2

Everyday Rituals and the Performance of Community

Six months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and its doctrine of “separate but equal,” an article in the November 20, 1954, edition of the Saturday Evening Post announced the successful integration of Japanese “war brides” who had ostensibly vanished into American society after immigrating as wives of U.S. servicemen (Figure 2.1). The story’s title, which asks, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” encapsulates its tone of curiosity and surprise. According to the writer, William L. Worden, many of the women had assimilated into neighborhoods scattered throughout the country and adopted lifestyles typical of the American housewife: they drove automobiles, bought baby formula “containing no rice whatsoever,” and debated the quality and price of groceries with other homemakers.1 Worden claims, “This trick of disappearing as a group is one of the brides’ outstanding characteristics,”2 and observes, “few of the brides cling to Oriental communities.”3 Even as examples to the contrary appear in the article, Worden repeatedly downplays the impact of racial discrimination on the women’s experiences, quoting sources who muse, “Apparently we Americans are losing our race prejudices,”4 or insist, “Contrary to the general impression in Asia . . . the principal reason for the high ratio of unhappiness [in marriages between American military men and Japanese women] is not a racial problem.”5

In a nation on the brink of a critical struggle over segregation and racial inequality, Worden’s disappearing “war brides” offered a narrative of integration in which assimilation was the result of individual gaman (a Japanese word referring to the ability to endure hardship), and segregation was the result of an obdurate “clinging” to minority communities. Linking the disappearance of these women to the dissipation of racism, Worden proposes that the “racial problem” will wane with the dispersal of racialized groups and the gradual integration of willing individuals. In lauding the women’s remarkable capacity for assimilation, however, the article ignores the possibility that making the erasure of difference a condition for acceptance might speak to the persistence of “race prejudices,” rather than promise their end.

Figure 2.1. “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” Image from the Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1954, 38. Courtesy of the Saturday Evening Post.

A similar logic equating integration with dispersal and disappearance is evident in programs begun a decade earlier to resettle Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians who were interned during World War II.6 In both the United States and Canada, albeit with important differences that I discuss below, the state directed the dissolution of the very communities it had consolidated and segregated in wartime camps. After meeting strict eligibility requirements, including affirmations of loyalty to the United States, about nine thousand Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the internment camps and relocated to largely white, middle-class communities in various parts of the country. These efforts at resettlement, which were in effect from 1943 to 1945, suggest an early experiment in erasing difference and expediting assimilation through a geographic redistribution that was paradoxically coterminous with the continued internment of over a hundred thousand U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese lineage.7

Meanwhile, in Canada, such dispersals were compulsory rather than voluntary: at the end of World War II, the government released Japanese Canadians from internment but required them to choose between relocation east of the Rockies or Japanese “repatriation.” Although the Canadian government admitted near the war’s end that suspicions of treachery were unsubstantiated, it continued to insist that even if Japanese Canadians had not behaved in a way that justified their exclusion from the nation, they had not yet demonstrated that they belonged properly within it. In his August 4, 1944, speech to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Mackenzie King affirmed, “It is a fact no person of Japanese race born in Canada has been charged with any act of sabotage or disloyalty during the years of war.”8 This acknowledgment, however, preceded a case for dispersal that placed on Japanese Canadians the burden of eliminating the racism that fed wartime fears: “The sound policy and the best policy for the Japanese Canadians themselves is to distribute their members as widely as possible throughout the country where they will not create feelings of racial hostility.”9 Characterizing the dispersal policy as the government’s attempt to look after the best interests of those whose lives it had just irrevocably upset, King argued that racism would fade only with the dissipation of racialized communities. Making overt the reasoning tacit in Worden’s article, King’s speech naturalizes racism as an inevitable reaction to the visible presence of minority groups, and implies that they must earn their acceptance and forestall enmity by being as inconspicuous as possible.

Despite crucial differences between the U.S. and the Canadian state and media’s treatments of interned Japanese Americans, interned and forcibly separated Japanese Canadians, and recently immigrated Japanese “war brides,” they collectively manifest the explicit and implicit demands placed on those of Japanese descent in North America during the postwar era to disperse and assimilate. These groups had to contend with both the persistence of racial hostilities spurred by wartime anxieties, and the insistence that they assuage racial animosity by effacing ethnic distinctions and rejecting affiliations with others who were of Japanese descent.

