This week after finishing our discussion on Obasan, we visited the rare books library at Irving to look at the Joy Kogawa Fonds. The fonds consist of material written by, about, or to Joy Kogawa and the librarian informed us that all documents were kept in the order Joy Kogawa sent them. There were drafts of Obasan and other books written by Kogawa, letters from publishers and students, newspaper clippings, and other unpublished writings. Most of the material I looked through wasn’t focused on Obasan. It was nice to see Kogawa and her writing from different perspectives other than Obasan.

I looked through a different box and found a file full of miscellaneous poems Joy Kogawa had written. It was really interesting going through everything in the file I ended up looking at it for most of the time period. I enjoyed reading something that was more casual; nothing was really organized or formatted. Some of the poems were written out on a typewriter, but others were hand written on stationary or scribbled on the back of scrap paper. I felt as though I got to see a different side of Kogawa through her writing. In class we’ve only focused on Kogawa through Obasan and her experiences during WWII, which were the only things I related her with. After reading her other poems, I was reminded that there is more to Joy Kogawa than her and her family’s experience of internment in Canada. It was obviously a huge, significant aspect of her life, but not the only one.

On a different note, I want to share one of her poems I read that really stood out to me. It reminded me of Naomi and the silence she carries throughout Obasan.

“I face the wind

To shelter the flame

And never see the light.

A protected child

Is one

Who stands alone.”

This week in ASTU we finished reading the book Obasan by Joy Kogawa. Obasan tells the story of the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Naomi Nakane. Although the novel starts out quite slow, the amount of detail Kogawa gives to each event allows the reader to visualize (to an extent) what it must have been like to live as a Japanese-Canadian at the time. Never having experienced such extreme racism before, after reading the novel, I was more capable of visualizing the racism Naomi and the Japanese-Canadians had felt during that time. Regardless as to whether they were first generation Canadian-born Japanese, second generation, or even immigrants, the Canadians at the time treated them all the same, turning their backs on their own people in the time of war. As one of the more repetitive aspects of the novel, racism against the Japanese-Canadians is seen in almost every chapter.

The characters in the book reacted to the racism and negative treatment differently.  Some took upon silence, such as Obasan (Naomi’s aunt) and Naomi herself. Naomi’s brother Stephen adopted a completely different strategy. It seemed as though he almost ‘internalized’ the racism and became ashamed of his own culture. This is hinted throughout the book by Stephen’s dislike and un-interest of anything having to do with Japanese culture. For instance, on the train when Obasan offers Stephen a rice ball, he scowls and says he doesn’t want “that kind of food” (Kogawa 136). Stephen truly dislikes the Japanese food made by Obasan. When Obasan sent homemade kakimochi (bit sized Japanese crackers) to Stephen in Montreal, he never sent anything back acknowledging that he received it. Naomi even states in the book that Stephen is “always uncomfortable when anything it ‘too Japanese’”(Kogawa 277). By rejecting all parts of Japanese culture, he alienates himself from his Japanese family and their values.

This rejection of the Japanese culture must’ve occurred with several Japanese-Canadians or Japanese-Americans. In elementary school I read Under The Blood Red Sun by Graham Salisbury, which you can read more about here. The novel is about a Japanese-American boy named Tomi and his family who were living in Hawai’i during WWII and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tomi’s parents and grandparents having emigrated from Japan try to preserve their Japanese heritage, but Tomi does not let them. He insists that they are American, not Japanese and buries all of his family’s Japanese mementos.

If what both these novels hint at is true, and there were people who rejected or suppressed their Japanese culture, I wonder if that affected Japanese national memory in the US and Canada at all. Was the culture forgotten just during the period and the tension of war? Or was the Japanese culture forgotten by some and therefore not taught and brought down to the next generation?

Reference: Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print