The novel we read last week hit me like a pillowcase full of soap bars. Before reading it the closed-minded and cold hearted side of me though, “What is a few years in a camp? Free food. Free shelter. Family and friends nearby.” I had no idea about the emotional heartaches and mental fatigue that ruined many Japanese Americans.
The family presented in the novel is American to the core. The children were born in America and have only lived in Berkeley their entire lives. Their father is a successful businessman who has traveled quite extensively abroad and their mother is a dutiful and honorable housewife who loves her pets and family. Until Executive Order 9066 was signed on February 19, 1942 by Franklin D. Roosevelt and their father was arrested and taken away. They did not see him for over four years and he was a completely different man than before.
I could go on and on about this book… giving plot details, character descriptions and overarching themes but that is not the point of my blog. The point of my blog is to show how close minded I was about the entire history. To show that my personal history has created a sense of pride and minimization in regards to the hardships of others. And how wrong I was! I cannot imagine the feelings of betrayal and heartbreak by the Japanese Americans. Issei and Nisei. I cannot imagine signing up and fighting for a country that feeds you only catfish, liver and horse. Fighting against people who look more like you than your allies and then returning to a country that continues to bash and fear you. Yes, of all the characters in the book the father struck a chord with me.
His hair was gone, he was skin and bone and he never returned to work again. Every sense of honor and pride had been stripped from the poor man and he felt that he had let his family and wife down by not fulfilling his obligations as a husband and father. The separation from his family continued throughout his life as he stared outside the window waiting for the days to pass.
It is impossible for me to write a solid novel about a subject such as this because it is so foreign to me. I feel that Otsuka was born to write that novel and she did so with prowess and grace. Like Jasmine mentioned in our group discussion, the book was written like a haiku…very simple with an immense amount of power.
The film we watched was heartbreaking. To hear about propaganda is one thing but to see it is another. The dehumanization of the Japanese American people after the bombing of Pearl Harbor makes me sick to my stomach and painful at heart. Hard working Americans treated like aliens from another planet. Rounded up like terrorists and sent away to wait upon the unknown future. The images of the bombings in Pearl Harbor did cause a stir in my heart strings, but nothing like the images of the Japanese being forced from their homes. And then of course, after learning what I have about the treatment of Chinese workers in America before the Japanese…and then the mistreatment of the Japanese in America… and to know that in 1924 they were banned from becoming citizens…after doing such hard labor to build this country….it really is heart breaking. We work them to near death, treat them like slaves, ban them from having families, ban them from sleeping with white women then rob them of their homes and lives. It is a horrible history that should not be covered in dust.
Our trip to Tacoma also magnified that. We boot an entire population of people out of the city then burn down their buildings and a hundred years later a couple of white people think they deserve a nice rock park next to the river. It seems so absurd and unbelievable. It seems like a smack in the face to someone after being beaten down. But what the hell else can we do?