Nicole Reads: Yokohama, California by Toshio Mori

For a long time I've struggled to understand what it meant to be Japanese American. Growing up, I didn't "feel" very Japanese. I had a Japanese last name. Sometimes my family would eat Japanese food. Occasionally, we'd attend the Cherry Blossom Festival or see my cousin's kendo matches. But to claim that being Japanese was a large part of my identity would be a stretch.

I chalked my "lack" of Japanese-ness up to a combination of contributions. I'm hāfu of mikkusu (i.e. half or mixed) and not quite white-passing, but Asian is usually not the first impression I give off (or so I'm told). I'm also yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American. But the largest factor to me is that my grandparents, American citizens, were forcibly held in concentration camps* by the US government. It became difficult for me to predict how they might have carried on traditions had EO 9066 not happened. For some Japanese Americans post-internment, they leaned into their Japanese roots, but for others, assimilation was the way to prove their loyalty to a country that had not trusted them.

*When I was growing up and in school, most people I heard talk about these camps as "internment camps". I think this is because the term "concentration camp" is so strongly associated with the imprisonment, mass murder, and genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in WWII. I absolutely acknowledge that what went on in Nazi camps was far more torturous and inhumane than the conditions in US camps. That said, terms like "relocation center" and "internment camp" act as a euphemism for the reality that was: "a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities".

I stumbled across the title "Yokohama, California" by Toshio Mori while browsing the library (I had just finished "Big Little Lies" and was looking for more by Liane Moriarty). What grabbed my attention about this little book was that it was a collection of short stories set in a fictional Japanese American neighborhood that was (with the exception of a few stories) written before WWII. The initial publishing was postponed several years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and a few stories reference the events soon after. But for the most part, this tells the story of a community getting by in the 1930s and early '40s.

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At first, I was disappointed reading it, because aside from names, nothing really called out to me that these were Japanese American stories. These were mostly nursery owners and flower sellers, living in NorCal, working, chatting, eating, etc. I was hoping to see something that was distinctly Japanese, and just so happened to be in America. Admittedly, my idea of what the Japanese American experience looked like was actually just what I thought the Japanese experience looked like. So much of my struggle in understanding my Japanese American identity was because I was grasping at a strictly Japanese identity, when in fact the two are distinct from each other.

It took a lot for me to realize that my experience is, by definition, the Japanese American experience. Just as my issei great-grandparents' experience is the Japanese American experience. Like Mori's anthology, the Japanese American experience is a diverse collective of lives, and my life fits perfectly into it.

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PS: All this is to say that I am still in fact Japanese, though how I understand that as part of who I am is different from how I relate to my Japanese American identity. I am, among many things, both of these.