Japanese American Cultural Loss, Longing, and Reclamation

This article originally appeared in Gidra Zine.

Japanese Americans are unique compared to many other Asian ethnic groups in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, 73% of Japanese Americans reported being born in the US. Compared to the overall average of 43% American-born across all Asian ethnicities in the same time period, Japanese Americans are nearly twice as likely to have been born and raised in this country. Although there has been additional immigration in the postwar era, the Shin-Nikkei or “new Japanese diaspora” is much smaller by comparison to the multigenerational Japanese Americans whose families immigrated prior to the Immigration Act of 1924.

This means that the majority of Japanese Americans are descendants of people who were directly impacted by the forced removal and mass incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II. From the postwar era onwards, the relationships that Japanese Americans have had with their ancestral culture vary greatly. Most Japanese Americans stopped speaking the Japanese language after the Nisei – second-generation, in part because of the stigma of wartime incarceration. Despite the loss of language, many persons of Japanese ancestry practice other aspects of traditional culture in their daily lives. Some families maintained this relationship during the postwar resettlement period, while others whose families intentionally assimilated, now struggle to make meaning of traditions that were lost to time.

Another divergence from a singular cultural narrative is caused by the widespread intermarriage that both Shin-Nikkei and multi-generational Japanese Americans have engaged in. 2010 census data shows that only 36% of Japanese Americans report being married to someone of the same ethnicity. 55% reported marrying a non-Asian with an additional 9% marrying non-Japanese Asian. This percentage increases dramatically with each subsequent generation. The Yonsei, or fourth-generation, which I belong to, is estimated to have an intermarriage rate of nearly 90%.

As the Japanese American community continues to diversify through inter-ethnic and interracial marriages, this raises questions about whether a community that was once thought to be culturally homogenous will continue to practice Japanese traditions at all. If so, what do those traditions look like today, and what might they look like in the future?

My interest in this topic comes from my family’s rather unique connection to Japan. Few Yonsei have the privilege of knowing their Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) forbearers. My maternal great grandmother Asako Marumoto or Hibaachan as we called her, lived to the age of 95 - until I was 18 years old. I was blessed with this direct connection to an Issei immigrant that few others in my generation have experienced.

Having an Issei matriarch in my life who told us firsthand about where she grew up in Hiroshima and our relatives in Japan gave us a more direct understanding of our lineage and ancestral culture of origin than many other Japanese American families. This was not entirely a positive thing, since Hibaachan lost cousins to the atomic bomb and carried with her a burden of survivor’s guilt that was transmitted across generations.

Like the all persons of Japanese ancestry living in the West Coast in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, our family was forcibly removed from their home in Gardena, California where they worked as tenant farmers on the Kurata Ranch. However, they avoided wartime incarceration by fleeing inland to Layton Utah, where my great grandfather Masaichiro Marumoto had a cousin who worked on the railroad. Masaichiro was a Judo sensei who was trained by Kano Jigoro, the founder of Judo. Although he passed away before I was born, his presence in my childhood was felt whenever we visited Hibaachan and through the stories my mother told about him.

I have also spoken at length about Masaichiro with my Obaachan, Yukari Mikesell, who shared some memories with me.

“My father, you know, was born under the sign of the tiger. My romantic view is that a tiger cannot be caged. So that’s why we moved. The thing was, they had to have the equipment to start their life over again when they moved from California to Utah. And my mother made sure she carried the usu, the steamers. When we packed our car and trailer to move to Utah, that was one of the things she had. She took things that were important.”

Masaichiro and Asako decided to take their chances by fleeing inland to Ogden Utah where my great grandfather’s Issei uncle worked the railroad. Arriving in late February 1942, they found him missing, taken by the FBI to the Department of Justice camp in Crystal City, his only crime that he was a leader in the local Buddhist Association.

