When Lucio made his journey around the world, he stopped first in Los Angeles. I remember he joined me to see Wakako Yamauchi’s play And the Soul Shall Dance. He seemed confused to see this play with Englishspeaking actors in Japanese roles; it was artificial to his ears. He questioned this Asian American thing. He was Brazilian; in Brazil, it was a question of class, of feeding hungry people, not race.
Mika
Mika Morishita Akagawa is sitting in the rattan chair. Her story was told to me by her grandson, Lucio Kubo. She was the eldest daughter of a well-to-do family in Toyohashi, Aichi. The family owned an iron works and hardware store. Unusual in those days, Mika received an eight-year education rather than the traditional six for girls. She married her husband, Hidetake, by the strict arrangement of miai, in which Hidetake, under some pretense of visiting the family, observed Mika from a distance. Mika was unaware of these arrangements and only met her husband on the day of her marriage. She was eighteen; he, thirty. Later, she would comment of her relief upon seeing he was, in fact, rather handsome.
Mika followed Hidetake to Manchuria, where he received substantial pay as station chief for the Japan Railroad for a period of eighteen years. Upon returning to Japan, however, Hidetake couldn’t find work with comparable pay and, with the failure of the stock market in 1931, suffered further financial losses. In a family now grown to nine children, the Akagawas feared their sons would be sent to war with China. Having lived outside of Japan for so many years, perhaps Brazil seemed an easy option in 1933. Still, Hidetake would have been nearing fifty, Mika forty; they would begin again, albeit with a working force of older children.
Mika Morishita Akagawa (São Paulo, 1941)
Unlike most Japanese immigrants who arrived as contractual labor, the Akagawas paid their passage and bought a parcel of land in the Japanese colony of Tietê. Tietê in 1933 was a virgin forest on the far northwestern frontier of the states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso. The Akagawas cleared the land and planted rice, corn, beans, and cotton. Only the sale of cotton would have rendered a return greater than making ends meet, and again, counting their losses, the family moved on to the city of São Paulo. By then, war edicts forbidding the Japanese language and any contact in groups confined them to their house. The children married, went on to other jobs, and left home.
Mika had been a dedicated wife and mother, not engaged in the hard labor of the farm but situated in the home in a traditional manner her daughters somewhat critically said was due to her upbringing as the spoiled daughter of a good family. Yet, she wasn’t a social sort, but extremely discreet, reserved in manner. Life in São Paulo became lonely; occasional outings with her daughters to the local cinema may have been a singular source of happiness in those years.
This is perhaps the time in which the photograph was taken. No longer youthful, slightly severe, Mika sits in a rattan chair in the Foto Tucci studio in São Paulo, having traveled great distances, her own story woven silently between the warp and woof of an energetic man, nine children, three countries, war, and the economic and political whims of her time.
Lucio worked as the associate director for Tizuka Yamasaki’s film Gaijin. I remember my confusion when the film’s ending suggested the issei heroine marries a Euro-Brazilian. Even if everything else about the film was realistic (the Japanese characters spoke Japanese!), in my book, that ending never happened; it was a romantic ploy using a famous Brazilian actor.
Tei
Tei Imai Sakai, my maternal grandmother, was the oldest daughter of a fish merchant in Matsumoto, Nagano. My grandfather Kitaichi came from a small nearby village and married Tei before he left for adventures across the ocean. For seven years, no one heard from him, and Tei’s family began to advise her to remarry. But in 1906, an earthquake devastated San Francisco and forced the work of reconstructing the city. It was work that made it financially possible for Kitaichi to write after seven years. “Come,” was all the letter said, and Tei went.
Tei Imai Sakai (Matsumoto, 1900)
Tei made the trip to America at a time when Japanese women were rarely known to travel alone. She joined Kitaichi and they opened the Uoki Fish Market, a Japanese grocery store that remained in business for 103 years on Post Street in Japantown, San Francisco.
Kitaichi, like so many issei men, invested and lost his money in one venture after another, and, unforgivably, an employee and bookkeeper in the store absconded with the rest. It would take Kitaichi’s sons a decade of sacrifice to pay off this loss, but Kitaichi had perhaps by then already lost the will that began his adventures so long ago in Japan.