Produced several decades after World War II, Velina Hasu Houston’s drama Tea (1987) and Joy Kogawa’s novel Itsuka (1992) offer retrospective meditations on the impact of negotiating these dual pressures. Set in 1968 Kansas, Tea presents a group of women who gather to reflect on their lives over tea after a fellow Japanese “war bride” commits suicide. Itsuka shifts between the internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II, and the later movement for redress, which culminated in 1988. The novel’s narrator, Naomi Nakane, transforms through its pages from an isolated woman skeptical of the politics of redress to a committed member of a revived Japanese Canadian community. Moving from postwar conversations about Japanese North Americans to these later cultural productions, this chapter engages both “archives of racial representation” and “archives of ethnic self-expression.”10 The temporal shifts that characterize Houston’s drama and Kogawa’s novel facilitate this passage by building connections between the midcentury and the late century. The decades-long gap across which these works stretch includes, not insignificantly, a period in which claims of an Asian American identity—as opposed to classification as “Orientals”—gained traction. As part of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, newly self-identified Asian American activists and artists asserted a political and cultural presence. Their efforts included drawing attention to injustices like the internment and developing a distinctive body of Asian American literature.

Although Kogawa and Houston have come to occupy central places in conceptions of Asian American literature and theater, they also strain efforts to delineate the borders of an Asian American cultural corpus. Most obviously, Kogawa is a Canadian, not a U.S., writer. Asian American literary criticism’s embrace of Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), to which Itsuka serves as a sequel, has elicited wary reactions from scholars based in Canada who are concerned that it reflects an unthinking American appropriation of a Canadian text and elides differences between the U.S. and Canadian government’s policies towards those of Japanese heritage, as well as differences among the experiences of Japanese North Americans.11 As Donald Goellnicht points out, Obasan fills a noticeable gap within Asian American literature as a novel about internment by someone who directly experienced it.12 Literary works set in internment camps by former internees—even those who were prolific writers—are few in number, a pattern that is unsurprising given the pressures of the postwar period. Wakako Yamauchi’s play 12–1-A (1982) and short stories such as Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950) and Lonny Kaneko’s “The Shoyu Kid” (1976) stand as exemplary pieces next to memoirs from Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Monica Sone, and Mine Okubo. The tendency to include Obasan in this assemblage of Asian (U.S.) American writings raises a number of definitional, theoretical, and ethical questions: How do we define “Asian American,” and to what end? What are the paradigms that best capture the complexity of identification? How do we avoid replicating a nationalistic logic of exceptionalism and a propensity to co-opt difference? Such questions have been generative for Asian American studies as occasions for critical self-reflection, and underscore the unwieldiness of the term “Asian American.”13

As the editor of two anthologies of Asian American plays, The Politics of Life and But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, Houston has actively participated in defining and promoting Asian American drama. Yet she has also put pressure on concepts of Asian American identity by drawing attention to the nebulous position of those who are mixed race. With a father of Native American and African American descent and a mother from Japan, Houston has emphasized this background in her writings, both for the stage and in other public forums. During the 1990 controversy over the casting of a white actor to play the biracial character of the Engineer in the musical Miss Saigon, Houston wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times that was sympathetic to but slightly diverged from the position taken by Actors’ Equity and Asian American theater artists. While she set the casting choice in a long history of privileging white actors in American theater (particularly in light of reports that the character was originally meant to be Vietnamese), Houston also criticized the debate for its tendency to assume an either/or conception of the Amerasian character and enjoined Asian American artists not to marginalize those who are mixed raced.14

Thus, while Kogawa and Houston’s works have been crucial anchors for Asian American literature and theater, the complex implications of identifying their fiction and drama as Asian American expose the tenuousness of such designations. Their undecided status reflects ostensibly competing impulses: a desire for collective expression and a resistance to narrow categorization. The continuous negotiation of these inclinations constitutes a key concern of Itsuka and Tea, which set them in relation to the contradictory pressures faced by Japanese North Americans after World War II. Confronting the question of how to navigate between the sweeping claims of racial difference that justified the internments and the subsequent valorization of inconspicuous assimilation, the novel and the play posit the ritualization of everyday activities as a means of performing community and defying pressures to disappear. The ritualized mundane, as elaborated by these works, does not manifest “natural” or inherent racial bonds, or affirm accepted traditions; instead, it dynamically materializes communal ties as an oppositional response to the dual imperatives of racialization and assimilation. Furthermore, ritualization is not just a process that absorbs the characters of Itsuka and Tea; it also emerges as a technique of infusing the depiction and reenactment of banal behaviors with a ritual-inspired style and significance that aspires to engage the audience.

