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