It was Tei who quietly formed the strong backbone of the family, an unwieldy brood of nine all housed in the Victorian rooms above the store. From that time, Tei never lived anywhere else, except for the years during the war at the Topaz concentration camp. Her entire world resided in Japantown, on Post Street, and in the big kitchen where the family and store employees came to eat. Tei rarely spoke a word of English. Her world was insular, enclosed.
And yet, working or at rest, she was the central, solid, most tangible, and eternally patient force behind the family. Perhaps it was the Zen Buddhist in Tei; everything about her radiated simplicity, honesty, humanity, humor, and wisdom. As time went on, she became the elder who spoke few words but always spoke the truth. No one speaks of Tei as having any faults, and it seems strange to report that such a good woman could exist. A peaceful, smiling Buddha—the same woman in the photograph who sits with calm simplicity and a face of young wonder, awaiting a portrait, awaiting a husband gone to America with no word for seven years, waiting at the center of the storm of family and community and life in a new world.
Lucio married Yuri, a more recent Brazilian issei, and I married a Brazilian of European, African, and aboriginal extractions. It’s possible to call Lucio’s children nisei or sansei, but mine have probably lost these designations to some other identification of their own making.
Kazue
Kazue Kato Kubo was Lucio’s paternal grandmother. She had been married and separated in Japan at the age of twenty-six. A few years later, in Kyoto, she met Tetsu Kubo, a scholar-teacher of Christian theology who had studied at Princeton and spoke English fluently, and who was widowed with four children. Kazue is standing in a kimono, perhaps just moments before she took on the responsibilities of raising a family of six.
Tetsu was a Christian intellectual, and author of several books in Japan. He had Western tastes, drank coffee, and set his sights on a world outside Japan. In 1929, after the Japanese Exclusion Acts, the U.S. was no longer an option. Leaving for Brazil was his decision. Kazue would’ve preferred to stay in Japan as the prominent wife of a future school director, but she came along.
The Kubos necessarily augmented their family group with two young men and came as contract laborers headed for a coffee plantation northwest of São Paulo. One of the requirements for immigration to Brazil was that Japanese must arrive in traditional family groups composed of a husband, wife, and at least one child of laboring age, fourteen or older. This was a requirement the government thought would prohibit the excessive entry of young unmarried males, who were considered—in the case of U.S. immigration—to be a source of social problems. Whether it was the fear of young Asian males or the perspicacity of creating conditions for family life, this requirement brought Japanese women to Brazil. And because Japanese woman accompanied men to Brazil, families were born, land was settled, roots taken, homes established.
Kazue Kato Kubo (Kyoto, 1926)
While the idea to immigrate to Brazil was Tetsu’s, the physical reality became Kazue’s. Lucio admits his grandfather could never again find his footing in a land that required his physical rather than intellectual labor. From that moment on, Kazue became the major provider and mover of the family’s fortune. She tilled the land, planted the garden, established a poultry ranch, sold eggs and produce in the city, and raised four stepchildren until they left for college and marriages. In later years, being no inte
llectual slouch herself, she taught the Japanese language. Kazue was a dynamic sort, a woman of energy and charisma. She gave everything she had to the life and sustenance of her family in Brazil. She made Tetsu’s dream happen.
We study the formal portraits of our antecedents, recognize statements of fashion and period and familial resemblances. We knew them as older women, as grandmothers with whom the possibilities for communication were more or less difficult. We have remembered or forgotten their stories. What little we know is recounted here. By themselves, the photographs mean nothing—antique curiosities framed for museums and curio shops. But perhaps we remember when our young hands were held by old hands, remember the thin wrinkled skin over tired bones, the deep crevices in the mottled palms.
Lucio is a reader of palms, and therefore, one assumes, the future. I never understood if this was a serious avocation or Lucio’s wry method of initiating conversation and meeting women. I don’t know if this reading of palms contradicts or complements one of the keenest, most perceptive minds I know. I have never asked Lucio to read my palm.
By 1941, some 190,000 Japanese had immigrated to Brazil. Today, Japanese immigrants and their descendants number over a million and a half—the largest such population outside of Japan. As simple as it may seem, one of the most plausible reasons for this large population must be the presence of women. Women, despite gentlemen’s agreements and the myriad plans of men, provided stability, created families, and established homes. While many men may have considered themselves migrant/dekasegi laborers, women were perhaps the true immigrants of the time.
