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Circle
K Cycles
Excerpt
Prologue: Purely Japanese
In 1997, for six months from March to August, my family and I lived in Seto,
just outside of Nagoya in the prefecture of Aichi. Funded
by a Japan Foundation Fellowship and sponsored by Ryuta
Imafuku, then Professor of International Studies at
Chubu University, I was there to meet and understand
the Brazilian community living in Japan. During that
time, I wrote a monthly travel journal for the internet
website CafeCreole. In this book, those journal pieces
are merged with works of fiction, in an effort to paint
as varied and textured a portrait as possible of the
life I saw and experienced during that time. Just
prior to this trip, I could think of three images that
described my perceived relationship to Japan. The first
is of the Butoh performer Kazuo Ohno dancing La Argentina.
The second is of a car: a shiny sleek Mazda RX7. And
the third is the presence as well as the voice of Maki
Nomiya and her musical group Pizzicato 5. These are
some of my favorite Japanese things, but also just
some of my favorite things-reflecting a burnished and
mature beauty, a graceful sense of line and movement,
creative energy and play. They perhaps also reflect
the cultural avant-garde and the technological and international
nature of the relationship of the modern world to things
Japanese. In the more distant past,
my relationship to Japan had not been tied to any preeconceived
images other than the traditions of my Japanese American
family.
I first came to Japan in the early seventies on a kind
of quest as a student, to study and travel. This was
a period of activist movements across the world. In
the U.S., the so-called Asian American Movement flowered
with the quest for identity and the protest of the Vietnam
War. I spent a year and a half in Japan, my main focus
being to research my family history, tracing my father’s
family back fourteen generations. My father’s father
came from a small village near Nakatsugawa in Gifu,
his mother from Tokyo. My mother’s parents both came
from Matsumoto in Nagano. All of my grandparents immigrated
to the Bay Area-San Francisco and Oakland-at the turn
of the century. They were Meiji Japanese. When
I first arrived in Tokyo, I had short cropped hair,
wire-rim glasses, flared pants, and a dark tan. I was
a typical American sansei from California. As time
passed, I exchanged my American clothing for Japanese,
grew my hair, got contact lenses, and lost my tan.
I also developed an intuitive grasp of mimicry. I pointed
at my nose to indicate myself. I covered my mouth when
I laughed. I held teacups with both hands. I kept my
legs together when I sat. I used appropriately feminine
Japanese. I passed. But every now and
again, I would be questioned in a roundabout way about
my ancestry, about my parents and their parents until
my story ended in Gifu, Tokyo, and Nagano. The questioner
would then exclaim with surprise: Ah, then you are
a pure Japanese! What could it mean to be a "pure Japanese"? I felt hurt and resentment.
I came from a country where many people, including my
own, had long struggled with the pain of racism and
exclusion. Purity of race was not something I valued
or believed to be important, and yet, in Japan, I was
trying so hard to pass, to belong. A
few years later, in 1975, I received a fellowship to
travel to Brazil. I was to study Japanese immigration
to that country. Brazil is home to over a million and
a half Japanese immigrants and their descendants-the
largest such population outside of Japan. That community
has a long and fascinating history, and is a complex
and varied society. But I knew very little of this
when I first arrived; chance and intuition sent me
to Brazil. I admit that I wanted to spend time in a
warm, tropical, and sexy place, but perhaps I still
wanted to know what being a pure Japanese might be.
What was the essence, the thing that might survive
assimilation and integration into a new culture and
society, the thing that tied communities in the North
to those in the South and to the Far East? Those
questions, and more, kept me busy at my research for
the next three years in Brazil. I wanted to know about
the efforts of Japanese pioneers, their clearing of
virgin forests, their extensive accomplishments in
agriculture, their social structures and political
activity, their leisure, and their ideas. I wanted
to know who these people were, why they came, what
they believed. I wanted to know the answers to questions
that might take a lifetime to discover: What is education?
What is freedom? What is happiness? In
the meantime, I married a Brazilian architect and artist,
and our children were born in São Paulo.
I continued to live in Brazil for almost nine years.
We lived in the very busy center of the city on the
fourteenth floor of a condominium high-rise. The street
below was like a village unto itself, with small shops
and businesses-the Portuguese bakery on the corner,
the Korean grocery across the way, the stationery shop,
the barber shop, the pool hall, the local bar, the Italian
butchers, and the Japanese produce grocer-a cosmopolitan
village. Everyone called the Japanese
grocer "o japonês."
It was not unusual for me to ask o japonês to save me
a cake of tofu or to put aside a half-dozen artichokes
for lunch. One morning, with my daughter in a stroller,
I went down to shop on the street, stopping at all the
usual places. O japonês decided to take up a conversation
with me to satisfy his curiosity. He was an issei, immigrated
to Brazil in the thirties. His children were nisei.
