The Emperor's Orphans by Sally Ito

Author:Sally Ito
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780888015686
Publisher: Turnstone Press
Published: 2018-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

After my return to Canada, I wrote a short story about a Japanese-Canadian teenager who brings her grandmother’s fan to an art display at her high school; she entrusts its care to a white girlfriend with striking blonde hair and blue eyes, who inadvertently loses the precious fan (it’s not clear if she’s lost it or taken it) and disappoints the protagonist.

Clearly, what I felt I had been seeking had been found in Japan, but, back in Canada, I could only perceive its loss. In this liminal space, this vacuum between two worlds, grew a desire to go to Japan. After that Grade 10 trip, I became obsessed with the notion of going back there. I was certain I had to go—this time to live rather than visit—to truly find whatever it was I kept sensing I had lost. My mother, seeing the urgency in my desire, arranged for me to stay with her youngest sister, Michiko, and her family in Shiga. Years before that, when I was a child, Michiko had lived with us in Edmonton, attending the University of Alberta for a year. The arrangement was that I, too, would stay a year in Shiga before going to university. And so, in 1982, I left Canada again for Japan.

During the year that I was there, the Japanese government was undergoing a very public campaign to help reunite Japanese children abandoned in Manchuria during the war with their now aging parents living in Japan. Part of the program involved having these now-grown children, who spoke only Chinese, appear on national TV with their testimonies, outlining as best as they could the circumstances of their abandonment. Some had artifacts, like name tags or token objects, left with them; others had only the stories told to them by their adoptive Chinese parents. My aunt and I would watch the TV, transfixed. The segments were short. Appearing one at a time, looking straight at the camera, the subject would speak in Chinese. Overlying the Chinese was the Japanese translator’s voice. Poker-faced in the beginning, the men and women would attempt to respond to the off-camera interviewer’s questions as succinctly as possible, but often within seconds, their faces would crumple up, tears welling out of their eyes, as they recounted in sobbing spurts the stories of their abandonment. The stories were excruciatingly painful. What struck me most was how these men and women, despite their Chinese clothing, language, and mannerisms, knew without a doubt they were Japanese.

I had come to Japan that year on a journey to find something about myself, and now I dimly began to perceive what that something was. My situation was nothing nearly as painful as that of those people who appeared on the TV, but there was something similar in our quests. Was I not here in Japan also as a result of the war and its effects on my own family? I, too, was a descendant of wartime repatriates on both sides—of grandfather Saito from Indonesia on the one hand, and grandfather Ito from Canada, on the other.

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