Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  If, like Asako, I live to ninety-eight, I could maybe be the last sansei. House me in any international museum that’s a swooping architectural extravaganza, preferably with water and glass and spectacular views and height, and surround me with handlers who invent exotic cocktails and precious gourmet fusion tapas; wash my body and hair in lavender oils; perform the nostalgic and the rude in arts and music. Just make sure I die in sweet sleep, and you can have my brain too.

  Ishi, using your ideas of surrealist juxtapositions, I contemplate here a world war that ended in two atomic bombs, the utter devastation of Japan, and a legacy of atrocities. Then, a Japan that emerges into the Cold War alongside Benedict’s reconstitution of feudal practices, practices lifted in part from a Japanese tribe and their descendants who got pickled in segregated communities in the rice vinegar of Meiji Japan and American democracy. All right, I’m overstating the Japanese American role in Benedict’s thesis, because I’m amused by the idea that my folks could have been the fodder for a kinder, gentler Zen interpretation of the inscrutable Japanese. What about the industrial revolution, the zaibatsu and yakuza, my grandparents who were encouraged to emigrate to pay rural debts, to colonize a greater Asia, to provide for the national infrastructure as international human bridges? Does it matter that Japan had become modern, required resources to drive its modernity, required military power to assert its right to those resources?

  Homer asserts that the idea of God made the modern world possible. The authority of a universal Western god created the possibilities or perhaps the arrogance of discovery and investigation. But it wasn’t just the West; the consequences of progress were played out in three Nipponic eras—Meiji, Taisho, Showa—from military and technological prowess to the experiment of nuclear extinction; a people got bombed back into their stone age. What idea of God, even if oriental, was here present? Benedict suggests that what empowered imperial edicts was not belief in the emperor as a living god but belief in rituals of obligation and loyalty. It was the difference between feeling guilty about sin committed against God and feeling shame over one’s conduct in God’s presence. Homer might say that any idea of God has consequences that are possibly dangerous.

  Tomi was proud to be modern and a Christian, and, having sent her two oldest children to be educated in Japan, she must have had hopes for the future. Either she hoped to return to Japan or she believed that her children would truly be a bridge to the West. I wonder if, for Tomi, the idea of a modern world made a Christian god possible. Tomi became converted to Christianity in the United States through her exposure to examples of kindness, but there was also a community built by Japanese Christians in Oakland at the West Tenth Methodist Church. She and other issei women gathered together to found their own kind of social powerhouse. Meiji modernity and emigration gave these women power. You see these widowed ladies posed together in photographs, in pressed Sunday dresses with gloves and hats, gripping their matching purses, and Asako chuckles, Those ladies ran everything. They were a force to contend with. Japan’s gift to an Oakland God.

  Tomi’s second son Hiroshi was a rascal. At some point, Tomi also gave him the name John. I asked my dad about this, since it was assumed he was named after John the Baptist, but it turns out that Tomi went to the cinema and saw a movie in which a bandit sees the light and is converted to goodness. Tomi may have felt desperate, but my dad said to me, I was named after a bandito. At a young age, he climbed to the top of a fence, jumped off, and broke his hip, the long healing of which kept him in crutches and took him in and out of the Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children. In one story, Aimee Semple McPherson set up her Pentecostal revival tent somewhere in town. Tomi took seven-year-old John to that tent, and he hobbled out without his crutches. Hallelujah, as they say. The doctors were furious, John remembered. We had to buy new crutches.

  The crutches, the stiff bum leg soldered to the hip, never seemed to stop John, who was known to bat the ball, then scuttle around the bases, likely using his crutches to some defensive advantage. Physical disadvantage never seemed to bother him; he never complained, never made excuses. He knew himself to have a brilliant mind, but I believe his particular brilliance was his capacity for empathy, the bright reach of his capacious social intelligence.