I told him that I was sansei. It had been a long time
since anyone had wanted to trace my roots, but since
he insisted, I took him back to Japan, to Gifu, Tokyo,
and to Nagano. Yes, I was, without diversions of lineage,
pure Japanese. I remember his reaction: "Ah,"
he exclaimed with a mixture of shock and disbelief,
"how we become so different by the third generation!"
as if I, by some accelerated Darwinian law of evolution,
represented a strange and curious transformation. Brazil
is a warm and friendly place; it is hard to be resentful
toward anyone, and his was a reaction full of honesty
and innocence. I remember feeling happy to laugh. In
1984, we moved as a family from Brazil to Los Angeles.
Through the experiences of my husband and children,
I found myself immigrating back to my own country and
into that great urban cosmopolitan cauldron of tremendous
energy and ferment that is Los Angeles. We were a part
of this change: immigrants, migrants, exiles, tourists,
dekasegi, refugees, visitors, aliens, strangers, travelers
all in search of work, education, new opportunities.
As we crossed the border from south to north, we were
also aware of a new movement of Japanese Brazilians
making their way west to Japan to find
work to support their families through yet another Brazilian
economic slump. In 1990, the Japanese
government had passed a law to allow nisei and sansei
to acquire visas to perform unskilled labor in Japan.
At the same time, this law more strictly prohibited
work by other foreign workers considered illegal aliens.
Both government and business hoped to find a way to replenish the loss of unskilled
factory labor, but in so doing to also replace non-Japanese
foreign workers with the more familiar faces of Japanese
descendants who should, it was thought, integrate more
easily into Japanese life and society. In short, it
was a solution probably well-intentioned but perhaps
purely in favor of race. Since 1990
a growing number of Japanese Brazilians and their families
have migrated to Japan as contract laborers to work
in the myriad parts and subparts factories that support
the products of companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi,
Yamaha, Sony, Subaru, Sanyo, and Suzuki. They have
also come to work in civil construction, food processing,
health care, and to work as guards, hostesses, and
golf caddies. These migrant workers have been named
dekasegi, a term used to refer to workers who leave
their homes, usually to work in factories in distant
cities, to support their families. An estimated 200,000
Brazilian dekasegi now reside in Japan representing
perhaps as much as thirteen percent of the Japanese
Brazilian community at home. As the
first decade of the dekasegi comes to a close, one
marvels at the resourcefulness and energy of these
people. They have rapidly built small businesses: services
such as educational programs, child care facilities,
documentation and legal services, and associations
and networks of every kind including soccer teams,
internet cafes, and samba schools. The creation of
community, in this sense, points to a new phase in
the migration in which many are choosing to settle
with their families in Japan. Every day, Brazilian
consulates are filled with Brazilians needing documentation
for marriages, divorces, and the birth of children
in Japan. Dekasegi are known to work long hours, six,
even seven-day weeks, taking on overtime without holidays
for months on end. Many have or may return to Brazil
with their savings to start businesses or to buy property.
While some may succeed in reestablishing their lives
in Brazil, many return to Japan, having lost their
investments or their ability to reintegrate into Brazilian
life. Although Japanese may regret their dependence
on migrant labor and the disruption by foreigners of
a homogeneous society, a dynamic bridge of migration
between Brazil and Japan has nevertheless been established
over which many travel constantly to sustain their
lives and families in two homes. I
return to my three images: Kazuo Ohno, the RX7, and
Pizzicato 5-things old and new, daring, innovative,
creative, international, full of humor, traveling fearlessly.
Purely Japanese. In a similar vein, I am aware that
I should now add a fourth image, something to encompass
the brave new Brazilian world experienced within Japan.
For the moment I have no singular image but rather
a range of images and stories contained within the
following pages. In any case, how could any one image
represent the lives and experiences of so many who
have become so different and yet so purely Japanese?March: BackacheI have a backache. This is an old complaint, a secretarial one caused by years of pincering phone receivers between my ear
and shoulder, along with excessive sitting and typing,
further exacerbated by childhood scoliosis and little
exercise. Sitting for long periods without back support
on the floor may now also contribute to this discomfort.
Finding some relief in the horizontal on a tatami floor
under blankets or kotatsu, I doze off. The world becomes
a great sleeping spine, and I have been dreaming. In
my dream, my spine stretches out as a long bridge, traversing
a great space. There is the
memory of the flight from LAX to Narita. Varig flight
RG836. We join the spine of a great Boeing 747, its
articulating vertebrae already constructed by several
hundred dekasegi, businesspersons, and tourists whose
travel has originated in São Paulo, Brazil. In
Los Angeles, we are the last to fill in the remaining
seats down the long backbone of this great flying whale. Seats in airplanes are always too high
for me; my legs dangle, my knees ache. The backrest
is also too tall; it presses my head forward awkwardly.
I do not participate in the medium American height.
Is it an international standard? How many on the plane
are participants? Surely, our bones will pay for this. Our
travel through space and altitudes is a continuum of
digital dots on a flight monitor, precisely mapped,
pushing through the same air, flight after flight.