For Japanese women, leaving home meant shedding traditional relationships—an adjustment to the system of joining one’s fortune to the husband’s family and living under the watchful eye of a mother-in-law. As difficult and physically strenuous as life might’ve been in the Americas, women achieved a modicum of freedom and equal standing alongside their men. Of course, they were probably too busy to notice. Women’s responsibilities were pragmatic and obvious: children, household, meals, garden, work. Perhaps unlike men, women didn’t have to succeed; they had to work. Men on the other hand were responsible for an economic and sometimes political, sometimes spiritual vision for their families. So often these visions became muddled; men lost their way. The Americas have a way of swallowing dreams, castigating those who believe, those who yearn. Women made the voyage, crossed the boundaries of time, culture, class, and gender, adjusted to the visions of men in subtle and supple ways, made the thing stick.
I’m the granddaughter, and Lucio is the grandson. I speak an Anglo language; Lucio, a Latin. I live in what is considered the First World in one of the great centers of the Pacific Rim; Lucio lives in the so-called Third World, in São Paulo—the largest metropolitan/cosmopolitan center of South America. As I write, it is winter. Lucio will receive my faxed copy of this document; there, it is summer.
Bombay Gin
My cousin locked me inside his mother’s apartment. This isn’t funny, I thought. I jiggled the lock. He had sawed off the stem on the dead bolt so the inside knob wouldn’t work. I knew this. He’d already explained this to me. Anyone could knock out the glass on the door, put their hands through, and open the dead bolt. He’d also made sure the windows were secure. I went to try the windows anyway, but he had fixed them so you could open them only about three inches. I’m skinny but not that skinny. I was in a locked box. I guess that was the point.
As locked boxes go, this was a pretty nice one. I mean, it had all the amenities: refrigerator, microwave, TV, telephone, bath, and bed. Well, it had more than amenities; it was a kind of museum and a box of memories. My cousin’s mother had died five years before, but he hadn’t removed or rearranged a single item in her apartment since. My other cousin said it was like a shrine to his mother, but I didn’t think so. It wasn’t about any sort of neurosis on my cousin’s part; he was just being lazy and comfortable. He really didn’t live there anyway. He came in on the holidays, slept in a sleeping bag on the sofa, locked up the place again, and flew back to New York. My other cousin said, “Why does he sleep on the sofa? Why doesn’t he sleep in the bed? It must be that he’s nostalgic, because sleeping on the sofa is what he did when she was alive.” Again, I knew better. He just didn’t want to have to change the sheets.
I went to the refrigerator, opened and closed it. It must be a nervous sort of thing, going to the fridge and looking in, as if there’s an answer inside that cold space. I’ve noticed that everyone does it, though. I’ve seen my kid and even his friends come home, wander into the kitchen, take a peek, make a mental note about week-old leftovers or a dead slab of steak that would take too much time to grill, then shrug away empty handed. I stared at the closed refrigerator for a long time. The doors were a jam-packed collage of two-by-three photos of all the kids in our families, their toothy or toothless grins under a plethora of magnets. My kid was there too, at ages zero to whatever age he was when my aunt died. I stared at everyone, but especially my kid. He was so cute back then. Everyone who visited must have stared at these fridge photos, paying particular attention to their own kids. My cousin never married, never had kids of his own, a fact his mother lamented time and time again. What she would’ve given for grandkids. Since she had none of her own, she adopted and borrowed everyone else’s. I could see and hear my aunt cooing over the photos, naming each one, their ages, announcing the newest baby. This was her future on the door of the fridge. It was her happy moment repeated every time she arrived where I had now also arrived. Or had I?