Ritualizing the Routine

An interdisciplinary field with links to research in anthropology, history, performance, and religion, ritual studies takes as its focus a particularly slippery object of inquiry. The difficulty of characterizing ritual with precision becomes immediately obvious not only in studies that directly tackle the problem, but also in introductory and theoretical works that foreground or circumvent the definitional challenges it poses.15 Two aspects of rituals nevertheless require elucidation as a preface to illustrating the significance of mundane rituals in Itsuka and Tea: namely, ritual’s relationship to the everyday, and its role in preserving and contesting established social relations. Both rituals and everyday behaviors realize specific societal arrangements and beliefs through repeated, embodied acts, and a fixed distinction between them remains hard to maintain in theory and in practice—a matter of degree and context more than absolute difference. Accordingly, the process of ritualizing the mundane at once draws out existing ritualistic aspects of the everyday, and imbues the everyday with more obviously ritualistic elements. Ritualizing quotidian activities makes their symbolic significance and social force explicit, thus bringing them closer to formally recognized rituals.

Notwithstanding debates about the specificities of ritual’s attributes and effects, some of which I examine below, ritual is generally characterized as involving the repeated embodiment of a set of formalized, socially significant acts. In his study of collective memory, Paul Connerton stresses the “canonical” quality of rituals, which center on stylized repetitions of previous performances.16 As reenactments of customary behaviors, rituals are patently social and historical, activating relationships among its participants as well as to the past. Furthermore, for Connerton, rituals are both symbolic and performative: in the repetition of highly meaningful acts, rituals realize social relations and have consequences beyond their obvious representative or practical significance.17 Emphasizing the importance of direct, corporeal engagements to rituals, Bernhard Leistle argues, “It is by doing things, by handling objects, by performing standardized movements and gestures that ritual creates cultural meaning.”18 Ritual’s efficacy depends on both cultural memory and physical immediacy.

The primary effects of performing rituals, however, are a topic of dispute. Since Émile Durkheim’s influential association of ritual with social integration, scholars have debated its role in consolidating communal ties and beliefs. Victor Turner and Gerd Baumann are among those who have highlighted ritual’s transformative possibilities and differentiating effects.19 Baumann, for example, observes that rituals may promote social change rather than stability, and involve opposing factions and those considered “others” in relation to the performing community.20 Reconciling divergent claims about ritual’s impact on group solidarity, Catherine Bell concludes that “these loosely coordinated activities are constantly differentiating and integrating, establishing and subverting the field of social relations.”21 Rather than argue for ritual’s either conservative or transformatory effects, Bell emphasizes that it dynamically configures and reconfigures matrices of social relationships, and moves for a shift in analysis from rituals to strategies of ritualization.

The question that remains, however, is what makes the repetition of conventional behaviors in a ritual different from the repetition of conventional behaviors in the everyday, particularly if we consider ritualization in terms of general practices rather than discrete events. In other words, how do we distinguish between rituals and routines? The emphasis on explicitly formalized acts in the works cited above suggests that the difference between ritual and the mundane might rest in their pitch rather than their rhythm: while the repetitions of the quotidian unfold, signify, and have social effects in a subliminal hum, rituals are more insistently patterned and symbolic.

For Bell, ritualization is a means of elevating certain acts as sacred: ritualization, she argues, is a way to “distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities.”22 If ritualization differentiates the extraordinary from the ordinary, however, it derives its meaning and efficacy from the specific relationship it generates between them. To the extent that ritualization organizes and manages social relations, its force depends on its intimacy with the quotidian, its capacity to infiltrate and shape the everyday. As Connerton observes, “Although demarcated in time and space, rites are also as it were porous. They are held to be meaningful because rites have significance with respect to a set of further non-ritual actions, to the whole life of a community.”23 Joseph C. Hermanowicz and Harriet P. Morgan assert that rituals intended to reinforce a group’s identity are especially prone to co-opt the everyday: “the ritual draws upon the ordinary, intensifying and thus affirming it.”24 Furthermore, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff warn against too rigidly dividing rituals from the everyday, as such distinctions tend to cast rituals as primitive and irrational.25 Stressing instead ongoing, productive relations between formal and mundane practices, they argue, “The creative power of ritual . . . arises from the fact that . . . it exists in continuing tension with more mundane modes of action, of producing and communicating meanings and values.”26