  John was accepted at several institutions: Boston University Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Drew Theological School in New Jersey; however, delayed by military and FBI bureaucracy from leaving camp and beleaguered by scarce resources, he would settle for Garrett, the alma mater of his Oakland mentor and protector, Frank Herron Smith, missionary to Japan and Korea and superintendent of the Japanese Methodist Mission. Twenty miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, Evanston was an upscale and tidy college town known for its strict temperance laws and the Methodists who founded Northwestern University, Garrett Biblical Institute, and five local churches. Arguably, of all the locations John might have landed, it was the most conservative. In the first months after his arrival in Evanston in 1943, John wrote back to the family at Topaz:

  I talked to George Matsuyama who . . . stated that his camp visit was like a strange dream. Well, with me it’s the other way around; this school is yet the dream and my mind keeps wandering back to camp. Whenever I speak to groups and people about the camp I am so intense in my description that they look at me very curiously . . . at school here they all know about the camp because of a large FOR group here and sympathetically express that it’s a bad situation and keep giving me cheerful notes; they always introduce me as one who has just come from an internment camp and I’m a sort of curio.

  Initially he must have felt a responsibility to speak about the camps, and his letters evoke a hectic schedule of speaking engagements, intense coursework, dishwashing, and co-op work to support his studies and dorm residency. By the next year, he retreated into what he justified in his letters as the ivory tower of intellectual solitude; however, I believe that he was silently blacklisted from speaking or offering sermons to the white congregations in the area. His missives to his family seem always upbeat and conscientious, working diligently on his end to create an opening for nisei resettlement into Chicago, but what I sense generally was his absence and psychic solitude. While I cannot say I understand the theological questions of his coursework, I am struck by a lack of intellectual excitement or enthusiasm, the irrelevance of theological questions in the context of war and internment, and the absence of mentorship. I may be wrong about this. John’s papers reflect a repeated concern with the validation of faith in the gospel of Jesus’s charity and the miracle of his resurrection. If John needed a miracle, so do I. Still, the record of John’s presence at Garrett in those years seems to amount to a notation of his divinity degree and that he was a member of the Dempster League, responsible for activities under the heading of World Fellowship.

  Also curious is the absence of administrative files from the war years in the school’s archive. While every other year in Horace Greeley Smith’s tenure as president from 1932 to 1953 is meticulously saved, no wartime correspondence from 1941 to 1944 exists. No correspondence from Frank Herron Smith or from John Nason or Joseph Conard representing Nisei Student Relocation; nothing about the surveillance of conscientious objectors, enrolled students eventually arrested by the FBI; and nothing about the community controversy over the lease of Professor Frank McKibben’s Evanston home on the corner of Asbury and Noyes.

  At the end of February 1944, Chizu and Ed made plans to leave temporary resettlement farm work in Idaho to join brothers John and Tom in Evanston. Edwin Kitow was a Stanford engineering graduate, born in Japan but having lived since the age of eight in California. He and Chizu had built a profitable produce company in Calexico, in the Imperial Valley at the Mexican frontier. At the outbreak of the war, this business in cantaloupes and lettuce was thriving, but John was the absentee corporate signator of the business since Ed was a Japanese national ineligible for citizenship. Chizu recounted to me that in the prewar they
were doing so well that Ed bought her a three-month trip to Japan, a full-length fur coat—useless in Calexico—and a Cadillac, which she drove back and forth across California to visit the family. Chizu was a registered nurse and president of the PTA in Calexico. Unlike others in the salvage, the Kitows probably had means to start a new life in another place. They decided to move to Evanston to be near John. Professor Frank McKibben, who taught at Garrett Seminary, offered to lease his home to the Kitows during his sabbatical. It was an elegant six-bedroom, three-story house that could shelter the three Kitows, bachelor brothers John and Tom, and eventually mother Tomi.

