Finding Themselves in Japan

“I used to be ashamed of being Japanese.”

With those words, Southern California writer Darryl Mori, 29, suddenly found himself in Japan, facing all he had come to reject and despise after growing up in an Orange County community where no one looked like him.

As just about the only Asian American boy in his La Palma neighborhood, Mori was tormented by a schoolyard bully who commanded him to declare every day, “I am a Chink,” and once demolished his glasses when he refused to comply.

Such cruelties drove the bewildered boy into his own lonely world, where he took refuge in books, punished himself by overeating and imagined transforming his Japanese features into round eyes and light hair.

“I used to have fantasies about how wonderful it would be to be white,” recalled Mori. “The kids wouldn’t pick on me anymore, I would be one of the bunch. At the time, I didn’t think it was racism; I felt they were saying these things because there really was something wrong with me.”

Now here he was in Japan, one of 10 essay contest winners in a program by All Nippon Airways and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to help reconnect Japanese Americans with their ancestral roots. For ANA, the program was one of 10 events planned this year to extend good corporate citizenship as the Japanese airline celebrates the 10th anniversary of its inaugural flight to Los Angeles.

The program also marks another step in healing the rift that erupted between Japan and Japanese Americans. The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor stunned many Japanese Americans into abandoning their heritage in an effort to prove their loyalty to the United States. Even today, Japanese Americans may bear the brunt of Japan-bashing: A group touring the White House a few years ago was told to “go back to Japan” by demonstrators against Japanese exports, according to Japanese American anthropologist James Hirabayashi.

For Mori and other winners, all encountering Japan for the first time, the program represented something far more personal: a milestone in their inner journeys to self-acceptance.

In a weeklong trip to Hiroshima and Tokyo, Mori--now tall and slim, an administrative assistant at UCLA by day and screenwriter by night--was completely surrounded for the first time by people who looked like him. He liked their manners and modesty. They seemed happy, content with what they were; why shouldn’t he feel likewise? The final vestiges of three decades of racial angst suddenly seemed to clear away.

“Everybody here seems to feel pretty comfortable being Japanese,” Mori said, recounting his experiences during a recent evening in Tokyo. “Since I know so many Asian Americans who haven’t been happy being Asian Americans, there [are] . . . a lot of nice role models here.”

Forces of Self-Doubt

His painfully honest testimony might surprise those who assume Japanese Americans have “made it” in climbing the ladders of social, educational and financial success. Many have: The seven Japanese Americans in the group of 10 winners, ranging in age from 28 to 35, boast two PhDs, six master’s degrees, numerous dean’s list awards, peer approval as prom queen and the “most likely to succeed” and specialties ranging from geriatric neuropsychology to French literature to housing development.

But success by such external measures does not necessarily signify victory over the treacherous forces of self-doubt, community leaders say.

“The common perception is that Japanese Americans have succeeded and assimilated, but I think that is just a surface view,” said Irene Hirano, executive director of the Japanese American National Museum. “While a lot of people may want to deny the fact that [self-doubt] is an issue, at some point we’re all confronted with some experience that tells us we are not seen as fully an American. A lot of people of color still have issues like this to work through by virtue of the fact that we oftentimes look different.”

Not all Japanese Americans have had to overcome such harrowing pasts as Mori’s. Another program participant, West Covina city planner Mona Miyasato, 29, went to school with mainly whites and Mexicans in Hacienda Heights but developed a strong ethnic identity through her family’s close association with such Japanese American community activities as basketball and traditional festivals.

Still, Miyasato says she kept the two worlds separate: hugging her school friends but not her own family members because of the Japanese cultural bent toward emotional reticence; acting “superaggressive and loud” in college to conform with what she thought were mainstream expectations even though her Japanese American inclinations are quieter. Finally, after college, she says she was able to figure out her real self and integrate the two worlds.

Hirano and others say that Japanese American successes have created new challenges for the community by pulling people out of the racial ghettos of their grandparents into mainstream society. While those ghettos limited opportunities, they also served as a “shelter from a hostile environment and gave people a sense of community, extended family and tradition,” Hirano said.

The dispersion is raising complex questions about how to maintain a strong cultural identity and sense of self-worth as the community confronts the powerful forces of assimilation. Japanese Americans today number 847,000, just 0.34% of the nation’s population.

A century after the first wave of Japanese immigrants landed in the United States, there is a pronounced waning of ties to Japan--particularly among Japanese Americans on the U.S. mainland, says Akemi Kikumura, a Japanese American anthropologist in Los Angeles.

The keepers of those connections, the first-generation pioneers, or Issei, and their second-generation children, or Nisei, are dying. Fewer Sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans, speak Japanese or cook in traditional ways--although some are creating their own, hybrid culture of, say, Japanese festival dances with rap music or rice balls with Spam, Kikumura says.

The majority of Japanese Americans now marry outside their race--55%, according to a 1989 study by UCLA professor Harry Kitano. Valerie Nao Yoshimura, an ANA program participant from the Detroit area, is a 28-year-old PhD candidate in French literature. The daughter of a Nisei father and Irish mother, she married an Irish American. She says the trip to Japan helped reaffirm a part of herself that she holds dear, connecting her to her Japanese relatives and the aesthetic traditions of simplicity that feel familiar.

But it also has brought into even bolder relief questions of how to hang on to the Japanese part of her heritage, especially with the children she one day expects to have, who may or may not have Japanese features. While the U.S. government interned anyone with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry during World War II, today the question of ethnic identity is mainly self-defined.

“I have a 50-50 chance of having a blue-eyed kid. I don’t know if I can handle having a blue-eyed J.A. [Japanese American],” Yoshimura said bluntly. With a laugh, she added: “I guess my biases are coming out.”