The compression of the cabin seals our hearing, and
we slip through dreams and waking, glancing occasionally
at the continuous American movies flickering endlessly
in the dark. By the time we reach Narita, we will see
four American movies; this means that the passengers
from São Paulo have already seen four others. Twenty-four
hours of travel and eight representations of Hollywood.
We eye our watches for the time left behind, trying
to match, yet hoping to forget, our physical clocks.
Nevertheless, we arrive the next day. The
bullet train is an even longer spinal thing, an articulating
steel serpent, dividing an old Japan from a new. Now
we join the Japanese traveling population, each person
with extended travel plans, starting from the farthest
northern corners of snowy Hokkaido, tunneling through
on private trains and subways, taxis, buses, and ferries
off Sado Island, toward palm trees in Kyushu. This
is not a single spine but a great multiple dragon.
Still, the Shinkansen is the fastest thing going. We
are instructed to sit on the right side of this spine
in order to see Fujisan. I fit in these
seats; my legs do not dangle. Relaxing into the comfort
of another standard, some of us sleep and never see
the sleeping volcano. At 200 kilometers per hour, Fujisan
is in view for a full ten minutes, as we traverse 33
kilometers of its foothills. Travel on the Shinkansen
is more precise than air travel: to the very second,
it makes a cushioned stop like a soft sneeze. 11:22:00.
Nagoya. Settled in Seto, outside Nagoya,
we have rented a car, a silver four-door Subaru coupe,
vintage 1987. We apply a green and yellow arrow-like
sticker to the backside of the car to indicate we are
new drivers. We meet another Brazilian family using
the same sticker on their car, but they’ve kept it there for three years
now. Green and yellow: the colors of the Brazilian flag.
Honk if you are Brazilian. Cuidado! Brazilians in car.
Careful, these guys get confused; they’re not used to
this new spine where the directions have changed lanes
from right to left, where oncoming is ongoing and vice
versa. In any case, we are turning Japanese, hugging
our corners to the left. Our friend
Ryuta shows us the way from his house to our house.
There is a Circle K convenience store on every corner.
Four Circle Ks. To go to Ryuta’s house,
make a left turn at every Circle K. To go home, make
a right turn at every Circle K. We are circling Ks.
This is a joke about my name, Karen. Kon-binis. Open
twenty-four hours. Climate controlled 365 days of the
year. What do we need? Eggs, yogurt, musubi, nori, or
napa? Toothpaste or clothespins? A copy of my manuscript?
Pornographic manga? Extra cash? We can even pay our
phone, gas, and electric bills here. In this land of
minimal spaces, the kon-bini is an extension of our
rented space: our personal refrigerator, bathroom cabinet,
office, library, and banking service. The routine of
our lives sends us out circling Ks, no matter the hour,
along a lighted path between my home and your home in
my car. E-mail. Internet. Connect. Sorry,
your modem is busy or is not connected. Please check
settings for proper connection. Click help. The Internet
Wizard will connect you. Sorry. Please call MSN Member
Services Technical Help. 044-965-0196. Type in AT&F in Advanced
Settings. Type in S56=144spaceS27=48. The access number
you have dialed is invalid. Please wait. Searching for
baud rate for current access number. 9600. Welcome to
CompuServe Member Services. $9.95 per month for 5 hours.
Free trial period first month. However, surcharges from
your site in Japan will be 35 yen per minute. (That’s
$20 an hour!) Are you sure you wish to disconnect? Try
the Japanese software version. Can you read the katakana?
Kyanseru. Herupu. From my modem to your modem. From
my computer to your computer. Hardware vertebrae. Cable
nerves. KDD. AT&T. My back hurts. We are not connected. Occasionally we telephone out of desperation.
On the other side, they answer: Do you know what time
it is? We are seventeen hours behind you! We need our
sleep. Is this any time to call? We are talking at
the same time, but my time is not your time. I
can see the kanji, hiragana, and katakana gathering.
They run down the page delicately, right to left. Now
they also seem to run across the page left to right.
Romaji jumps out at you. You piece your recognition
together like reading abstract art. That looks like
a cow. That looks like a violin. Hey, this is the gas
bill! And this flyer: Pi-za. They deliver. Benri Japan.
Ou, this is a flyer for sexy videos! That is, you can
tell by the nude photos, but read it: bi-de-o. You
don’t
get the girl in the flyer; you get the video of her.
Kinky sexist Japan. Traveling my spine, from my tongue
to my pubis, a sentient road, a sentient border. I need
a massage.
My
back aches. It is longer than it should be, expanded
geographically. It is shorter than it should be,
compressed and digitized. It is a great abstraction,
a vertebrae of pidgin utterances in which I connect
to the message maybe twenty-five percent of the time.
It is multiple and reversible, disconnected yet utterly
connected, timeless and long-suffering and infinitely
sensitive. It is border and frontier. It is both
vehicle and passenger. Conveyance and traveler. It
is a bridge and a beast of burden. It is my back.
Also
by this author:
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