  Tom, having graduated the University of Nebraska, had moved to Chicago for an engineering job. He wrote to Kay:

  No luck as far as housing goes. The 6 room flat which was lined up fell through and we went through the same agony again. The owner was willing and so were the immediate neighbors but one of the influential ladies in that district objected and wouldn’t even give us a chance to talk to her. She has 4 sons in the South Pacific and threatened to get the rest of the neighborhood aroused . . .

  Professor McKibben himself wrote a letter to the editor of a local Evanston newspaper telling a further story—that a neighborhood meeting was convened at the McKibben household and that among those present were Reverend Ernest F. Tittle of the Evanston First Methodist Church; Professor Rockwell Smith, who sponsored John’s project, A Study of a War Relocation Community; and the President of Garrett Biblical Institute himself, Horace Greeley Smith. McKibben states that, because of the hostility of the crowd against comment from those outside the neighborhood, these prominent men did not speak. If you visit the neighborhood, you realize that Garrett Seminary is only blocks from this house, that it is indeed within the neighborhood and part of its community, and you wonder also that a local minister to that same neighborhood could not speak, as McKibben suggests, in opposition to any doctrine of racial superiority and in support of the real meaning of the Four Freedoms.

  This is an event I heard retold by the family on numerous occasions. It marks, I believe, the end of any naïve relationship to a liberal church and reveals the environment of John’s invisibility during those years. I have not had to create a fiction here to retell this story. If you google the other names in McKibben’s letter, their prestige and scholarship, especially as Far East Asian pundits and missionaries, bubble to the screen. Did they not have a moral responsibility as religious leaders and missionaries? Their silence may have been golden or tactful as perhaps the frustrated McKibbon makes their apology, but as anthropologist Benedict advises regarding shaming a Japanese, my revenge will be virtuous.

  In order to accelerate his graduation from Garrett, John took courses during the summer months. By February 14, 1945, he was on a train, en route Coach Challenger, back to visit the almost defunct camp Topaz, then on to Oakland to reopen the Oakland West Tenth Church. Arriving six months before the official end of the war, he must have been among the first Japanese Americans to return home. Appearing like an apparition on Oakland streets, he ducked into the old church to receive his violent welcome home: the crack of gunshots, ricochet of bullets. This story about gunshots might be apocryphal; it wasn’t one of those stories repeated like family lore. I heard it from my sister who remembers hearing it only once from John. You know Dad, she said. Said he was shot at and then laughed. No big deal. Even thirty years after the war, still holding responsibility for the character of his role as upbeat and steady counselor, John would seek to suppress the negative and sensational.

  The church had been filled with the left-behind belongings of evacuees, boarded shut during the war, and assiduously guarded by a friend of the church, Lee Mullis, and his father. John began acquiring cots and blankets and turned the church into a hostel to receive the residue of returning folks, many now homeless, all fearful and skeptical about their future. Despite the pained and angry resentment of the returnees, John kept seriously on task and was mostly joyous. Indeed, in his train letter approaching Cheyenne, John advised Kay to

  feel independent and seek the situation which makes for the most peaceful now and in regards to the future . . . be ready to take off where your heart calls and interests lie. Don’t let circumstances shape your affairs too much . . . In the change learned much and saw more. I maintain in America we have a women’s world—They have the initiative to make up men’s minds for them . . . I say all is adventure and more adventure and if you don’t want it—then don’t venture forth in faith, but be content with things as they are . . . Here’s to you for new worlds to be.

  John

  Here then was the incorrigible and cheerful romantic who refused to be diminished by the war, by any idea of salvage or shame, who returned home to push open old church doors, to sort through and put to new use the stored artifacts of lives left behind.

  Dear Ishi:

  I suppose I could have named you Margaret Mead or even Ruth Benedict, but I wanted a connection, like Homer, to deep storytelling. As you warn, I may be taken to task for this blasphemy, but as we are told, Ishi was not really the name of the last Yahi in California; it was the name he accepted in his new life as artifact or perhaps in the sense of John’s being a curio out of camp, the old life lost forever.

