Memories

Sunday, December 07, 2003

Tora, Tora, Tora... 
Today is the day of infamy, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor... It was the beginning of a war that totally destroyed Japan and took the lives of many people: American, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Dutch, Australian and countless others. What a stupid war. Japan had visions of grandeur, colonizing neighboring countries, becoming the major power in East Asia. Why? The question is too complicated and I will let the historians deal with it. I will simply take the position that war is usually unnecessary, and started by closed-minded men who will ultimately make other men die for their decision. I wonder how many soldiers with the surname Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeldt have died in Iraq? Virtually zero, I would wager.

As  a youth, I was just as stupid. As a Japanese-American, I thought, rediculously, that I was Japanese. When the war movie, Tora, Tora, Tora came out (early 70s), my friends and I went to the Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood to root for the Japanese. As the Zeros were torpedoing the battleships and bombing the airstrips, we hooted and hollored and waved our Japanese naval flags (right) in the theater. You can imagine we were received with loud boos and a storm of popcorn. But we were young and stupid and "Japanese". Of course, I now realize that I am not Japanese. Indeed, the more I study Japan, the more I realize that I am not one of them. So why were we like that? Well, as JAs, we were marginalized in the country of our birth, the good ol' US of A. We certainly didn't feel like we belonged to any segment of the society and so we ended up imagining we had an affinity with our cultural heritage, the land of the rising sun. Since the mainstream didn't allow us to swim along them, we had to create or imagine our own tributaries. And for us it was a connection to Japan. As unrealistic as it was, it still made us feel good. The 70s was not the best of times to be a minority, but it was a good time to feel like a minority: On the coattails of Black Power and Chicano Power, it felt good to have some kind of identity, and for us it was to be Japanese.

I feel like I'm rambling... I 'm not trying to blame anyone or any segment of society. It was what it was...

How do Asian youth feel today? Is the feeling similar? Would you wave a J flag--or a kendo shinai--during The Last Samurai?

Thursday, September 11, 2003

: Remembering : 
Two years ago on this day, many people died at the hands of a group of desperate people--people who, I wrote a couple of weeks ago, shared similar traits to the suicide kamikaze of WWII. I didn't mean to "revise" the image of kamikaze as desperately battling the cultural encroachment by and hegemony of the West; neither did I intend to equate the actions of kamikaze pilots on military targets with terrorists on non-military ones. But I do believe that desperate people resort to extreme measures to accomplish their goals. It is frightening and more than a little sad...

On a lighter note on this solemn day, I would like to tell you that there seems to be an affinity between disasters and me sitting on the can. As I mentioned earlier this week, I was sitting down, doing my business when the '89 SF earthquake hit, and fearing my body would be discovered under undignified circumstances. Well, two years ago on 9/11, I was again reading the newspaper in my favorite place when Musubi-chan pounded on the door to hand me the telephone receiver--damn, these cordless phones! It was my sister and she was screaming at me.

"Oh my gawd. It's horrible!"

"Huh? Calm down, what's up?" I said, half jokingly.

"Haven't you heard? You're ALWAYS on the toilet. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center."

I was frozen in horror because my sister worked right across the street from the WTC. But I immediately calmed down as I remembered that she just happend to be in LA taking care of our mother.

"Gawd, Onigiriman." No, she doesn't really call me this. "There was a crash at the Pentagon, too. Didn't you hear? Isn't your school near the Pentagon? Do you LIVE in the bathroom?!?"

"..........."

I don't mean to make light of today's significance. But this is pretty much how it unfolded for me that day. It is now a standing joke in our house that I spend far too much time in my special room, and whenever I'm there, there's always the possibility of a disaster. Musubi-chan yaps about my time there, and my sister always tells me she's glad we have extra bathrooms. Whenever they start talking like this, I grab the most recent issue of SI or Newsweek and head to the... uh, you-know-where.

For a more intimate description of the events of that day, read caffeinenicotine. He was near ground zero and his account is vivid and moving.

Saturday, August 09, 2003

The A-Bomb and Mom
CultofDizzo: Much respect to your mom. She survived a horrific event and in the end demonstrated her dignity and selflessness. For all the hype about the War on Terror, I still believe your mom and her generation will continue to define what a true-life hero is.
Thanks, Dizzy. I'm pretty sure my mother would not define herself as a hero, but she was a survivor, somthing that she passed on to my siblings and me.

Sleetse: Yeah, you're right, parents are usually right, plus they have the power to disown you and leave you off the will, now thats scary.
Sleetse, I love your sarcasm. The power to disown can certainly make parents look "right"... haha... You will get no argument from me.

Pochi124: I appreciate my parents. i just despise my brother with a passion....
Now, now, Pochi, It's nice that you love your parents, but your brother is just being "your brother". I think there's a contract signed by all would-be brothers that they must make their sister's life miserable, but with decreasing degrees of misery as the contract slowly reaches its expiration date. My contract has yet to expire--according to my sister--but its close...

