"In America, there's an expression for a landslide victory, but this is more than a landslide; it's more like a major earthquake."
Daniel Okimoto, an international political economist and one of the most knowledgeable Japanese people about Japan, described the Democratic Party's overwhelming victory in the House of Representatives election in August this year (2009) in this way.
Reading this article made me happy to know that Okimoto is still alive and well. I first learned about Okimoto in 1975 when I watched the NHK English education program "Talk Show."
Awareness of the issue of forced relocation, as seen 34 years ago
"Talk Show" was a program produced in the 1970s by Kunihiro Masao, a former university professor who continues to publish on topics such as English language education. The show featured interviews in English with intellectuals from the UK, the US and other countries who came to Japan, and covered a wide range of topics, including politics, economics, literature and religion. I was a high school student at the time and watched the show avidly, so I still remember each and every guest well. Okimoto was one of those guests, and the show aired twice in April 1975.
Okimoto was born in August 1942 at the Santa Anita Relocation Camp in California, but it was through this program that I learned about Japanese American internment camps. I don't remember ever learning about them in school, either in Japanese history or world history. In his conversation with Kunihiro, Okimoto responded as follows:
Kunihiro: I believe you were born during the war, in a Japanese relocation center.
Okimoto: Yes. I was born at the Santa Anita Racetrack, where Japanese Americans were being transported to relocation centers in the interior of the United States. So, it's a bad pun, but I guess I was destined to run around from birth. (Laughs)
Kunihiro: It comes up in your book, but even though they were euphemistically called relocation centers, in reality they were more like concentration camps.
OKIMOTO: That's absolutely true. The US government chose the euphemism "relocation center," but this term does not fully convey the gravity of the forced relocation incident.
The title of the interview was "Japan from a Comparative Perspective," so the talk about the concentration camps ended there, but Kunihiro's retort, "In reality, it was probably something like a concentration camp," stuck in my mind. So, I remember immediately buying Okimoto's "The Masked American," which was introduced in the interview, at a bookstore and reading it.
A brilliant man, Okimoto graduated from Princeton University's Department of History in 1965 and received a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University in 1967. He majored in international relations at the University of Tokyo Graduate School from 1967 to 1970. At the time, campus unrest at the University of Tokyo was at its height, and Okimoto had a lot of free time. He used that time to write his autobiography, "The Masked American." He finished writing it during that time and it was published in the US in 1970, and the Japanese translation was published the following year.
The difficulties of living as a Japanese-American in his autobiography
Americans in masks. Many Japanese and Asian Americans think of their yellow face as a mask and spend time searching for their identity. Okimoto was no exception.
If Okimoto dated a white woman, he could not help but feel the gaze of white men that she was theirs. When Okimoto went to a white woman's house, she would say, "Mister Moto is here," or even, "Don't go near my daughter." Mr. Moto was the protagonist of a novel written in the 1930s, which was later made into a movie and played by a white man as a Japanese spy. Even today, in America, the word is used as a synonym for Japanese people or Japanese Americans.
If one experiences such experiences repeatedly, one's self-preservation instincts will kick in and one will be forced to be cautious about associating with a white woman. Okimoto eventually chose a white woman named Nancy Miller as his wife, but if he had not met her, his sense of self-preservation may have continued for the rest of his life.
Even so, at this point, he was unable to overcome his dual identity as both a Japanese and an American. It was only after he lived in Japan that he was able to actively accept his dual identity. Through various experiences in Japan, such as feeling a sense of security in being part of the racial majority, feeling the strong discriminatory attitude of Japanese people towards foreigners, and meeting his paternal relatives, he was able to accept his identity as a Japanese American. From then on, suppressing his Japanese elements and feeling resentment towards white people were no longer big problems for him.
Okimoto identifies not only as a Japanese American, but also as an Asian American. In the preface to The Mask of the American, Okimoto writes:
"Japan's international image and behavior have been deeply intertwined with my own identity as an Asian American."
The term "Asian American" was coined during the student movement at the University of California, Berkeley, during the same time that Okimoto was staying in Japan in 1968. He must have been aware of the political situation in America during his time studying in Japan.
This was a time when the shadow of the Vietnam War was casting a shadow over him. Before coming to Japan, he was very hesitant about whether he would serve if he were drafted by the U.S. government. During World War II, Japanese people who were put in internment camps were asked whether they would pledge loyalty to the United States, but this book taught me that this issue of "loyalty" is not limited to the events of World War II.
This book was republished in 1984 under the title "Born a Second Generation Japanese American," with "The Masked American" as the subtitle. During this time, a public commission report on the internment of Japanese Americans was published in the United States. A few years later, it was decided that $20,000 in compensation would be paid to all Japanese Americans, but Okimoto predicted at this point that compensation would be difficult to obtain. The award of compensation in 1989 must have been an unexpected joy for him.
This book is out of print because the publisher, Simul Publishing, went bankrupt. I wish another publisher would publish it, even if it was just in paperback. This book, which covers everything from his birth in the Santa Anita detention center to the Tokyo University conflict and anti-Vietnam War sentiment, is also a valuable testimony of modern history.
*This article is a reprint of the eighth installment of the column series "From the Perspectives of Two Countries" in the online magazine "Kaze," published by Renso Publishing , which features information about new books, such as articles linking new books to current issues and daily topics, as well as monthly bestsellers and review columns of new books.
© 2009 Association Press and Tatsuya Sudo
