Ethnicity and the American Short Story by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8. The Invention of Normality in Japanese American Internment Narratives

John Streamas

DOI: 10.4324/9780203775196-8

Of imprisoned Jews, Bruno Bettelheim writes, "How silent one's voice becomes under totalitarianism is well known by those who were inside concentration camps" ("Eichmann" 263). Of imprisoned Japanese Americans, Ronald Takaki writes, "Memories of the internment nightmare have haunted the older generation like ghosts. But the former prisoners have been unable to exorcise them by speaking out" (484). These two imprisonments are part of the story of the Second World War. Significantly, Franklin Roosevelt, "on at least three separate public occasions," referred to relocation camps for Japanese Americans as "concentration camps," and "informally officials often called them concentration camps" (Daniels, Conference Keynote Address 6; Culley 57). I do not mean to equate the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans with the imprisonment and massacre of millions of Jews and other oppressed groups in Nazi Europe: Roger Daniels aptly reminds us that internment camps and relocation camps "were not, thank God, death camps or extermination camps" (Conference Keynote Address 6). I mean, rather, to draw from Bruno Bettelheim's moving study of Holocaust survivors a lesson in silence, so that we may more compassionately know the condition of oppressed people as well as the expression—or failures of expression—of this condition. Here I apply the lesson to Japanese American short stories of internment, discovering that, when these stories revolve around children and teenagers, their writers often use an internal narrative perspective to construct a politics of protest.

In the work of sansei, third-generation Japanese Americans, such protest advances the imperative of breaking silence—an imperative announced in titles of poems, anthologies, conferences, and chapters of popular histories. Janice Mirikitani's book Shedding Silence contains the poem "Breaking Silence," whose headnote reads, "After forty years of silence about the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II concentration camps, my mother testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Japanese American Civilians in 1981" (33). Introducing the anthology Breaking Silence, Joseph Bruchac celebrates young Asian American poets for "breaking both silence and stereotypes with the affirmation of new songs" (xv). Takaki cites nisei parents and issei grandparents who in recent years have been prodded for their story by sansei and by government commissions. One woman claims that, as a "stereotype [sic] Japanese American," she "kept quiet" for thirty-five years, and now realizes that "it doesn't pay to remain silent" (485).

Of course issei, the immigrant generation, bring a culture whose attitude toward silence differs greatly from mainstream America's. Among writers naming the difference, D. T. Suzuki identifies a Zen silence that is God and wisdom; Michihiro Matsumoto describes a silence that guides and impels Japanese commerce; and Deborah Tannen and Muriel Savile-Troike recognize in Japanese discourse a "wordless communication" in silences that punctuate conversation.1 But to focus exclusively on this cultural difference, King-Kok Cheung shrewdly reminds us, risks subscribing to stereotypes of "the inscrutable Oriental" and neglecting the American part of Japanese Americans (17, 18). Japanese American silence is informed by, but does not duplicate, Japanese silence.

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