Thursday, August 07, 2003

A Few Words of Response to Yesterday's Entry
Did your mother feel conflicted about living in the US after the war? 
Not that I could tell, but she was pretty good at concealing her feelings. She came to the U.S. of her own free will to get married. And while she never expressed it directly, she instilled in me a sense that we are all individuals, our acts are individual acts of free will (under most circumsatnces) and as individuals we must accept responsibility for them. So I figure she felt the same way. That is, she wasn't going to hold the American people accountable for decisions made and acts taken by a few. Indeed, this general outlook may explain why she preferred the U.S. to Japan, a country where individual acts can be attributed to a group, and responsibillity must be accepted by the group. Maybe, this explains why I didn't fall into the trap of thinking I had to go to school within a specific time frame or follow the typical JA standards of behavior... maybe...

Did she ever naturalize?
Yes, she did become a US citizen. She told me that she wanted to be a citizen of the country where her children were born. Moms... don't you just love 'em?

Have you ever seen "Grave of the Fireflies"?
Yes, I have. The life of children under horrific conditions such as war, struggling to survive, and ultimately succumbing to cirumstances they had nothing to do with, was far too "realistic" for an anime. As Piratechan might agree, it's not the "realism" of the illustrations, but the "reality" in the story, content, emotion, that is at the heart of any good film, animated or not. But seeing the movie once was enough. I'm afraid that if I see it again, I'll breakdown all over again... I get choked up just thinking about it here... (yeah, yeah, just an old geezer...)

I've always wondered what it would've been like to have lived through an ordeal like what your mother went through.
I have too, and I can't even begin to imagine what it was like. I've lived through two major earthquakes--Sylmar ('73) and San Fransisco ('89)--but suffered little damage. I've been in a couple of auto accidents, but survived both. Learning and trying to comprehend the extreme hardships experienced by my mom and dad (he "voluntarily" relocated during WWII) have made me appreciate the life I have lived--indeed, all my gripes and complaints about life seem petty by comparison... But, y'know, my parents have NEVER, EVER told me to stop complaining, that their life was harder, or any other of a thousand ways to say "well, when I was your age"... I miss my mom...

Lecture of the day: Younger readers--yes, you--make sure you always appreciate your parents. They may not always seem like it now, but they will likely prove the be the best things in your life.

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Pause to Reflect
I have been writing about myself so earnestly--me, me, me, me, me--that I had forgotten what day it is today: August 6, the day the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Props to Taknunishi79 for reminding me of this important day.

A-Bomb, Hiroshima, and Mom
Today is the 48th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Every August, this becomes an intense issue for many anti-nuclear groups and opponents. For me, it is just as intense, but for more personal reasons.

My mother is an A-bomb victim--hibakusha in Japanese. That makes me a second generation victim, and the research on how radiation effects second generations is still inconclusive--although a friend has told me that if I'm any indication, the research should lead to illnesses like Peter Pan syndrome. But this is not about me....

My mother--photographed in the early '50s next to Honkawa, a river in Hiroshima (I think the Atomic Dome is visible in the background)--rarely talked about her experience. I had asked her a couple of times, but she would only tell me it was terrible and offered virtually no detail. On my first trip to Japan, I visited my relatives in Hiroshima with her and learned that most victims indeed did not talk about the event... until they were talking to someone who went through the same experience. In my great-aunt's house just northwest of ground zero--the Atomic Dome--she talked very animately with her cousin's husband about their experience. I was mesmerized, and now kick myself in the butt for being so selfish, for not recording their conversation on tape or on paper to share with others. All I can offer you today is my memory--as suspect as it is.

I had interviewed my mother a few times and actually put some of it on audio tape before she passed on last year, but I have yet to transcribe them as it is still too painful even to listen to them. So I will not write about her fateful day--I will do that on some future date relying on her memories. Instead I will jot down some of the insights I have gained through her over the years...

Burns: They were shiny oval areas on her legs. They differed in size, from 4 inches to 6 inches in length. Each had what looked like veins in a leaf: a center vertical vein with several branches sprawling outward from there. I always stared at them and at times tried to run my fingers over them, but every time I tried, she would slap my hand away. These are the remnants of her burns she suffered from the atomic blast. Her burns were severe and promoted keloids--an excessive production of scar tissue. She later explained to me that these keloids would form, then become dead skin that turned black and then peeled away. After a time, as her wounds healed, they stopped forming, but they left these shiny reminders of August 6. Whenever she slapped my hand away, she would just say, "Stop it." But I wonder if it was because it hurt or because she didn't need anyone else to bring attention to her experience. These weren't her only reminders.

Physical Scars: She had an ear--the left one--that looked like a boxer's cauliflower ear. Whenever my siblings and I were horsing around and we accidentally brushed against this ear, she would freeze in pain. Causing the pain were minute shards of glass. They had been embedded inside this cauliflower ear when the windows of her office imploded from the blast. After the blast, she went to a hospital to have them removed, but she was sent away, told that she should count herself among the lucky; patients that demanded "real" care needed their attention first and foremost. My mother just let the wound heal-over as is. Amazingly, she still maintained some--albeit diminished--hearing in this ear.

