“It doesn’t mean anything,” Dad would say. “It’s just a name!” which would cause Ma to recoil in horror. “How you can say Justa name? Name is very first thing. Name is face to all the world.”
“Jane” represents their despair at ever reaching an interesting compromise.
In spite of the Little, my dad was a tall man, and I am just under six feet myself. In Japan this makes me a freak. After living there for a while, I simply gave up trying to fit in: I cut my hair short, dyed chunks of it green, and spoke in men’s Japanese. It suited me. Poly-sexual, polyracial, perverse, I towered over the sleek, uniform heads of commuters on the Tokyo subway. Ironically, the real culture shock occurred when I left Japan and moved here to New York, to the East Village. Suddenly everyone looked weird, just like me.
Being racially “half”—neither here nor there—I was uniquely suited to the niche I was to occupy in the television industry. I was hired by Kato to be a coordinator for My American Wife!, the TV series that would bring the “heartland of America into the homes of Japan.” Although my heart was set on being a documentarian, it seems I was more useful as a go-between, a cultural pimp, selling off the vast illusion of America to a cramped population on that small string of Pacific islands.
As a coordinator, I was part of the production team that shot fifty-two half-hour episodes of My American Wife! for the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate, or, simply, BEEF-EX. BEEF-EX was a national lobby organization that represented American meats of all kinds—beef, pork, lamb, goat, horse—as well as livestock producers, packers, purveyors, exporters, grain promoters, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness groups. They had their collective eye firmly fixed on Asia. BEEF-EX was the sole sponsor of our program, and its mandate was clear: “to foster among Japanese housewives a proper understanding of the wholesomeness of U.S. meats.”
This was how we did it: My American Wife! was a day-in-the-life type of documentary, each show featuring a housewife who could cook. My job description, according to Kato, went something like this:
“You must catch up healthy American wives with most delicious meats.”
His English was terrible, but I got the picture: Fingers twitching on the pole of a large net, I would prowl the freezer sections of food chains across the country, eyeing the unsuspecting housewives of America as they poked their fingers into plastic-wrapped flank steaks.
Travel, glamour, excitement it wasn’t. But during that year I visited every single one of the United States of America and shot in towns so small you could fit their entire dwindling populations in the back of an Isuzu pickup—towns not so different from Quam, Minnesota, where I grew up. I remembered the scene.
It all came back to me during a pancake breakfast in a VFW hall in Bald Knob, Arkansas.
It was our first shoot. I met my Japanese crew at the local airport. A brass band was playing when I arrived, and the ticket counters were decorated with proud banners of spangling stars and stalwart stripes. Yellow ribbons festooned the departure lounge, and Mylar balloons floated like flimsy planets over the cloudlike tresses of blond girls in pastel who had come to say good-bye.
At the center of all this effusion were the callow recruits, with brand-new crew cuts and bright-red ears, dressed in the still-unfamiliar pale of desert camouflage. Babies were pressed to their clean-shaven cheeks. Mothers’ breasts heaved like eager battleships, while the soldiers’ fingers lingered over ramparts of stone-washed thigh. Many tears were shed.
My Japanese team was shocked. Stumbling off a twenty-hour flight from Tokyo, jet-lagged and confused, they ran smack into Gulf War Fever. In modern-day Japan, militarism is treated like a sexual deviation—when you see perverts practicing it on the street, you ignore them, look the other way.
Then, at the pancake breakfast where we had been filming, a red-faced veteran from WWII drew a bead on me and my crew, standing in line by the warming trays, our plates stacked high with flapjacks and American bacon.
“Where you from, anyway?” he asked, squinting his bitter blue eyes at me.
“New York,” I answered.
He shook his head and glared and wiggled a crooked finger inches from my face. “No, I mean where were you born?”
“Quam, Minnesota,” I said.
“No, no ... What are you?” He whined with frustration.
And in a voice that was low, but shivering with demented pride, I told him, “I... am ... a ... fucking... AMERICAN!”
MEMO
TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: Tokyo Office
DATE: January 5, 1991
RE: My American Wife!
We at Tokyo Office wish you all have nice holiday season.
Now it is New Year and weather is frigid but we ask your hard work in making exciting My American Wife!. Let’s persevere with new
Program series!
Here is List of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!
DESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: “Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!”)
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house
7. Attractive friends & neighbors
8. Exciting hobbies
UNDESIRABLE THINGS:1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples
*** MOST IMPORTANT THING IS VALUES, WHICH MUST BE ALL-AMERICAN.
MEMO
TO: RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: JANE TAKAGI-LITTLE
DATE: JANUARY 6
RE: MY AMERICAN WIFE!
