“What’s this pile of mail?” Dr. Hashikin asked Linda one day. “I thought we were sending our six-month reminders on postcards,” he remarked, flipping through the envelopes.
Linda said sheepishly, “These are all x-rays from our files, requested by patients changing to other dentists—” She bit her lip. Lately, every day, she got calls for x-rays and records.
“Bob Kono? Who’s he gone over to? Uba? What’s happening here? I put in his bridge, and I did all that gold work. Cheryl Miyamura too? I’m the one who got her to stop sucking her thumb! What’s got into everyone?”
Linda shrugged. A few months before, she had patients signed up for an appointment at least six months in advance. Now she could squeeze in anyone, if there was anyone, tomorrow or any other day. The calendar looked like a war zone of cancellations. Still, it wasn’t as if Dr. Hashikin had been oblivious to the gradual decay of his once-healthy practice. He himself had observed the tiny cavity and the pockets indicating the inception of pyorrhea. He knew the source of the problem, but he wouldn’t treat it, as if the excellence of Candy’s method would somehow brush everything away.
There was another reason Dr. Hashikin ignored his crumbling business, a reason he couldn’t quite admit to himself. He had begun, after the initial trauma of rejection, to listen in on Candy’s sessions. In the beginning, he would sneak surreptitiously into the corridor and pretend to look at x-rays outside her door, but, after a while, he merely leaned against the wall outside her room, rubbed his sore jaw, and eavesdropped.
It wasn’t as if the patient having his or her teeth cleaned said much of anything. They only had to sit there comfortably, their legs propped up and their minds tilted gently into the headrest. It was Candy who did all the talking. In fact, she talked so much that it had occurred to Dr. Hashikin that she might be too hoarse to say anything to him at the end of the day. The content of her monologues was as varied as the patients who frequented the office, and it was this content that began to attract and preoccupy Dr. Hashikin like a Hershey bar to a sweet tooth.
“I guess you don’t like the magazines Dr. Hashikin has in the waiting room,” Dr. Hashikin would hear Candy say. “He used to get the big issues of Vogue, but Betty must have canceled her subscription. You used to steal those big issues. Now all he has is Newsweek and Time.”
Dr. Hashikin caught sight of wide-eyed Mrs. Miura, her mouth gaping despite the necessity for it to be open anyway.
Candy scraped away with the scaler and continued, “Did you hear Dr. Hashikin and Betty are getting a divorce?”
This was news to Dr. Hashikin.
“Something about some dental hygienist!” Candy laughed. Mrs. Miura nearly choked.
“But,” Candy added, probing a sensitive area beneath the gums, “I suppose you thought about divorcing Joe years ago when he was alive. But it wasn’t like now where everyone gets divorced, and Joe didn’t do too bad. I mean, he didn’t make as much as Dr. Hashikin does, but at least he left you a pension.” Candy babbled on to Mrs. Miura, who looked blanched with surprise. “The girls don’t understand that. I mean, how you miss their dad even though you bitched and complained all those years. It’s hard to make anyone believe you really miss Joe since you never seemed to appreciate him when he was alive …”
It was Mrs. Miura who had burst into tears in Dr. Hashikin’s office, which came as no surprise, considering the tender subject broached by Candy. Joe Miura had died only last year, and even Dr. Hashikin had thought Mrs. Miura was faking her mourning. No one gave Mrs. Miura much sympathy because they had pitied poor Joe and thought Mrs. Miura had nagged her husband to death. Poor Mrs. Miura. All of a sudden Dr. Hashikin realized what a lonely and frustrated woman she was, and he was sorry he didn’t have any more Vogues for her to steal.
Then there was Gary Kozawa. He was a young man in his thirties, extremely successful and self-assured. He was an accountant and sped around in a BMW. Dr. Hashikin could hear Candy buzzing in with the prophy angle to polish his nice, straight teeth. He had been coming to Dr. Hashikin ever since he had had braces in high school. Candy pressed the paste to Gary’s teeth and said, “You heard from your mom about Dr. Hashikin’s dental hygienist too, didn’t you? Now you wonder how Dr. Hashikin could be interested in such a woman. You’d never get involved with your secretary, for example. That would be too tacky. You have to keep up appearances. Still, you wonder what would be cool to do when you’re in your fifties.”