The dynamic relationship between ritual and the everyday finds rich elaboration in Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea and Joy Kogawa’s Itsuka, inspiring models of affiliation that oppose the dispersal of Japanese North Americans after World War II. Although rituals in the stricter sense (for example, formal political and religious events) appear in the play and the novel, both dwell on the everyday as a crucial site for forging social links, collectively constructing histories, and establishing a sense of belonging—thus, for performing community. In contrast to the imagined community of the nation theorized by Benedict Anderson, the communities that are the primary concerns of Tea and Itsuka are ambiguously situated at the very edges of the nation. The disavowed associations and disrupted histories that both splinter and unite Japanese “war brides” and Japanese Canadians stand in sharp contrast to the nation imagined, as Anderson argues, as a “deep, horizontal comradeship”27 or a “solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”28 Instead, the communities performed in these works are continuously negotiating, on the one hand, racialization as treacherous “Japs” and, on the other, demands that they quietly disappear. In a revealing convergence, Tea and Itsuka propose that the ritualization of quotidian activities can offer a way of mediating between these pressures. Exploring the generative possibilities of fusing ritual and the mundane, they draw from a performance form that is especially well suited to accommodate the contradictory situation of Japanese North Americans in the postwar era. According to Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritualizing enactments operate dialectically under circumstances in which polarities are too important to be chosen between. Participants seek some third way on a plane different from that occupied by the first two alternatives. . . . Ambivalence is at the heart of a ritualizing attitude.”29 In grappling with the polarities of racialization and assimilation as impossible choices, the everyday rituals of Itsuka and Tea model performances of community that seek a dialectical “third way.”

Salvaging the Unsalvageable

A sequel to Joy Kogawa’s acclaimed 1981 novel Obasan, Itsuka focuses like its predecessor on the internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. It continues the story, however, by tracing in detail the Japanese Canadian movement for redress, which was most vigorous in the period between the publications of the two novels. Almost instantly canonized, Obasan was a critical success as well as a best seller and is credited with stimulating popular support for the redress movement in Canada. The first part of Itsuka, like Obasan, is fragmentary in style and moves fluidly between times, suggesting the immersion of the narrator, Naomi Nakane, in her memories of the internment and the dispersal. In the second half of the novel, however, the initially reluctant and skeptical Naomi becomes increasingly committed to the redress movement, and Kogawa depicts its struggles and accomplishments in a chronological, almost documentary fashion. Through Naomi’s transformation and a concomitant shift in style, Itsuka rejects a purely instrumental assessment of the movement’s value. It shows that in addition to bringing about an official apology and monetary compensation, the struggle for redress enabled performances of community that countered decades of silence and isolation. The internment and the dispersal deprived Japanese Canadians of multiple manifestations of “home,” not only discouraging affiliations with both Japan and Canada, but also severing familial and communal ties. In the novel, the ritualization of mundane acts is integral to the rearticulation of these broken connections.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, those of Japanese descent residing near the western coasts of Canada and the United States were subject to progressively harsher civil restrictions, eventually leading to their relocation and internment. When World War II began, over 95 percent of Japanese Canadians, a population of approximately twenty-two thousand, lived in the province of British Columbia. Stirring (and stirred by) existing anti-Asian sentiments, fears of Japanese Canadian treachery led to curfews, interrogations, confiscations, and mandatory registrations. In 1942, Order in Council PC 365 decreed the removal of male Japanese nationals from a stretch of British Columbia’s coast thought to be vulnerable to attack. Soon after, Order in Council PC 1486 legislated the relocation of all people of Japanese descent from this “protected” zone. The British Columbia Security Commission, which was in charge of managing the removal of Japanese Canadians, distributed them among various prisoner-of-war camps, provisional internment centers, and ghost towns. Families found themselves broken apart as a result of the fitful expansion of the internment, the assignment of men to work camps, and the separation of genders in detention centers. The government later exploited the desire to maintain family units by allowing those who volunteered to work on Canadian beet farms to stay together. Meanwhile, the Security Commission seized and sold the property of the internees, and then used a portion of the proceeds to pay for their relocation and imprisonment.