Just a quick note to clarify the memo from Tokyo. I spoke with Kato, the chief producer for the series, and told him that some of the points in the memo had offended the American staff. He is very concerned and has asked me to convey the following:
NOTE ON AMERICAN HUSBANDS—Japanese market studies show that Japanese wives often feel neglected by their husbands and are susceptible to the qualities of kindness, generosity, and sweetness that they see as typical of American men. Accordingly, our wives should have clean, healthy-Looking husbands who help with the cooking, washing up, housekeeping, and child care. The Agency running the BEEF-EX advertising campaign is looking to create a new truism: The wife who serves meat has a kinder, gentler mate.
NOTE ON RACE & CLASS—The reference to “second class peoples” does not refer to race or class. Kato does not want you to think that Japanese people are racist. However, market studies do show that the average Japanese wife finds a middle-to-upper-middle-class white American woman with two to three children to be both sufficiently exotic and yet reassuringly familiar. The Agency has asked us to focus on wives within these demographic specifications for the first couple of shows, just to get things rolling.
NOTE ON ALL-AMERICAN VALUES—Our ideal American wife must have enough in common with the average Japanese housewife so as not to appear either threatening or contemptible. My American Wife! of the ’90s must be a modern role model, just as her mother was a model to Japanese wives after World War II. However, nowadays, a spanking-new refrigerator or automatic can opener is not a “must.” In recent years, due to Japan’s “economic miracle,” the Japanese housewife is more accustomed to these amenities even than her American counterpart. The Agency thinks we must replace this emphasis on old-fashioned consumerism with contemporary wholesome values, represented not by gadgets for the wife’s sole convenience but by good, nourishing food for her entire family. And that means meat.
A final note:
The eating of meat in Japan is a relatively new custom. In the Heian Court, which ruled from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, it was certainly considered uncouth; due to the influences of Buddhism, meat was more than likely thought to be unclean. We know q
uite a bit about Japanese life then—at least the life of the court and the upper classes—thanks to the great female documentarians of that millennium, like Sei Shōnagon. She was the author of The Pillow Book, which contains detailed accounts of her life and her lovers, and one hundred sixty-four lists of things, such as:Splendid Things
Depressing Things
Things That Should Be Large
Things That Gain by Being Painted
Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster
Things That Cannot Be Compared
Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, wrote the following about Shonagon in her diary:Sei Shōnagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of hers that she so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections. Someone who makes such an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people’s esteem, and I can only think that her future will be a hard one.
Murasaki Shikibu scorned what she called Shōnagon’s “Chinese writings,” and this is why: Japan had no written language at all until the sixth century, when the characters were borrowed from Chinese. In Shonagon’s day, these bold characters were used only by men—lofty poets and scholars—while the women diarists, who were writing prose, like Murasaki and Shōnagon, were supposed to use a simplified alphabet, which was soft and feminine. But Shōnagon overstepped her bounds. From time to time, she wrote in Chinese characters. She dabbled in the male tongue.
Murasaki may not have liked her much, but I admire Shōnagon, listmaker and leaver of presumptuous scatterings. She inspired me to become a documentarian, to speak men’s Japanese, to be different. She is why I chose to make TV. I wanted to think that some girl would watch my shows in Japan, now or maybe even a thousand years from now, and be inspired and learn something real about America. Like I did.
During my Year of Meats, I made documentaries about an exotic and vanishing America for consumption on the flip side of the planet, and I learned a lot: For example, we didn’t even have cows in this country until the Spanish introduced them, along with cowboys. Even tumbleweed, another symbol of the American West, is actually an exotic plant called Russian thistle, that’s native not to America but to the wide-open steppes of Central Europe. All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.
Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we’re all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I’m feeling grand, I feel brand-new—like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad’s ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom’s on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.
2.
The Clothes-Lining Month
SHŌNAGON
When I Make Myself Imagine
When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands—women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are perfectly happy—I am filled with scorn.
AKIKO
“Rumpu rossuto,” Akiko repeated to herself. “Notto Pepsi pleezu.” She watched the television screen, where a sturdy American wife held an economy-size plastic bottle of Coca-Cola upside down over a roasting pan. The woman smiled broadly at Akiko, who automatically smiled back. The woman shook the bottle, disgorging its contents in rhythmic spurts onto the red “rumpu rossuto.” Under her breath, Akiko pronounced the words again. She liked the sounds, the parallel Japanese r’s, with their delicate flick of the tongue across the palate, and the plosive pu like a kiss or a fart in the middle of a big American dinner.
She liked the size of things American. Convenient. Economical. Big and simple. Like this wife with the “rumpu.” Impatient, she shook the bottle up and down, like a fretful infant unable to make its toy work. A close-up showed the plastic Coke bottle so large it made her fingers look childlike as she squeezed its soft sides. The camera traveled down the foamy brown waterfall of cola until it hit the meat, alive with shiny bubbles. The woman laughed. Her name was Suzie Flowers. What a beautiful name, thought Akiko. Suzie Flowers laughed easily, but Akiko was practicing how to do this too.