A Longing for Roots

Intermarriage and cultural assimilation may be natural in America’s melting pot, but so is the longing for connection to one’s roots. Yoshimura’s husband, William Shay, wistfully wishes for an Irishtown in the Detroit area or another discernible way to stay linked to his heritage, aside from the corned beef and cabbage his family eats on St. Patrick’s Day.

Faced with fading ancestral ties, many Japanese Americans are moving to reclaim their heritage before it is lost--and the ANA program represents an opportunity to do so through visits to Japan. ANA, Japan’s premier domestic carrier, is trying to expand its international business.

The airline has pledged to continue the program next year in cooperation with the museum. This year’s contest drew more than 100 entries and included three other winners of Philippine, Chinese and Mexican heritage who were intrigued by the essay question of how to build bridges of understanding between Japan and the United States.

“The reason why Japanese corporations can stay in Los Angeles is based on Japanese American struggles and endeavors,” said Toshio Ito, an ANA executive based in Los Angeles who traveled with the group to Tokyo. “We wanted to give something back to the local community.”

The idea of strengthening ties with Japanese Americans had been long contemplated by Dennis Tanioka, ANA’s director of Western regional sales. The airlines’ 10th anniversary provided the opening, and the program was proposed to ANA management by June Ogawa, a consultant to the airline who had struggled with many of the questions of race, culture and identity that bedeviled program participants. Ogawa, 32, grew up among blacks in South-Central Los Angeles, then was thrust into a world of whites when she was bused to Encino for high school.

“There was definitely a sense that I was weird. I wasn’t white. I wasn’t black. I wasn’t Latin. I had no sense of who I was,” said Ogawa, whose upbringing did not include many trappings of Japanese culture, although her mother is Issei and her father Sansei.

April Hattori, another program participant, is a communications manager at Standard & Poor’s rating service in New York. She expresses similar sentiments. A Chicago native born to a Nisei mother and Philippine father, she says she was accepted in her blue-collar, Roman Catholic neighborhood of people with East European roots--and was even voted high school prom queen. She grew up thinking of herself as “just an American.”

Yet, Hattori, 32, said of herself: “There was always a difference. I can’t label it or put my finger on it. Why do I think a certain way? Why do I make scrambled eggs and rice and shoyu [soy sauce] in the morning?”

Ogawa’s epiphany occurred when she began working at the New Otani Hotel in Little Tokyo at age 18. After years of not quite fitting in, she says, she finally felt at home surrounded by Japanese hotel staff who never questioned what she was. In 1992, she began working at the Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo, mastering the language and myriad cultural rules--not to talk back to superiors even if you think you’re right, for instance.

Acting as Bridges

It was not always easy in Japan. Ogawa says the Japanese often expected more from her than from her Caucasian colleagues; she took pains to serve tea and perform other menial tasks to avoid peer jealousies over her native English and privileged American status. But Ogawa says she found a rewarding place for herself using her dual heritage to negotiate cultural gaps involving, for instance, the Bon Jovi rock group, whose members wanted to stay at the elegant hotel but terrified the Japanese with images of tattoos and wild behavior.

“Eventually, what I realized was that yes, Japanese Americans are bridges; we do have connections,” said Ogawa, whose interest in exposing other Sansei to Japan led her to propose the program.

Not everyone believes Japanese Americans ought to play such a potentially sensitive role. Suspected ties to Japan were used as an excuse to intern 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II; since then, some community members have vociferously opposed any move to become entangled with Japan again.

Hirano believes such attitudes must change.

“We can’t deny our parents and grandparents are from Japan and gave us certain cultural things we grew up with,” she said. “It is important to experience these things to feel good about who we are.”

As time dulls the war’s bitter memories, Hirano says links between Japan and Japanese Americans have begun to expand. In recent years, the Keidanran, Japan’s most influential business organization, has contributed nearly $10 million to the museum--its largest contribution ever to an American organization; officials in Tokyo have extended preferential visa treatment to foreign workers of Japanese descent.

University professors say more young Japanese are becoming curious about their overseas peers, with a growing interest in researching such events as the wartime internment. The curiosity extends to the Imperial Family: When Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited Los Angeles a few years ago, they asked to meet young Japanese Americans.

ANA’s Ito says he often encourages Japanese Americans he meets to take an interest in their heritage. “It’s not a matter of being proud or ashamed,” he tells them. “It’s what you are. Truth is truth.”

For one autumn week, as they toured temples, met relatives and melted into a sea of black hair and brown eyes, the group of Japanese Americans affirmed that truth in small but meaningful ways.

Probing One’s Heritage

Julie Akiko Gladsjo, 33, raised in a Mendocino community of whites and Native Americans, began to probe her heritage after the death of her Japanese grandfather in 1992 symbolized the slipping away of ties to Japan. In her visit here, she immediately recognized herself in the modesty of the Japanese people. A brainy bookworm who entered college at age 16 and now works as a postdoctoral researcher in geriatric neuropsychology in San Diego, Gladsjo said she always felt uncomfortable tooting her own horn and discovered the hesitation was culturally inbred.

“In the United States, you have to sell yourself, but it doesn’t come naturally to me,” Gladsjo said. “Here, people are very modest, so I think I can fit in better here.”

For Yoshimura, a moment of truth came in meeting relatives for the first time. Separated by linguistic and cultural differences as wide as the Pacific Ocean, Yoshimura nonetheless saw herself reflected in the face of her cousin Kazuo. “I could see the Yoshimura eyes, the square jaw. That was what was so wild.”

Mori says the encounter with Japan has helped complete his journey of healing that began with an ethnic studies course in 1989, when he first realized his poor self-image was not his fault.

“I thought this trip would be a way to symbolically embrace something in a big way that in the past I tried to avoid or remove from my life,” he said. “It was something I had to do.”