Although the Canadian and U.S. internments were congruous in many respects, the U.S. government neither confiscated property nor separated families. Perhaps the most striking difference, however, was in the governments’ postinternment policies. While the approximately 120,000 interned Japanese Americans were released from the camps and allowed to return to their homes on the west coast as the war came to a close, Japanese Canadians had to choose between dispersal to areas east of the Rockies or “repatriation” to Japan. Masquerading exile as return, the government’s claim to “repatriate” Japanese Canadians to a nation many did not consider their home affirmed the suspicions of entrenched racial allegiances that had helped justify the internment. Forced either to corroborate accusations of disloyalty or to dissolve all ethnic and communal associations, Japanese Canadians had no choice but to uphold the border between “Japanese” and “Canadian” that made an interstitial or coincident identity untenable.

The dispersal policy expedited the push toward assimilation that became the modus operandi of wary Japanese Canadians during the postwar decades. Although the internment and the dispersal might seem to reflect opposing directives, one concentrating a population and the other scattering it, they collaboratively worked to compel the “choice” of disappearance. Pamela Sugiman succinctly describes, “Many social bonds were severed and ethnic identities and loyalties were denied, as Japanese Canadians sought assimilation as a strategy to protect themselves from the harsh racism that they had experienced in Canada.”30 Sugiman suggests that the internment of Japanese Canadians encouraged their compliance with the goals of the dispersal policy by instilling in them a fear of being seen as different. Dissolving any possible links to Japan included not only rejecting certain cultural and linguistic practices, but also limiting associations with other Japanese Canadians, as such affiliations might draw attention and censure as racial self-segregation. The rootlessness that resulted from the uncertainty of ties to Canada and the necessary denial of ties to Japan constituted just one facet of a comprehensive social fracturing brought about by the internment and the dispersal, which splintered familial, communal, and national bonds.

In Itsuka, Naomi’s separation from her parents and itinerant childhood and adolescence emblematize the severing of familial and communal ties effected by government policies during and after World War II. Naomi recounts,

Not long after [Mother and Grandma disappeared], the whole world fell apart as, day after day, people disappeared. In our family, father’s brother went first. Then Father was gone. Aunt Emily and Grandpa also vanished. And suddenly one day, Obasan, my brother and I were in the middle of a black-haired throng, milling about a train station in a ghost town called Slocan. We were separated, and we were concentrated. The displaced Canadians.

In Slocan, we survived. Men built flumes for water from the hills. People planted gardens, built bathhouses and a school. But three years later, and just as suddenly again, we were on trains once more, headed for sugar-beet farms, fruit farms, sawmills—as laborers, servants and factory workers across the country. The government’s “Dispersal Policy,” Aunt Emily says, was a “smashing success.”31

Short, punctuated sentences capture the erratic yet continual disappearances and relocations that pervade Naomi’s childhood. She loses both of her parents when her father passes away during the internment, and her mother is unable to return from a trip to Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor (in Obasan, her disfigurement and eventual death from the Nagasaki atomic bomb are kept from Naomi for many years). In addition, the multiple, abrupt migrations Naomi must undertake with her aunt Obasan and her brother Stephen, from their beloved home in Vancouver to the ghost town of Slocan to the beet fields of Granton, discourage attachments to place and people. In noting, “We were separated, and we were concentrated,” Naomi tersely highlights the government’s paradoxical treatment of Japanese Canadians: while geographic concentration made the racial difference of a “black-haired throng” more sharply visible, the separation of families and communities, which was exacerbated by the dispersal policy, pushed for their dissolution.