Homeless as a family of six, a local Mormon couple called the Thorogoods took pity on them and allowed the Marumotos to pitch a tent on their frozen farm field through the rest of the winter months if Masaichiro agreed to work as a sharecropper the following season. There our family lived in a single room canvas tent for almost a year, until the Thorogoods cleaned out their storage shed where our family spent the following winter. By 1944 they had saved enough money to purchase a small plot of land in my Nisei uncle Hiroki’s name in Clearfield Utah, where Masaichiro built a house that they would raise their five children in.

Life was not easy as some of the few Japanese in Mormon pioneer country, but they found a way to make it work. At the behest of the community, Masaichiro began teaching judo in what little spare time he had between planting and harvest seasons. In addition to her share of the farm labor and side jobs as a domestic housekeeper, Asako volunteered at the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple cooking elaborate meals for community gatherings and pursuing her interests in ikebana, koto playing, and kimekomi doll making.

Although my family lost everything, resettling during the so-called voluntary evacuation left an indelible mark on our family’s identity as Japanese Americans. While they were very much traumatized by the experience of forced removal, I credit Masaichiro and Asako’s decision to flee California as the reason that we have maintained our relationship with Japanese culture to the extent we have.

My Hibaachan taught me my first words in English and Japanese, introduced me to Japanese cuisine, and sparked my interest in Japanese cinema - something that has driven the direction of my entire professional career. She was deeply involved in her Buddhist temple community and for our family at least, fulfilled the role of cultural bearer and wisdom keeper. Although I never met Masaichiro, his commitment to passing on traditional Japanese culture was apparent in his practice as a Judo sensei. As a roku-dan - sixth degree blackbelt, Masaichiro was the highest ranked Judo practitioner in the state of Utah who co-founded the Judo Association of Utah. My Obaachan, Yukari Mikesell, elaborates on her father’s judo practice.

“The father’s of the boys wanted to have judo taught and they knew that my father knew judo. If they built a dojo, he said he would teach. And so that was the rules they went by. When the dojo opened up, my father arrived at the dojo. The kids were running all over the place having a great time. Their shoes were all over the place. He walked in and looked at that, and he went about gathering all the shoes, laid them in front of the door in a nice neat row. He went into the middle of the mat, sat down with his legs crossed, and waited. Pretty soon the kids figured it out. They knew they were running around, like kids would be, and they saw their shoes all lined up. So they came and sat down in a line, in front of him. That was the first day. The second time that they had their judo lesson, when father walked in they were already sitting in a nice neat line and they were ready for him.”

Knowing that his students were mostly Nisei and Sansei (third-generation) boys who had come out of Topaz Relocation Center in Utah and other concentration camps, it was clear that Masaichiro wanted to instill a sense of pride in their Japanese heritage at a time when Japanese culture was deeply stigmatized. It seems to me that this was a conscious choice by our Issei progenitors to maintain our connection to Japan, despite the intense pressure to assimilate in the postwar era.

But speaking with other community members it seems that the Marumotos were somewhat of an anomaly. Especially among families who endured the wartime incarceration, it is more common to hear stories where people consciously attempted to assimilate. Some became Christian converts, others joined the military, and some people married into white families. Like my family, some people also maintained a kind of cultural connection, but typically stopped speaking the Japanese language in their homes and gradually lost touch with that aspect of the culture.

My Sansei mother along with her siblings and cousins were not encouraged to speak Japanese. Among my extended relatives who grew up in densely populated Japanese American communities like Orange County and Sacramento California, and Eugene Oregon, nearly all of them maintained a connection to Japanese food culture and Buddhist tradition. Even if they do not attend temple regularly, most of my cousins take their kids to the Obon festival. My older cousins who grew up when Masaichiro was still alive all practiced Judo, and almost all of us learned a few key Japanese recipes from my Hibaachan.

Growing up in 1990s rural-suburban Connecticut where my Mom and sister were the only other Japanese Americans in our town of 18,000 people was pretty difficult to maintain a meaningful connection to our Japanese heritage. Throughout much of childhood and adolescence I experienced an incredible amount of anti-Japanese racism from both peers and adults. This caused a negative association with my Japanese heritage, as it was constantly pointed out to me as a weakness to overcome, rather than the strength that I now embrace.

