The Phoenix Must Now Learn to Harmonize With the Eagle

Now that President Reagan has signed the redress bill and after the details of reparations are worked out, Japanese-Americans will lose the unifying issue of their own Holocaust.

The passive response to this loss is to take full citizenship for granted. The haunting ghosts of Manzanar will be swept away to make room for yuppie dreams. Descendants of the internees will retire from the politics of redress in order to pursue the politics of privilege. Instead of reaching into the past to stand in lonely defiance with Mitsue Endo and Fred Korematsu, they will work at emulating the life styles of the celebrated Tritia Toyota and Pat Morita. The bliss of full citizenship will lie in the anonymity of assimilation.

The active response is to maintain the spirit of redress against a new danger. Japan has risen from the ashes of Hiroshima, and this Phoenix has become a rude bird, singing the song of ethnic superiority. This performance is especially hard on the ears of Americans who have financed it through their purchases. Panasonic products once were jokingly referred to as being “from the people who brought you Pearl Harbor.” To some who have been hurt, the economic success of the Japanese has felt like another Pearl Harbor. Americans who own Acuras love them, but to the dispossessed they are the cars of enemy occupation forces. In Michigan a few years ago the anger turned on a mistaken target, a Chinese man. He was killed. Japanese-Americans, also the wrong target, may again be punished for the crime of lookinglike the enemy. Still, this time they should not be caught unawares.

The Japanese of Japan have learned how to make cars that Americans love. But they have not learned how to make Americans love them. What makes them particularly unlovable is their claim of uniqueness, which they enforce by exclusion. Even Japanese-Americans have felt excluded,as if they were still country cousins. Because of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans long felt the need to distance themselves from Japanese culture to avoid the appearance of disloyalty. Now they find themselves excluded from the positions of privilege in Japanese corporations here because they are out of touch with Japanese culture.

Such exclusion may prove to be a blessing, for it reminds Japanese-Americans that home is where their countrymen confirmed their full citizenship by supporting redress. In their active role, Japanese-Americans would be highly visible in support of the uniqueness-by-inclusionfor all, which characterizes America in its finer moments.

Japanese-Americans have worked for more than 40 years to get the Bald Eagleto sing the Song of Inclusion for them; now the Phoenix, with its prideful song, is threatening the Bald Eagle, and Japanese-Americans may be caught in the middle of the fray. The active role for Japanese-Americans will include persuading the Phoenix to change its tune to one that harmonizes with the Bald Eagle’s.