Now Suzie was opening a can with her electric can opener. Several children ran through the kitchen and Suzie good-naturedly chased them out with the spatula. Then, never missing a beat, she used the spatula to smear pale mushroom soup over the roast and pat its sides. Pat, pat, pat. She sprinkled the onion soup mix on top and popped it in the oven. Bake at 250° for 3 hours. Easy. Done.
Akiko was so thin her bones hurt. Her watch hung loosely around her wrist and its face never stayed on top. She spun it around and checked the time. The recipe was simple, and if she did her shopping in the morning she would have plenty of time to get to the market and back, marinate the meat, and cook it properly for three hours. She double-checked the ingredients that she had written down on her list and realized she should have a vegetable too. Canned peas, Suzie suggested. Easy. Done. Suzie bent over the oven. Her children pushed between her sturdy, mottled legs and hung off her hem. They must have just poured out, Akiko thought, one after the other, in frothy bursts of fertility. It was a disturbing thought, squalid somehow, and made her feel nauseous.
“It’s not spite,” Akiko muttered, chewing her lip, “or my contrary nature.” She tried a smile again at Suzie, tried to feel happy-go-lucky.
When her periods stopped coming, Akiko’s doctor had told her that her ovaries were starved and weren’t producing any eggs. Akiko’s husband, Joichi, was very upset. He told her that she must put some meat on her bones and he bought her a stack of cookbooks—Meats Made Easy, Refined Meat for the Japanese Palate, Delicate Meats, and The Meat We Eat. He read each one, cover to cover.
“‘A liberal meat supply,’ ” he said, quoting from this last book, “‘has always been associated with a happy and virile people and invariably has been the main food available to settlers of new and undeveloped territory.’ ”
He held up the book for her to see.
“Professor P. Thomas Ziegler. A wise man. An American.”
Joichi believed in meat. The advertising agency he worked for handled a big account that represented American-grown meat in Japan. After a few months of reading cookbooks, Joichi began working late at the office every night. Then he started making business trips to Texas. Akiko didn’t mind, but she began to worry when he returned from one of them and told her curtly:
“Joichi is not a modern name. From now on, call me ‘John.’ ”
He was working on a big project, he told her. As his state of suppressed agitation grew, she wondered if he was also having a Texas affair.
Then one day he arrived home and made an announcement.
“My American Wife!” he proclaimed, then sat back and waited for her reaction.
Akiko’s heart sank. “Who ... ?” she whispered sadly. “When ... ?”
“Saturday mornings at eight o’clock. Thirty minutes. Our new TV show. It’s a documentary.”
He swelled with pride—and that’s when her meat duties started. Every Saturday morning, she would be required to watch My American Wife! and then fill out a questionnaire he had designed, rating the program from one to ten in categories such as General Interest, Educational Value, Authenticity, Wholesomeness, Availability of Ingredients, and Deliciousness of Meat. To complete these last two, she would have to go out and shop for the ingredients and then prepare the recipe introduced on that morning’s show. On Saturday evening, when “John” came home from work, they would eat the meat, and he would critique it and then discuss her answers to the questionnaire.
“Kill two birds with one stone,” “John” said jovially. They were sitting at the low kotatsu table after dinner. “John” was drinking a Rémy Martin, and Akiko was having a cup of tea.
“You will help me with the campaign,” he continued
, “and learn to cook meat too. Fatten you up a little.” Then, all of a sudden, he got very serious. He sat straight up on his knees in front of her, spine stiff, head bowed.
“It was on account of your condition that I was able to have this wonderful idea for the BEEF-EX campaign in the first place,” he said in formal Japanese. “I have received great praise from my superiors at the company, and if everything goes well I shall get a significant advancement too.” He bowed deeply in front of her, touching his head to the tatami floor. “I am most grateful to you.”
Akiko blushed, heart pounding with pleasure, then she realized he was drunk.
It was the Sociological Survey part of the program that Akiko didn’t really care for, so she stood up to get ready to leave. She checked the thermometer on the balcony, then stepped outside and looked over the railing at the playground in the courtyard, twelve flights below. It was cold and still quite early on a winter morning to be outside. A toddler, a little girl swaddled in a pink snowsuit, was playing on the swings. Her mother stood near the chain-link fence with an infant strapped to her back, draped in a hooded red plaid cape that made the woman look hunchbacked. She leaned forward under the weight of the child and bounced it gently up and down. Akiko watched the little girl in pink. She could hear the chains quite clearly as the girl swung back and forth. The kree kraa kree kraa sound echoed up the sides of the tall buildings of the danchi apartment complex, which surrounded the playground like steep canyon walls.
My Year of Meats Page 2