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The Waters
“What am I doing here in this endless winter?”
—Franz Kafka, from The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
My brown body began writing the Japanese character “水” water when I was four years old. I began writing Chinese characters before I knew any of the more simple phonetic kana characters of Japanese language around that time. I hadn’t even heard of English then. And what I knew of China directly, were my Mama’s Chinese friends in Japan, and the Chinese waiters and waitresses and Chinese restaurants in Japan.
I became interested in Japanese calligraphy when I was fourteen. And at about the same time, I started sneaking into the school library during classes at Yamato High School on Yokota Air Base in Japan to strangely and endlessly browse through books about China. I continued doing this at Highland High School library in Albuquerque. I particularly liked books like The Good Earth by the historically important Pearl Buck.1 She wanted the Americans and the world community to pay attention to Amerasian children born of western—and particularly U.S. American military personnel, to Asian women around the Pacific.
I came to know of Pearl Buck in a junior high school English class one day. A teacher introduced that book as an assignment and I became addicted to it. I was obsessed with the drawings of Chungking City and the Chinese coolies and even began drawing replicas myself. I felt I could smell the fragrance of their coolie pants and the dirt and the large straw hats. What was this? My Mama would smile when she saw me carefully drawing Chungking and town scenes after dinner or on the weekends, sometimes spending the whole day at the table. But she would ask where I learned these things and why I liked it so much. Shiranai (I don’t know), was all I could say.
When we lived in Albuquerque and Dad was home for a few days from Vietnam, he asked what I wanted him to bring me back from there after he returned the next time. I wanted a straw coolie hat that resembled the ones I had seen the Chinese wearing in drawings and photos. I think now about ghosts. Some would use different words, I suppose, for these kinds of things.
* * * * * * *
Drowsy, I open the drawer of my bedside table to put away my writing tablet and pen, then put my computer on the chair, then turn off my bedside lamp. I reach for the covers and pull them over my shoulders, turning over onto my right side, then close my eyes, hoping to fall asleep quickly. I never thought about Mama’s life and how she met Dad, and what her life was like before my Dad arrived or what Japan was, and how this plays a role in family, longing, desire, hatred, life, repelling, attracting, co-existing, being patient, being impatient, crying, endurance, remembering and forgetting.
It was about the time late in my 15th year, that I began to slowly unravel my family and who and what we all were and what I now think must be said today.
I ask Mama: Mama dō yatte Dari ni atta no?
“Mama, how did you and Dad meet?”
Hora, Sensō no ato Dēri wa amerika senryō guntai no tame nihon ni kite. . . .
“Well, after the war, because it was the American occupation, Daddy had come to Japan. . . “
Then she stopped. She wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me how they exactly met.
* * * * * * * *
Mizuko.
Death. Girl. Fetus. Stillborn.
Why do I write about this when not much is happening at the moment?
On September 20, 2001, the then-President of the USA, George W. Bush, uses the “Day of Infamy” phrase in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. He spoke this “Day of Infamy” to connect those very same emotions and memory with that same phrase used by President Roosevelt a day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to begin what was to become “World War II.”
Japan and the U.S. and a 1940s war, living and alive in the 2000s. Who connects what and for what reasons? What positions do the people play in this? What are Iraqis thinking of Occupation, even as they would hate their tyrannical leaders or love them? What relations are forming? What laws and norms? I ask because of the space-time I occupy in relation to war, race, nation, culture, and memory. Aren’t we everywhere, living in occupation? Where are the lines between self and institution, military and institution, military and self, military and corporate, military and electronics and the media? The media, what we think are true and real and what self we become? Occupation is not evil or good. But what techniques carry the weapons of pain? Much of it is what I came to realize: that our everyday existence comes from war.
And how do death, water and children connect to this? What does this have to do with my family? I could not understand why this was in my mind at the time.
I read that day:
Shintoism and other so-called indigenous religions such as certain Buddhist institutions, for example, were outlawed by the U.S. Occupation administration—SCAP2 at the beginning of the formal occupation period in 1945 Japan, in order to purge spiritually-motivated Japanese nationalisms that had fueled its war against the U.S. in war time. Grieving mothers who couldn’t forget or wanted desperately to remember their dead infants, children, or stillborn fetus-as-children, were bewildered as to what to do. It went underground, private. Women carried that burden alone. In a devastated, starving Japan, many women didn’t want to think of raising their babies alone without clan. A high percentage of properties were given away and wealth was fractured, making families unable to care for children.
It was the postwar. Many clan members were dead or gone entirely. In some towns almost entire groups of children and adults were now without family members. Without familiar communal spaces for grieving, many women held grief alone. And then there was the added magnitude of unimaginable shame—where nation and culture were made the same single object by many Americans in their view of Japanese lives. First Japanese people had to re-do themselves for the compulsory systems of imperial Japan with its nationalistic jingoes, resources pouring into its militarized structure, and education system. Then in the desperate postwar confusion and isolation in a land already devastated into a defeated mind/landscape postwar, the people were in social exhaustion and despair. It was made ripe for a takeover, death-life.