The novel emphasizes that the cumulative effect of these seemingly inconsistent directives was the internalization of the drive to eradicate difference (whether associated with ethnic communities or racialized bodies), and it is in this context that the significance of ritualizing the mundane becomes intelligible. When Naomi’s friend and eventual lover Cedric asks her opinion of the Japanese Canadians’ fight for redress, her response highlights the dispersal policy’s “smashing success” in dissipating any inclination toward communal affiliations: “I stare at the floor. ‘I’m not really part of the community,’ I say hesitantly. It’s my guess that we don’t really have a community at all. After all, as Aunt Emily puts it, we were all ‘deformed by the Dispersal Policy’ and grew up striving to be ‘the only Jap in town.’ ‘No, I don’t speak Japanese,’ we’d say proudly” (126). Naomi suggests that Japanese Canadians are isolated by their common impulse to reject those who are similarly racialized: the collectivity implied by the “we” in Naomi’s rumination is therefore characterized by a drive to disintegrate itself.

Bodily malaise—simultaneously shared and personal—accompanies the disavowal of communal affiliations. According to Emily, Naomi’s aunt and a spirited activist for the redress movement, Japanese Canadians subconsciously continue to follow the government’s injunction to erase themselves:

Japanese Canadians, [Aunt Emily] says, are an endangered species. Some study she read somewhere shows that more niseis [second-generation Japanese Canadians] are dying of stress diseases than any other group. . . . She says a study should be done on the many older nisei like herself who never married. It would show how deeply they’ve obeyed the order to disappear.

We’ve had a cultural lobotomy, she says, and have lost the ancient ways. There’s a button in the brain that signals when to die and there’s a universal law—if you honor your mothers and fathers, the button stays on hold. (138)

As an orphan, Naomi literally embodies the split from a generative history that Emily sees as afflicting Japanese Canadians more generally. As I mentioned above, the vilification of Japan during World War II exerted pressure on Japanese Canadians to reject any connection to Japan (as Naomi’s brother Stephen often vehemently does), yet their internment simultaneously rejected their claims to a Canadian identity. Cut off from a viable relationship to a Japanese or a Canadian heritage, Japanese Canadians, Emily suggests, are also cutting themselves off from the future. She posits that they are subconsciously but faithfully fulfilling the Canadian government’s order to disappear by erasing their bodies from the nation. In particular, the stress disease—a distinctly psychosomatic illness—points to the intersection of physical and emotional strains that continue to carry out the policy of dispersal long after it is no longer officially in effect.

Naomi’s life of solitude and physical ailments, while particularly acute, manifest the homesickness of the larger Japanese Canadian population. Quiet and aloof, Naomi also suffers from a general sickliness and reacts uneasily to touch. Although Kogawa implies in Obasan that these physical ailments are related to a neighbor’s molestation of Naomi during her childhood, she shifts the emphasis in Itsuka to other potential factors and focuses on the fragmentation of Naomi’s family. Naomi contemplates, “Who knows what the psychogenesis of an illness may be? There are so many mysteries in the past—so many unknowns and forbidden rooms. According to Aunt Emily, I was fat and funny and healthy and never cried as a baby. I have no memory of that. She says I became sickly after Mother disappeared” (134). Naomi here speculates that the severing of maternal ties may have had long-term physical consequences. Describing her search for the reason behind her illness as an exploration of an inhospitable house full of “forbidden rooms,” Naomi suggests that it reflects a distinct “homesickness” born of the strange disappearances and separations that marked her childhood.

In a rebuttal of Prime Minister King’s declaration that “the sound policy and the best policy” for Japanese Canadians is dispersal, Itsuka repeatedly insists on its damaging effects and the necessity of forming and maintaining both familial and communal ties. The novel highlights, for example, the efforts of Naomi’s aunt Emily, who assiduously works to reforge broken connections by sharing memories with her family and distributing community news to Japanese Canadians. Naomi describes, “The Nisei News was one of Aunt Emily’s many efforts to keep people in touch after the war when our community was scattered across the country. In those anxious and lonely times, Aunt Emily’s mimeographed letter carried news to her hundreds of isolated friends—one here, one there, in hamlets, cities and farms” (4). The accelerated rhythm that accompanies the description of the Nisei News’s circulation, “one here, one there, in hamlets, cities and farms,” captures both the initial challenge of reaching people in distant, remote locations and the proliferation of contact sparked by Emily’s work. In addition, as the storyteller of the family, Emily continuously reminds Naomi of a childhood she only hazily recalls. Naomi insinuates that these stories help to ease her sense of rootlessness: “Aunt Emily’s stories are pebbles skipping over my quiet sea. Each one of her stones helps to build the ground on which I seek to stand” (74). Portraying her consciousness as a “quiet sea,” Naomi emphasizes that she lacks a binding attachment to place. In contrast, Aunt Emily’s stories, while small “pebbles” disturbing her peaceful isolation, form the foundation that connects Naomi to the places and peoples of her past. While Naomi’s own memories are full of “unknowns and forbidden rooms,” Emily’s recollections serve as grounding narratives that prevent her from drifting in the still waters of silence and loss.