  You appreciate the idea that forced internment coupled with the anthropological framing of wartime studies conspired to create the social conditions for the collective psyche of a people who, forced to perform loyalty, assimilation, and modeled-ness, became loyal and assimilated and modeled in order to survive. But, very perceptively, you also ask about refusal and resistance, what people kept for themselves in order not to change, to maintain independence, or to refuse outright, those declaring no-no and renouncing American citizenship. This outright refusal is a longer and very crucial history that cannot be contained in this project, but the substance of resistance is perhaps what I am attempting here to draw out or at least to complicate. As our story goes, the Yamashita family closed ranks under a united banner of yes-yes, but the two eldest siblings, Susumu and Kimi, were kibei, educated and raised in Japan. Sus in particular worked for Mitsubishi and was likely always under surveillance. Sus’s allegiances were no doubt divided, but as the eldest son and head of family, he was in no position to resist. With the notice for evacuation, the extended family moved into his home in Oakland in order to be evacuated together. Chiz and Ed with their young son Kix drove across California from Calexico to crowd into that small house. What Sus felt, he kept to himself, but the story is that at war’s end, Sus shaved away his thin mustache as, perhaps, a small sign to himself.

  You take umbrage with my desire for virtuous revenge over the failure of church elders in Evanston to support the short-term rental of Professor McKibben’s house to Chiz and Ed. I admit I do not believe in revenge as virtuous in the sense of honorably justified; I am only needling Benedict. But perhaps it’s possible to word-play with the virtuosity of justice, a desire for fluency and change of heart. You read the McKibben letter as very fair, that silence in this case would have been tactful, and you question what outsiders could have done in this situation. You feel my critique of liberal Christianity needs unpacking and complication. Frank McKibben’s letter, I too believe, was fair and measured, and McKibben himself is a small hero in this story, but why would he have named the outside persons who came to moderate or to witness this meeting? For me, naming these illustrious men was to call attention to their presence and their fear. But there is also the family—Chizu who kept this yellowed newspaper clipping all these years and Kix, her son, who saved it as well. I feel it is fair to report the oral storytelling that became a part of the family outrage and served as a backdrop to John’s sadness and muddled scholarship in Evanston. But it is also for this reason that Caleb Foote and the Quakers are a part of this story, because they refused to be silenced. And that perhaps is my larger question: Why?

  Sincerely yours,

  LETTERS TO

  Love

  Dear Vyasa:
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  One day, I received a telephone call from you. In those years, I was working at the television station; how did you find me in those dark ages before cyber? Perhaps you wrote to me through my publisher, and appropriately we corresponded. You were editing a book about Asians in the Americas. Would I contribute something about Japanese in Brazil? I was amazed and gratified. You were among a half-dozen American scholars interested in the subject, but unlike the specificity of most academic scholarship, you were expansive in your reach, casting your net across the entire hemisphere, across any genre of cultural production that could be represented in a book, and encompassing the diaspora from the broadest possible geography that might define Asia, from Lebanon to Japan. In one book, you reclaimed the halving of the world—north and south, old and new, occident and orient, first and third—by twisting the globe in a crisscross of human migrations. Your vision was expansive in your desire for inclusion—amateur and professional, academic and layperson, matured and youthful—all would be given voice. I realize that is why we met; you sought me out on a hunch, that some obscure writer hidden in the engineering department of a television station might have something to say.

  It must have been years later that we actually met face-to-face for Chinese lunch. You invited another guest, a Chinese American scholar. None of us had ever met. You arranged what you call a contrapuntal meeting to create a beginning of some possibility. Three American women from multiple diasporas—Chinese, South Asian, Japanese—met over tea and tofu and created a new space of knowing. This day stays in your memory because, as you confessed later, you went home with an MSG attack. You might have been tricked by the sensation of dying, but if it’s any consolation, memorable for me was learning to value the surprise of the contrapuntal.