The young man started to pop out of his seat. “What the—”
But Candy pressed him gently back and continued her application of prophy paste. “Of course, your fiancée, Janet—your ex-fiancée, that is—was only an administrative assistant at TRW. What a low blow. You had the wedding invitations all set up, and Janet pulls a fast one—day before the wedding, she calls it all off. Just like that. You had relatives coming in from all over. Your mom threw a fit.”
Gary was actually foaming at the mouth.
Candy went on, sloshing down the paste and generously squirting the teeth with water. “Now you’re making payments on that condo she wanted, and she never returned the Porsche. I mean, she returned the ring, but she kept the Porsche. Let her keep the Porsche! I wonder if she returned all those shower gifts. You keep trying to make everyone think it was Janet’s fault, like she was an opportunist or something. But you can’t buy a woman. No matter how much money you make, accountants are boring.”
Gary Kozawa spit out the foaming water and burst into the corridor, running into Dr. Hashikin, whose cheeks were puffed up with suppressed laughter. Even Betty had thought Gary was the most eligible bachelor in Gardena, but Dr. Hashikin hadn’t been impressed. Dr. Hashikin thought Gary was egotistical.
Gary screamed a flood of epithets at Candy and Dr. Hashikin. It was the first time he had lost his cool. He hadn’t even let himself get mad the weekend of his wedding, self-consciously aware of what others might think. Gary had been so worried about what others thought, he had forgotten what he actually thought himself—that he really wasn’t that wonderful and that he lost Janet because he couldn’t tell her, in the simplest way, without worrying about the way he said it and who overheard, that he loved her.
Candy made no attempt to defend herself, watching silently as Gary stomped out of the office. Dr. Hashikin looked out the window down onto the parking lot. He could see Gary slamming his BMW over the humps in the lot, the paper bib still fastened under his chin.
Every day, Dr. Hashikin could expect to hear everything, from whose kids were on drugs and cohabiting to the minute details of how the children of one of his dead friends had squabbled over and divided the inheritance. It was as if the entire network of gossip in Gardena reverberated through his office, its singular mouthpiece being his dental hygienist, Candy Yuasa. But Dr. Hashikin discovered that whatever the gossip out there in Gardena might be, Candy usually homed in on the truth, the simple, sometimes painful, sometimes silly, but always simple truth. It was for this reason Dr. Hashikin didn’t ask Candy to leave; it would’ve been against his sense of justice, and besides, he was enjoying himself too much.
Dr. Hashikin was at a loss trying to explain the phenomenon. It was something about the touch of Candy’s curette on the nerves of one’s mouth. But as informative and entertaining as Dr. Hashikin found the sessions, it couldn’t last forever. Obviously, people didn’t come to dentists to have their deepest secrets spoken to them as if they had been prerecorded, and few people, even though they felt relieved by the mental hygiene of Candy’s technique, wanted to be subjected to it every six months. Many people felt disturbed and afraid, and others were downright disdainful, assuming Dr. Hashikin’s dental hygienist was blabbering these personal things to everyone and anyone who sat under her scaler. Dr. Hashikin ran his tongue over his sore molars. The truth was that no one wanted to hear the truth, and the lips of Dr. Hashikin’s practice were now sinking into their toothless gums.
Dr. Hashikin still took his normal golfing days on Wednesdays. His
colleagues heckled him at first for putting a strain on their businesses. “We have all we can take. We can’t handle your patients too,” they complained at first. But after a while, his friends became seriously concerned. “If it’s that hygienist, get rid of her,” they flatly suggested.
Dr. Hashikin couldn’t explain it. It was too preposterous. Even the gossip about his divorce was more probable than this malarkey about tapping the roots of one’s conscience.
Harry peered into Dr. Hashikin’s mouth. “If it’s been bothering you this long, why haven’t you had it looked into before?” Harry scraped along the left molars, looking askance through his bifocals.
Dr. Hashikin shrugged. “I asked Linda to take x-rays. They didn’t show a thing.”