Itsuka emphasizes, however, that while Emily’s stories form vital connections, counteracting the profound disaffection of Japanese Canadians requires situated and embodied performances of these connections. Naomi explains, “In the end, [Aunt Emily] says, home is where our stories are, and that’s not just a question of ethnicity or even country, though she passionately loves Canada. Home for her is where the struggle for justice takes place, and because that is happening in our backyard she has returned with a will” (192). By claiming that home is “where our stories are,” Emily stresses that narratives connect the displaced to place. Yet the relationship between stories and home is not simply an abstract or imaginative one: the emphasis on “where” the stories are highlights the importance of physical situatedness, of materially inhabiting the space to which one is connected through narrative. Furthermore, Naomi notes that Emily’s story is the “struggle for justice,” connecting story to practice. The novel thus suggests that rebuilding “home” in its various manifestations necessitates embodied as well as verbal connections, performances as well as narratives. As homesickness finds both physical and psychological symptoms, it is only fitting that its remedy should require both embodiment and narrative.

The ritualized mundane enters here as a response to the effects of dispersal. The novel is replete with images of everyday activities, some closer to habit and others closer to formal rituals, which become a means of grappling with the contradictory demands of concentration and separation, racialization and assimilation. When I speak of these practices as “ritualized,” I am not assuming an intention to create ritual, but rather emphasizing a style and a significance that become discernible through Naomi’s narration: namely, they are explicitly symbolic and repeatedly enacted, and they dynamically configure and reconfigure communal relationships.

While Naomi’s other aunt Obasan does not engage, like Emily, in overt community-making efforts like distributing newsletters, her tender routines anchor their family to the most desolate of sites. Her continuation of the family’s custom of taking Sunday afternoon tea exemplifies a practice whose symbolic value and social effects acquire a notable density and urgency when carried out through their various dislocations. Naomi relates,

Obasan clung to memories of Miss Best and happy days in Vancouver. In the beet fields of Alberta, she made pancakes and we’d sit in the dirt and the heat with thermos bottles and pancake “biscuits” and have our Sunday afternoon tea.

When my brother and I were teenagers, we moved from farm shack to town shack. Gone were the long rides in the yellow school bus. We bought a coal stove and lo!—real biscuits on Sundays once more. (10–11)

Fondly remembering their Sunday custom of taking tea and biscuits, Obasan insists on retaining a version of this activity even in “the dirt and the heat” of the beet fields. Seemingly quaint and trivial, Obasan’s “Sunday afternoon tea” is a ritualized routine with deep symbolic significance: not only is it a physical reenactment of their memories of a happier past, it is also an effort to materialize a home while in a displaced, itinerant state. Underlining the efficacy of rituals in creating place, Grimes argues, “Not only is space founded to become ritual place, but actors themselves become grounded by acting in it. We hide, display, and boundary-mark ourselves by the way we transform space into place.”32 Although their family is forced to move “from farm shack to town shack,” Obasan nevertheless attempts to found a home for Naomi and Stephen in the bleakest environments. She performs a rootedness to Canada by repeating a practice that links them to their happier days in Vancouver as well as to the nation’s historical and cultural ties to England. Obasan thus draws attention to what Rita Felski describes as the less remarked attributes of habit, namely “the ways routines may strengthen, comfort, and provide meaning.”33 The family’s afternoon tea, however, does not simply re-create their pleasant Vancouver residence or insist on a shared Anglo-Canadian identity; the practice also makes explicit their displacement through the incongruity between the rough surroundings and the dainty custom. It is thus an ambivalent performance that traces a fraught line between the English traditions adopted as Canadian and Japanese Canadians who continue those traditions after the state has banished them.