Mizuko Kuyō 水子供養—religious rites and rituals for grieving parents of aborted babies, were created by religious leaders in Japan over a decade after the end of the World War II after SCAP lifted the ban on religions and its privatized rituals came more into the limelight in the 1970s. Primarily Buddhist, but Shintō and other syncretic religious temples and institutions began to offer these rites sometimes. Mothers could now, after a decade of repressed grief, come to a shrine-site to pray to the memory of their aborted babies. And later, the mothers of dead and killed children secretly came to these places as well, to close their eyes with hands palm-to-palm in prayer in smoky 白檀 byakudan (sandalwood) incense and lost time. But religious organizations charged high prices to provide these services. Mizuko Kuyō soon came under criticism for exploiting women to gain wealth for the religious leaders.3
I understood:
The Americans came. Never left. Still, the U.S. presence. In so many ways, Mama made Japan small and America large. And when I was born, and through the years, I realize that in so many ways, my body-mind and Mama’s body-mind are linked in occupation. We are occupied. Dad, is also occupied, but in a position more distant from me and Mama. But the occupation of Japan was not altogether some horrible thing. Like most things in life, contradictions come. Struggles come. That there was a takeover, and an undoing and new doings, are not a question, however. Occupation is a regime-change that brought Japan under the wing of global powers.
Even listening to music one day in the Washington Heights housing area in Japan, I asked Mama about the music she loved. She said that Japanese war songs reminded her of her soldier-friends, all boys at the time, who went to war and never returned. She said some songs reminded her of her first American boyfriends. She tells me she doesn’t remember the names of some of the Japanese songs but:
“‘Diana,’…toka… ‘Putto Yo-ah Heddo on Mai Shorudaaah’ toka…honto ni Pōru Anka no uta dai suki!”
Songs like ‘Diana’ and ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’…I really love Paul Anka songs!
“…Hon de ‘Teneshee warutsu’…suteki.”
…And ‘Tennessee Waltz’…wonderful.
Then I ask Mama: “Nihon no uta suki ja nai no?”
Don’t you like Japanese songs?
She responds: “Betsu ni”
Not particularly.
Why American songs? Not Japanese particularly?
Sometimes people refuse to refuse History. Memory is disfigured, layered, political, emotional, physical. If this is so, then so is Occupation, imperialism, killing and death, remembering and forgetting. This refusal of refusal has consequences for a world that makes reality. Who writes and claims History?
Mama saw Japanese children die. Her relations die. Friends die. Loved ones die. Her dreams died as new ones were born. Birth and death intertwine. And all the while during the bombings by the U.S., knowing that they were being killed because they were hated—intentionally exploded and burned into ashes, what grows and disappears inside hearts and minds after bombs no longer rain down? What has a person become?
And in the U.S. / Allied Occupation of Japan, where American, British, Australian, and New Zealander soldiers and civilian occupation personnel reigned, what was she learning about her Japanese-ness? American-ness? Coming into the world as Commodore Perry’s Americans and the European colonizers demanded and were fulfilled through? What is made to become dormant, only to erupt again and again because we deem it asleep? As long as there is the repetition of invasion, war, nations, occupation, atomic weapons, anti-miscegenation laws, institutions of war, sexism, and racism, something hard to articulate stays alive. So ghosts tell these stories.
I am not the only water child.
So many water children. There are so many water children.
Whispering—“忘れないで” Don’t forget me.
“Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory…death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other than them; something outside of them within them.”
—Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning
Notes:
1. Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) was an American writer who was the first American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature (1932). The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932. She was immensely popular in China, as she wrote often of the peasant life in China. She was famous for her work with Asia-Pacific orphans whose fathers were born of American servicemen. Her Chinese name is Sai Zhenzhu 賽珍珠.
2. SCAP—Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
3. For more information on Mizuko Kuyō, see: Elizabeth G. Harrison “Strands of Complexity: The Emergence of Mizuko Kuyō in Postwar Japan” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67/4 December 1999, pp. 769-796 “Buddhism and Abortion in Contemporary Japan: Muzuko Kuyō and the Confrontation with Death” in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies Vol. 15/1 1988 andAnne Page Brooks “Muzuko Kuyō and Japanese Buddhism”in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 8/3-4 September-December 1981.
This is an anthropology of memory, a journal and memoir, a work of creative non-fiction. It combines memories from recall, conversations with parents and other relations, friends, journal entries, dream journals and critical analysis.
To learn more about this memoir, read the series description.
© 2011 Fredrick Douglas Cloyd
