A Voice Of Their Own

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese American writers have been writing about their experience in the English language, yet Japanese American literature, like the literature of other groups of Asian Americans, remained oblivious and marginalized until the last two or three decades of the century.A Voice of Their Own: On the Rise of Japanese American Literature is a sociopolitical study of some works by one ethnic group of American writers, who have represented the Japanese American experience interacting with the political, economic, and cultural forces in the American society. I look on Japanese American literature as an emergent culture, by which I do not mean it was non-existent, but has risen from oblivion to recognition, and a group of writers have expressed what was unspoken and unspeakable about the Japanese American experience, in defiance to the hegemony of ideological discourse concerning them. I adopt a cultural materialist approach to these Japanese American literary works. "Cultural materialism is an approach to literature initiated in Britain in the late 1970s by the theoretical writings of Raymond Williams. Rooted in Marxism, cultural materialism stresses interaction between cultural creations and their historical context, including social, political and economic elements." In literary criticism, it is Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield who put Williams' cultural materialist guidelines into the practice of literary criticism. They expound cultural materialist criticism as "a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis."An important element applicable to both cultural materialism and an emergent American ethnic literature, say Japanese American literature, is their challenge to a power structure mainly constituted with ideological forces in a given social and historical context.In addition to a detailed explanation of cultural materialism, I include in the Introduction a brief survey of the Japanese American history and Japanese American writers, hoping this information is a helpful reference in the study of Japanese American literature. In the following four chapters, I examine four Japanese American writers and their works: Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California (1949), Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1988), John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), and Milton Murayama's tetralogy, including All I Asking for Is My Body (1975), Five Years on a Rock (1994), Plantation Boy (1998), and Dying in a Strange Land (2008). As their writings range a long period from the pre-World War II decades to the present day, my political commitments and theoretical methods vary correspondingly.Chapter 1 deals with Mori, whose Yokohama, California "has long been recognized as a pioneering effort to record the voice of the Issei in the rhythms and sensibility of their time before the war." Toshio Mori began writing in his twenties and had made himself a literary figure before he was interned. However, his first collection of short stories, designed to come out in 1942, was postponed until several years later. Mori wrote prolifically, yet so far only three short story collections and one novel have been published. Yokohama, California was his masterwork. He looked on himself as an American writer, and addressed an American audience. In this chapter, I focus on Mori's "cultural bridge" intention as shown in his representation of an imaginary pre-war Japanese American community called Lil' Yokohama. Mori's stories in Yokohama, California are a gallery of Japanese Americans who, instead of expressing their anger with racism and the experience of being incarcerated in concentration camps, put down roots in the United States and embraced America, retaining an optimistic belief in a better future. In a way, Mori accepted the assimilation discourse that was ideologically dominant with regard to American ethnic minorities. He lived and wrote in an era when anti-Japanese agitation and stereotypes were prevalent, and he took on the mission of countering the prejudicial conceptions by making a truthful representation of Japanese Americans and their community. He compared the Lil' Yokohama to any other part of the United States, describing in exact detail the quotidian life of Issei and Nisei Japanese, and recording multiple aspects of this community. From the 1970s on, due to an ethnically-conscious generation of Asian Americans, there was renewed interest in Mori's works, and today he is memorized for making a faithful record of a significant phase of Japanese American experience that has been forgotten and lost. Stylistically, Mori's work is influenced by earlier writers like Sherwood Anderson, yet thanks to his linguistic merits and technical maturity, many of his stories now rank among masterpieces in American short story.Chapter 2 focuses on the short stories by Hisaye Yamamoto, who has won the reputation as "the best Japanese American short story writer" and "a most talented writer of short fiction in Asian American literature." Yamamoto began her writing career before the war, was interned, and was "relocated" first on East Coast and later in Los Angeles. She only wrote short stories, which were mostly published in Japanese-language newspapers and some on national mainstream magazines. Many of Yamamoto's stories have Japanese women as the main characters, and in depicting their life on farms in South California, in a wartime concentration camp, or in a postwar metropolis like Los Angeles, her women characters always have our sympathy in their confrontation and struggle against what Deborah King calls "multiple oppression." Yamamoto is a feminist in describing women in struggle against gender inequality and sexual oppression, but her descriptions exceed the limits of conventional feminism and go into the scopes of class and