Psychological scars: Whenever we went outside, particularly when she was driving, my mother wore excessively dark sunglasses. I thought she was just trying to be California cool, but I found out later that there was a reason related to Hiroshima. When she was speaking with her cousin's husband, he mentioned that even today he flinches when he sees a sudden flash of light--a reminder of the flash on August 6. My mother nodded in agreement. She went on to describe to him how sunny southern California is and that when she was driving, a glint of sunlight reflecting off a car's chrome bumper always made her catch her breath...

I was reluctant to reveal these things about my mother--she consistently avoided talk about her scars and she always tried to hide them. But towards the end of her life, she suggested that perhaps her experience might prove to be noteworthy to some. I hope that some might serve as a reminder of the horrors of war and the effects of a nuclear blast--as we all know, there are some who unfortunately still need it...

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Cruisin' J-Town Memories: With Family

With the news that the Los Angeles City Council began a planning process to build a new Police Headquarters, a Jail, Emergency Operations Center, Fire Station, and other facilities next to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, I have been reminiscing about my life there--my salad days.

Born and raised in LA, I went to J-Town for as long as I can remember. Our family was active at Maryknoll, the local Japanese Catholic Mission located on the east edge of J-Town. We went to school there and to church. And every Sunday, after church, the big deal for us was to go to Nihonjin Machi, as the Issei referred to it--hence the referent Japanese Town, or J-Town--and shop. My mom would go to Bunkadō 文化堂, on 1^st between San Pedro and Central next to Kōyasan temple, to buy her Japanese magazines and journals, like Hōseki with the nudey photos on the first couple of pages. She also bought for me my copies of the original Tezuka Osamu's Atomu 手塚治のアトム--that's Astro Boy to you and me. Back then I couldn't read the Japanese, so I used to make up story lines based on the illustrations. If my mom needed something for the home, she would go to Uyeda Dept. Store 上田百貨店. It was a really small place with only a first floor and basement and it used to crack me up that they actually called it a department store, but it had everything Japanese that my mom would want--sewing scissors, yukata, and even zori--back then, flip-flops (or jap-slaps, as my friends called them) were still very ethnic.

We also did our shopping there. While my dad might go to Ida Market or Enbun, we usually went to Modern Market to buy rice, sashimi, tsukemono, and Japanese vegetable. Dad was also a charter member of Senryū Tsubame, a poetic salon, and met once a month with his poetry friends to compose poems--I still think it was their excuse to have a party. Anyway, when they had a contest, he would need a trophy and he would drag us to Mickey's Watch Shop on San Pedro (it's in Honda Plaza now as Mickey Seki and Son, I think). He also published his own little magazine for Senryū enthusiasts in the LA area.¹ There were a couple of ads on the back cover, one was Mickey's Watch Shop, for which he got the trophy's at a discount and engraving for free. There were also ads for two sweet shops: Fūgetsudō and Mikawaya. For these,he got a dozen manjū from each store for free for his monthly Senryū meetings. Now I like manjū, but going to the sweet shops meant more than manjū. It was, for me, more about anpan--which might explain why I look like Onigiriman, now--as well as Tomoe Ame, Glico Caramel, and Marble Choco.

If my dad was in the mood, we'd get sushi at Matsuno-zushi--where I developed my taste for shime saba. Often we would go to Far East Cafe the local Chinese place with partitioned seating, a juke box, and the salted plums at the cash register. For that rare treat, we would go to the Sugar Bowl Cafe on San Pedro. It was the first place I ever ate a club sandwich with avocados in it. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Anyway, my parents knew many of the shop owners there, and I always saw my friends from school and church. It was a place for us to mingle and associate with others from the JA community. I must admit that J-Town today doesn't seem to reflect that sense anymore, but it is still a community. It may be small, and maybe even a little run down, but it's still our community.

¹ For his activities, dad received a couple of awards for his contribution to the Japanese American Community: one from the Japanese government and the other from the LA City Council.

Comments

なんか、いいですねぇ「メモリーレーン」見たいな、ノスタルジックな過去を振り返って見るのも。^_^　あの辺りには、そう頻繁に行かなかったんですけど、それなりの思い出はありますね。≪自分は、K-Townの方が頻繁に通っていたんですよねぇ≫

とにかく、OnlinePetitionの方も上手く行くと良いですね。僕にとっては「故郷」とまで言える様な場所ではなくとも、沢山の人にはそうですからねぇ。察の設備が入ると、雰囲気も変わっちゃいますからね。

タク

Posted 7/16/2003 at 3:00 PM by takunishi79

RiceBallJournal © All material is copyrighted. Reproduction without the express written permission of the author is prohibited.