In Defense of Justice by Eileen Tamura

Author:Eileen Tamura [Tamura, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252095061
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

JAPAN

Kurihara’s refusal to seek restoration of his citizenship did not mean that he was enthusiastic about the idea of living in Japan. He believed that he understood the daunting implications of doing so. Pointing out to Hankey his frankness and outspoken ways, he sensed that such forthrightness might spell trouble for him in Japan. “[I]f I weren’t in love with Japan I wouldn’t criticize her,” he said. “Yet if I did [it publicly in Japan], I should be thrown in jail.”1 Such were the prospects of his new life, after years of senseless incarceration in America!

This anticipated loss of personal freedom, his lack of fluency in Japanese, and the anxiety of adjusting to radical cultural reorientation at the age of fifty gave Kurihara pause about his decision to leave the country of his birth. At a pre-departure orientation meeting called by WRA officials, a staff member noticed a “doleful” Kurihara. In order “to distract” him, the staff person asked why Kurihara, who had been designated leader of this departing group, “was not speaking to the crowd, or interpreting for them.” Kurihara responded “disconsolately that every time he spoke Japanese he ‘put his foot in [his mouth].’ He said that he believed it would take several more years, perhaps as many as ten, before he could make himself well enough understood in Japan to gain respect there.”2

Despite these misgivings, Kurihara remained determined to leave the United States. He had asked to be on the first postwar transport to Japan, and his request had been granted. “It is my sincere desire to get over there as soon as possible to help rebuild Japan politically and economically,” he wrote Dorothy Thomas on the eve of his departure. “The American Democracy with which I was infused in my childhood is still unshaken. My life is dedicated to Japan with Democracy my goal.”3

It was an idealized and lofty aspiration. He needed only to look at the United States to know that achieving the ideals of democracy was no easy task. As he had said at his renunciation hearing ten months before his departure, “Until [the removal order and the ensuing incarceration,] I tried to be a good American…. [B]ut when the Government will discriminate [against] you, and even being a veteran, throw you in camp, then I would ask you, how would you feel? … I have come to realize there is no such thing as democracy in the United States with the exception for the white people.”4

He may have truly believed that he would participate actively in the building of a democratic Japan, but his fifty years in the United States failed utterly to prepare him for the reality and complexity of life in postwar Japan. He found, stunningly, that he lacked the resources necessary to contribute to the kind of movement toward democracy in which he had naively believed he would participate. American-style democracy, he learned, could not be transplanted in Japan. But all that was in the future as he prepared to embark for Japan.

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