedi- Book Reviews253 cation, honor, and the possibility of the ultimate heroic death." Though she cannot be dissuaded from joining the ranks of the Red Cross by her family, her confidence in her country's supremacy and the sacrifice she would make for it is, however, shaken soon after by Japan's surrender at the close of the war, leaving her searching for an identity no longer shaped by a certainty of national superiority. And it is that search for self that dominates the rest of the Manchurian Legacy. Who is Kazuko Kuramoto if she is no longer a Japanese "savior" of Asia? Who is she when she discovers that the Chinese, who have inhabited Manchuria as second-class citizens, have never inwardly accepted their social standing underJapanese rule?Who is she ifshe is no longer part ofa wealthy ruling class, forced to seU her family's prized possessions just to get by? How can she claim love for a country that doesn't send help for its people, that aUows them to starve, to go homeless, to be vulnerable to attack at any moment? The answers to those questions come slowly as Kuramoto rebuilds her past on the page. One might be surprised by just how generous those answers are, after seeing her neighbor's house stormed and destroyed by a Chinese riot, after surviving a harrowing escape by train to Darien from the northern country in an open-roofed boxcar that is pelted with rocks, after hearing of the staggering...