I opened the fridge again. For some reason, I noticed the salad dressing; it was a Paul Newman vinaigrette. I was sure this was the same vinaigrette my aunt dribbled over salad when she was alive. I checked the date on the mayonnaise; it was even older than five years old. I plunged into that cold box and began ransacking it for old food, checking the dates and tossing anything that looked familiar. Well, five-years-old familiar. Could you have a memory of food from five years ago? I thought I could see my aunt making roast beef sandwiches and spreading the light mayo over sourdough bread. I was convinced it was the same light mayo. Then there was the miso; it could conceivably last forever, or could it? I grabbed bottles of pickled ginger, pasty seaweed concoctions, barbecue sauce, oyster sauce, kimchee, low-sodium shoyu, green pimiento olives, and concentrated lemon juice. I hauled out the tubs of margarine, cans of Sapporo and Diet Coke, even the open box of baking soda. Then, I got into the freezer section and tossed all the cans of frozen concentrate, orange juice, mai tai and margarita mix. I tossed aluminum-foil packages of what looked like wrapped leftovers. Imagine keeping this stuff! I tossed the ice cubes that looked near a state of dehydration, if that were possible. In the far corner of the freezer was a stack of natto. It’s the soybean equivalent of the stinkiest aged Camembert you can imagine with the additional quality of being attached bean to bean by slimy strings of its own brown snot. It was already a stinky old slobbering mess when it was fresh, but frozen for five years, it had to be really gross. I threw it out.
From the fridge, I started in on the cupboards. Boxes of instant miso and Jell-O that had hardened into cement. Baggies full of discarded ramen flavor packets, small bottles of salt-free herb concoctions, spray cans of old Pam, boxes of bran cereals. You could tell my aunt was working on the high-blood-pressure/cholesterol angle. These ailments were the nemeses of our family genes, knocking off her sisters and brothers right and left. Still, I knew then that she was always cheating anyway. She said you couldn’t live forever, and she wasn’t going to sacrifice quality for quantity.
Deeper into the cupboards, there were boxes of California golden raisins in various stages of wrinkled leather and old cans of Campbell’s mushroom soup. I checked the dates on the cans. One said 1978. I thought about it; my own son was born in 1978. My cousin never cooked. I thought about him sleeping on the sofa in his sleeping bag with all this rotting food in the kitchen. Pretty soon the trash can was piled high with jars, cans, and boxes. Ha, I th
ought. That’ll show him. On second thought, I replaced the light mayo; he would pay—sometime in the future, he would pay.
My cousin was an only child. His photos were all over the place as well. There were large and small portraits of him, family scenes encased in every sort of framed holder in every room. I went around scowling at all the representations of him, especially the posed one of him at age five. This photo must’ve been taken just before the war, when the family lived in the Imperial Valley and before they were all shipped off to the Topaz internment camp. Camp and after was part two of my aunt’s life, part one being her youth during the Depression. It was all about sacrifice and struggle, and here was her son in a little jacket with a tiny hanky spitting out of his breast pocket, looking like an angel. This was way before I was born, but everyone said he was spoiled rotten. His mother liked to reminisce that he was itazura, as if he were just rascally. When and if he unlocked this box, I was going to break that portrait over his head.
I went out to the back balcony. I supposed I could yell to some elderly resident. Sure enough, I could see someone moving slowly down a sidewalk. Of course she was an old lady; they were all old. This was a retirement community, a leisure world for the elderly. There were seven thousand of them, briskly walking at seven in the morning, tooling around in electric golf carts, shuttling between the pharmacy and their cardiac doctors. I could be counted as the youngest among them. I watched the old lady approach at something like the breakneck speed of a step every sixty seconds. She was dragging two leashes attached to two small dogs that used to be maybe shaggy poodles but were balding in spots and limping behind her at an even slower pace. I realized she was walking as slowly as possible to accommodate her dogs. I imagined I could call to her. “Help! I’m a prisoner!” But it seemed foolish, which of course it was. Any sudden gesture might give those dogs heart attacks. It must’ve taken her fifteen minutes to cross fifteen feet. Maybe I exaggerate, but it was part of some principle about life at this juncture: having all the time in the world because there was very little time left. Did she know my aunt? I wondered. I decided to say something. At least there would be a witness to my existence in the locked box. “Good afternoon,” I ventured sweetly, not wanting to startle her, but the woman and her dogs continued slowly by. “Hello!” I spoke up, but she never looked up. Neither she nor her dogs could hear me. I don’t know why, but I stared after the trio until they disappeared in a sort of mirage behind a pine tree.
Sansei and Sensibility Page 5