I knew that Asako – my Hibaachan, supported my interest in our Japanese heritage. Every time we visited her Utah home she would sit me down in front of the television and show me the samurai chanbara dramas where Japanese men were the heroes and romantic leads. A stark contrast to the Long Duk Dongs and Short Rounds from the Hollywood of my youth. Our shared love of Japanese Cinema is what led me to pursue a career in the arts.

But as Japanese popular culture became mainstreamed over the past several decades, I found it difficult to reconcile the cultural popularity with my experiences in childhood. By the early 2000s I had distanced myself from Japanese culture as my peers celebrated the same cultural trends (sushi, martial arts, video games, and anime) that I had been belittled for in childhood. I maintained an interest in our family history, but there was little that I could relate to directly in the contemporary images I saw of Japan.  

When Hibaachan died in 2006, I began to question whether I was still Japanese. She was our direct link to Japan, the matriarch of our Japanese American family, a living embodiment of the struggle our people had endured in her tiny 4-foot-10 frame, frail and crooked from a lifetime of stoop labor yet stronger than I will ever be. I went to Japan to see how much of the world she described to me still existed.

It took two years for my plans to materialize, but in the summer of 2008, I moved to Kyoto and began a Japanese language intensive program at Kyoto University of the Arts. There, I learned enough conversational Japanese to navigate daily life in Japan, as I spent the next semester living in Tokyo studying at Temple University Japan Campus. After that experience, I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Japan Studies and had the opportunity to live in Kyoto again during the summer of 2010 while conducting research for my master’s thesis.

When I decided to live in Japan and learn Japanese, I was trying to prove to myself that despite being mixed race and not having grown up speaking the language, I was Japanese enough to have a meaningful relationship to my ancestral culture. Instead I found that I was Japanese American, as I gained the perspective necessary to identify the many elements of my upbringing that were both Japanese and Japanese American. It took living in Japanese society for me to discern the nuance between these two, sometimes contradictory, cultural influences.

As a mixed race Yonsei, most people in Japan do not identify me as Japanese, a reality that I understood prior to living there. Still I found myself grappling with my identity as a result of my time in Japan. For Japanese Americans who have spent time living in both the US and Japan, the knowledge that we will never be fully accepted in either country contributes to our complicated relationship with Japanese identity.  

Despite the new questions this experience raised about my sense of belonging in Japan, I was able to embrace my identity as a Japanese American. As a result, the last fifteen years of my life have been and incredible journey to better understand what that means. In that time, I have become deeply involved with the Japanese American Citizens League and other Japanese American activist groups like Tsuru for Solidarity and Tadaima Virtual Pilgrimage. Additionally, because of my experience living and studying in Japan, I have deepened my knowledge and appreciation of Japanese culture in ways that have profoundly enriched my life in the years since returning to the States.

I do not mean to minimize the impact of institutional white supremacy and internalized racism that accompanies the intergenerational trauma preventing many incarceration descendants from pursuing an education in Japanese language or culture. These are very real challenges that our community continues to grapple with on a daily basis as Japanese Americans navigate our conditional acceptance within mainstream America. I also acknowledge that my experience is specific to me as a mixed-race white-passing Yonsei who benefits from immense privilege in even being able to study in Japan in the first place. However, I share my story to suggest that many within our community may also be grappling with the fear of being perceived as “not enough” and I would like to encourage other Sansei-plus generations of Japanese Americans to push through that and find your own way to enjoy a meaningful connection with contemporary Japan.

Although difficult at times to reconcile the stigmatized past with the normalized present, Japanese Americans share a pride in our common ancestry. How that manifests currently, and to what extent these traditions will be carried into the future depend greatly on our ability to overcome our negative associations with Japanese cultural practice.

As a new generation emerges, we have an opportunity to instill a sense of pride in being Japanese American once more. That is why I gave my Gosei son his Japanese middle name - Masaki, and why I am teaching him to speak a language that I do not fully understand myself. Whether he chooses to identify as Japanese in the future or not is up to him. But he will be given a choice to embrace the culture of our ancestors, knowing the sacrifices they made that enable him to do so.