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: Backache

I 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.

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