“There’s nothing here I can see,” Harry agreed. “But you ought to get ’em cleaned.”
Dr. Hashikin went back to his empty practice. Linda looked up with a start to see someone come through the door.
He strode into Candy’s room and plopped himself on her chair. “I need my teeth cleaned,” he announced.
Candy quietly dressed her boss in a bib for the ordeal. She ran through her normal procedure. For the first time, Dr. Hashikin felt the same fear so many of his patients felt facing his drill. But it was painless. The skillful hands worked quickly and delicately.
“You’ve lived all your life in this community, given your time and talents to these people. In return, you’ve raised a family and won respect, somewhat tarnished at this point, but …” Candy paused and adjusted the overhead light. “It’s not that dentistry was a bad choice. There weren’t many choices in those days. But you never really enjoyed the profession like some of the fellows. You always spent your evenings watching those animal shows like Wild, Wild World of Animals and the National Geographic specials on the New Guinea aborigines. The year you went to Japan with Betty was a revelation. You never wanted to come back to Gardena after that, but you did.”
Dr. Hashikin stared into Candy’s eyes in amazement. It had never been put so simply.
Candy spread the prophy paste and let the little rubber tip spin. “Now that your responsibilities have been fulfilled to your children and to hundreds of mouths all over Gardena, you can do what you’ve always dreamed of.”
Dr. Hashikin smiled. Years of care and irresolution had somehow emptied into the hygienist’s mouth. In one simple moment, she had squirted away the uncomfortable ache in his lower left molar. He tore off his bib, sat up suddenly, walked confidently away from his practice, and drove home.
Betty looked up from her weeding. She was pulling the dandelions out of the dichondra on the front lawn.
“Betty,” Dr. Hashikin blurted out. “Are we getting a divorce?”
“No.” She shook her head and removed her garden gloves. She looked up at her husband sheepishly. “I had my teeth cleaned,” she admitted.
“That’s good! That’s good! That’s great!” Dr. Hashikin roared over the quiet and meticulous Japanese American landscape. He shoved Betty, still in her shorts and size-five Nikes, into the car. Betty adjusted her L.A. Olympics sun visor; Dr. Hashikin pulled down the flip-top shades on his glasses and stepped on the gas, whistling past the mouth of Gardena, leaving the movement-sensitive bells sweetly ding-donging behind forever.
A Gentlemen’s Agreement
I am the granddaughter, and Lucio is the grandson. Our photographs are a curious reflection of a time we didn’t live in, of a past filtered to us through memories. We suspect and crave a continuum, but we can know neither the things that drew the eyes beyond the photograph’s flat surface, nor the inner focus of the mind’s eye. We imagine we are seen or dreamed of. We imagine the youth of our grandparents reaches toward us, invokes our respect, guides, condemns, or destines. We imagine.
In 1907, the U.S. and Japanese governments signed a gentlemen’s agreement to exclude Japanese immigrant laborers from the United States. In the following year, the first contingent—a boat load of some eight hundred Japanese—arrived at the Port of Santos to begin their contracts on coffee plantations in the state of São Paulo. Moving toward the twenties and subsequent U.S. Exclusion Acts, Japanese immigration to the U.S. dropped off as immigration to Brazil grew. While the U.S. came to house a Meiji-era generation of Japanese immigrants from a Japan somewhat wonderstruck by its opening to the West, Brazil began to house the succeeding generation of the eras of Taisho and Showa*—a time of expanding industries, spheres of political influence, and nationalism. While the dream of the Americas confronting reality would indeed shape emigrant experiences, Japan’s national self-perception and its relationship to the West at the time must have molded the way each era of emigrants approached the task of leaving home. While Meiji Japanese coming to the U.S. seemed to set about their purpose with respectful endurance, carefully corralling their children toward good behavior, Taisho and Showa immigrants to Brazil were perhaps more aggressive in their construction of insular colonies that replaced virgin forests, their frank disdain of the Brazilian peasantry, and their Japanese nationalism.
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* Japanese historic eras are designated by the lifetime of emperors, i.e., Emperor Meiji, 1868–1911; Emperor Taisho, 1912–1925; Emperor Showa (Hirohito), 1926–1989.
