From Desert Dust to City Soot: Environmental Justice and Japanese American Internment in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

“In this city, you have to risk your life; go farther, and pay more to be poor.”

—Karen Tei Yamashita (175)

Environmental justice scholars such as Vandana Shiva and Robert D. Bullard explain that people of color, the poor, and women suffer disproportionately from ecological crises,¹ a reality made dramatically evident by Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997), which charts the interrelated lives of seven racially marginalized characters as they navigate a polluted urban landscape.² Yamashita’s intricate narrative draws an important environmental connection between seemingly incongruent social phenomena to reveal that environmental justice is not only a recent urban struggle but also one that is rooted in the past with long-term physical and psychological effects. For example, Julie Sze, in a pioneering essay that calls attention to the “emerging literature of environmental justice,” offers an analysis of Tropic of Orange that illuminates an environmental connection between historical and contemporary issues of colonialism and labor for women of color in its examination of the characters Rafaela and Emi (40).³

This essay introduces yet another set of historical and contemporary issues that are foundational to an environmental justice reading of Yamashita’s novel: the past trauma of Japanese American internment and the contemporary homelessness of sansei Manzanar Murakami, who is named for one of those internment camps. In addition, this essay argues that cross-generational effects of environmental injustices are revealed in the character of his granddaughter, Emi, who refuses to acknowledge the painful internment history she has inherited. While this internment history may seem peripheral to the central plots of Tropic of Orange, it is referenced throughout the novel. Most notably, this history is alluded to every time Manzanar’s name appears on the page. Consequently, Japanese American incarceration haunts Yamashita’s characters and readers throughout the book. Internment’s history of land theft and displacement, severe degradation of living and working conditions, and long-term psychological trauma, this essay will show, constitute important environmental justice issues for Manzanar and Emi, issues which, in a Japanese American context, have been and continue to be largely ignored. Yet consideration of these issues for Japanese Americans is crucial not only for motivating positive environmental change but also for emphasizing the ongoing need for inclusion of Japanese American perspectives in scholarship across a diverse range of issues.⁴

In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita threads together the disparate histories and modern-day experiences of Japanese Americans through the themes of displacement and eco-resistance in order to make clear that the battle against environmental degradation demands a comprehensive, humanistic approach that recognizes the lasting effects of race-based environmental inequality. With its focus on the significant intersection of environmental and social justice issues, Yamashita’s novel presents injustice and resistance in their myriad forms as a “complexity of layers” (Yamashita 57), epitomizing what David Schlosberg calls “the new pluralism” of the environmental movement (4). This new pluralist approach maintains the interconnectedness of various environmental and social events. As Schlosberg emphasizes, “environmental justice struggles are not strictly environmental” but rather collective efforts that “challenge multiple lines of domination”:

This understanding of an environmentalism with diverse issues and an assertion of linkage calls for a broader movement—one that must necessarily forge a solidarity among a range of groups and movements. This type of networking across issues and groups is a key defining characteristic, and a crucial organizing strategy, of the growing environmental justice movement. (117)

Tropic of Orange lays bare this vast network of issues and groups, offering a vision for such a cohesive environmental movement. Specifically, Yamashita presents intricate layers of environmental devastation and environmental racism to expose internment and homelessness as integral twentieth-century environmental justice issues demanding our attention in the immediate global environmental crisis.⁵

Environmental justice is founded on the idea that social injustices—including racism, sexism, and classism—correlate with environmental destruction. The US environmental justice movement emerged in the early 1980s and gained momentum with the United Church of Christ’s 1987 publication Toxic Wastes and...