race. She has also written about women who are victimized by the forces of racism and class oppression. Oftentimes, her stories describe fierce conflicts, in which it is not hard to see a composite power structure that is based on racism and classism. For example, Mrs. Hayashi in "Seventeen Syllables" is burdened with farm work and housework, among other responsibilities. To her, writing haiku is a spiritually and socially uplifting action, yet the story ends with the tragic "death" of the poet which is brought about jointly by an apathetic husband, a formidable life on the farm and insurmountable class barriers. Therefore, the feminist critical race studies theory provides a feasible approach to and important insights into these women-of-color's liberation. In depicting Japanese American women in struggle against racial, class as well as gender oppressions, Yamamoto is an antiracist feminist.In Chapter 3 I look at the representation in John Okada's novel - also the first novel ever published by a Japanese American writer - a Japanese American community that is torn apart by the traumatic internment experience. Okada, like Mori, Yamamoto, and many others, was interned, yet he volunteered for military service. No-No Boy, based on the story of a real person, was Okada's only published book, but it was rejected by both Japanese American and American mainstream readers, and was not "rediscovered' and seen as a canon of Asian American literature until the 1970s. The protagonist in No-No Boy, like many others, is forced into the "camps" of either Japanese or Americans through an imposed dichotomy. Characters in this novel, whether pretending the war and the internment were past, or being reminded of the lingering effects, all relive the trauma. Children have been turned against parents, brothers against each other, friends into foes, and other ethnic Americans against Japanese... the sense of alienation and frustration not only overshadows the myth of Japanese Americans' success, but makes the reconciliation between Nisei and their future really hard. An example is Kenji Kanno, the war hero who has proved he is more American than most Americans, and whose family has achieved their American Dream. Unfortunately, the gangrene keeps eating away at his wounded leg, till kills him at last. Even his suggestions to Ichiro on his deathbed do not heal the social ills nor no-no boys' personal agonies. Like in Yamamoto's stories, Japanese American who return from the relocation camps and/or prisons after the war face a lot of cross-sightings with other ethnic groups, but Okada describes a society that remains to be characterized by racial hostility and intolerance, including Japanese Americans' internalized racism. Okada's remedy to these personal and social ills is of universal meaning: only through mutual tolerance and understanding between persons, racial groups and even in a society can all "mistakes," personal and social, be made up. In terms of style, Okada adopts the technique of interior monologue, bringing out his protagonist's inner world and presenting a tormented soul through outward manifestations, therefore, he is at the best of masterly craftsmanship.Then, in Chapter 4, my focus shifts to Milton Murayama's tetralogy that is set mainly in Hawaii and partly in mainland America. Due to the so-called grammatical error in the title, his first novel All I Asking for Is My Body was rejected and he had to establish his own press to publish it. Born and growing up in Hawaii, Murayama belongs to the post-Civil Rights Movement generation of writers and he writes about Japanese in search of freedom and identity in Hawaii and the mainland United States. Murayama has presented a panoramic view of Japanese Americans' experience on sugar cane plantations. In All I Asking for Is My Body, particularly, he depicts the intergenerational conflicts that are not parallel, but entangled with non-white Hawaiian peoples' fight against racism, class oppression and capitalist economic exploitation. I use the split labor market theory to analyze the nature of plantation system featured by racial stratification, ruthless economic exploitation, and a "divide and rule" policy. Murayama, in his novels, reveals that family system and plantation system are intersected in the process of oppressing and marginalizing the non-white peoples. Tosh, for instance, is forced to quit school to help his parents pay back the family's debt, yet the so-called traditional filial piety and the plantation system draw them deeper and deeper in debt, giving Tosh no chance to get out. Therefore, these people - including the protagonist - must launch an interethnic solidarity (e.g. in terms of unionism) and a class struggle at once in their fight for freedom and equality in Hawaiian plantations and the American society. Some of Murayama's works were newly published, yet time will prove they are classics in Asian American literature.Finally, in Conclusion, I draw upon Raymond Williams' notion of "emergent culture" to examine the connection between the rise of Japanese American literature and the canonization of Asian American literature. In the context of a multicultural American culture, these ethnic writers - Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, and Milton Murayama - can be read at two levels from a multicultural perspective. Individually, they emblematize a transition from politically acquiescent to politically conscious Asian American multicultural writers. As a group, Japanese American writers produce a literature that can be seen as an emergent culture, not for its "novelty," but on the ground of its challenge to the hegemony of dominant culture. Japanese American literature, symbiotic with Asian American literature, poses its challenge and subversion to an "embedded power structure" in American culture to achieve the canonization of Asian American literature by the end of the 20th century.