In 1975, I met Lucio Kubo in São Paulo, Brazil. He was a recent philosophy graduate of the University of São Paulo. He had long hair, a scroungy goatee, bell-bottom jeans—the symbols of the time. He surprised me with his knowledge of classical Japanese, French poets, and American jazz, and with his supple and sympathetic mind, his bright wit, and his Brazilian cynicism. Someone told me Lucio was raised and spoiled by his grandmother; it was she who taught him to read Japanese poetry. Other Brazilian nisei couldn’t boast of such a formal Japanese education. His friends nicknamed him Shogun.
The four women pictured here were all Meiji-born before the turn of the century and within a decade of each other. Two came from the cultural centers of Tokyo and Kyoto, two from smaller cities in Aichi and Nagano. They were born into a Japan opening to the West, making the transition from a peasant to an industrial society. The transition would be both dramatic and devastating. This opening was also the homeland’s implied blessing to leave, to explore the world, to attempt one’s fortune in distant places, to alleviate the burden of this transition and the poverty of its people. The four women pictured would all leave their homes and settle in a new world. Two would make their homes in the U.S. just before that gentlemen’s agreement, and some two decades later—a time poised between a worldwide depression and a second world war—two would make their homes in Brazil. But none of them planned to leave Japan. These plans were in the stars, in the minds of men, in gentlemen’s agreements.
When I left L.A. and that enclave of Japanese Americans in Gardena, California, I didn’t know who my counterparts in Brazil might be. I imagined my sansei friends with a Latin feeling. Instead I met a younger Japanese immigration and a generation my age who called themselves nisei, who spoke of integration, of their larger participation in a Brazilian nation, and of the necessity to become respected professionals. I had the strange sensation of meeting my parents’ generation in their youth. What was sansei? I was a figment of their imaginations. I had arrived in a time machine; and yet, I hadn’t. I had only come from up north. I was American, and every middle-class person on earth seems to know what that means.
Tomi
Tomi Murakami Yamashita (Oakland, 1901)
The woman with the bird on her head and the boa around her neck is my paternal grandmother, Tomi Murakami Yamashita. A poster-sized reproduction of this photograph was once displayed in the window of Bushnell’s photography shop in Oakland around 1901, shortly after my grandmother arrived in the United States. That a recent Japanese immigrant could attire herself in the Western flamboyance of turn-of-the-century San Francisco says a good deal about my grandmother—that she was beautiful and thought so, and that she was proud, extravagant, and daring—a description of her that remained
true until she died in her late eighties. What I loved about my grandmother was that she had guts.
Perhaps a part of her pride came from her upbringing in the urban center of Tokyo. She came from a family of swordsmiths and samurai, and it’s said that her mother was a kind of social magnet for artistic and intellectual sorts. Tomi was a convert to Christianity, a Meiji woman with urban tastes and enthusiasm for the West.
When my grandfather, Kishiro Yamashita—a dapper, well-dressed tailor and graduate of the Mitchell Cutting School in New York—appeared with a proposal of marriage and a home in California, she was perhaps only nineteen years old. Tomi and Kishiro came to Oakland and established Yokohama Tailor, catering to the needs of stylish Japanese men in the community.
Tomi was a seamstress in her own right; she patented and reproduced in small quantities a belted contraption called the Abdominal Supporter for pregnant woman. Preserving one’s feminine figure must have always been a concern for Tomi, a mother of seven; even at the end of her life, she wore a corset to improve her figure.
Tomi may have had a flair for fashion, but she was never above hard work. When Kishiro died in 1931, the tailor shop closed. Tomi found work in a local sewing shop and later opened Mayfair Cleaners, taking in laundry and cleaning for wholesale businesses and doing custom alterations and pressing. Her work supported the family through the Great Depression and helped pay off debts until 1942, when the family was forced to relocate to a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.
Perhaps it was because she was long-lived, and the details of Kishiro’s life vague and distant, that Tomi became what all of us in her family believed her to be: a matriarch. And yet this photograph, in which she may have only been twenty years of age, defines her in that role in a manner none of us can forget.
Sansei and Sensibility Page 4