The reenactment of Sunday afternoon tea with “thermos bottles and pancake ‘biscuits’” in the beet fields is but one example of the recycling characteristic of Obasan. At a fundamental level, her tendency to re-create activities and reuse objects in different contexts reflects the material exigencies of the internment, the confiscation of their property, and the postwar dispersal. Yet the novel, through Naomi’s accounts of the past, also imbues Obasan’s habits with heightened symbolic value and stresses their critical effect of maintaining family and home; in other words, ritualization here is a narrative strategy that, in depicting everyday activities as kinds of rituals, makes legible those aspects of the practices that exceed their obvious functions.

Obasan’s death and the destruction of their shack in Granton compel Naomi’s recognition that her aunt’s recycling had turned their otherwise unattractive abode into a place with which she had forged visceral connections. She recalls that Obasan always took great care in transforming apparently disposable household items into useful ones: “Obasan is salvaging the unsalvageable. Nothing is ever to be discarded. Plastic bleach bottles are wastepaper baskets and plant trays. Mandarin orange boxes are covered stools. . . . Unlike Pastor Jim, she does not divide the world into the saved and the lost” (79). By comparing Obasan to Pastor Jim, Naomi not only lends Obasan’s recycling a spiritual significance that elevates it from the quotidian activity of reusing disposable items, but also underscores an important difference in belief between the two characters.

The full significance of Obasan’s recycling strikes Naomi as she discards her aunt’s “saved” treasures after her death:

I alternate between frenzied packing, discarding and fits of weeping. Obasan has spent her lifetime treasuring these things that I am now throwing away. . . . I’m an undertaker disemboweling and embalming a still breathing body, removing heart, limbs, lifeblood, all the arteries, memories that keep one connected to the world, transforming this comatose little family into a corpse. . . . When the garbage collector carts away the mound of black bags, I can feel the muscles and bones, the last connective tissues, strain and snap. The new owners bulldoze it. Our shack of memories disappears. (84)

Obasan’s engagement with “unsalvageable” objects has made them the “heart, limbs, lifeblood . . . arteries” of their home and family, the embodiments of “memories that keep one connected to the world.” For Obasan, collection and recollection are intertwined pursuits, and her work materializes familial connections by fusing objects and memories. In Naomi’s account, the salvaged objects are the organs that keep alive their “shack of memories,” and the metaphors that weave together objects, memories, and bodies simulate the deep and intricate connections among them forged by Obasan’s loving recycling. Recalling Leistle’s observations on rituals, Obasan’s seemingly unremarkable “handling of objects,” her recurrent engagement with unsalvageable items, is what “creates cultural meaning,”34 animating ostensibly useless junk and making it a conduit for the memories that link Naomi to the shack and to her family. In addition, much like the family’s Sunday afternoon tea, Obasan’s recycling is a practice that highlights the conflicted situation of Japanese Canadians. Making trash constitutive of home, her recycling both acknowledges and counters the rejection of undesired excess by recuperating it. As Naomi observes, Obasan does not “divide the world into the saved and the lost” (79), but rather finds value in traversing such lines.

Understanding Obasan’s routine activities as ritualized allows questions of intentionality to recede and instead draws attention to the wider communal effects of her practices, particularly as they circulate through Naomi as participant, witness, and narrator. Bell suggests that the full creative force of ritualization is not always self-evident: “[Ritualization] is a way of acting that sees itself as responding to a place, event, force, problem, or tradition. It tends to see itself as the natural or appropriate thing to do in the circumstances. Ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, force, event, and tradition, how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding. It does not see how its own actions reorder and reinterpret the circumstances so as to afford the sense of a fit among the main spheres of experience—body, community, and cosmos.”35 Bell stresses that ritualization does not merely respond to social conditions but actively sustains and reshapes them, even if, as Naomi realizes, this generative quality is not immediately obvious. Responding to the displacements effected by the Canadian government, Obasan also redefines, reorders, and reinterprets her family’s circumstances. She engages in the kind of “bricolage” described by Michel de Certeau, “making do” not only by using thermos bottles in the place of teacups and recycling orange boxes as stools, but also by involving her family in acts of homemaking while in exile.36 In emphasizing Obasan’s “bricolage,” I do not intend to downplay the material constraints to which she is clearly responding, namely the limited resources available to her family after the government confiscated their property. Yet in the novel, these quotidian acts of survival are inextricable from their production of relationships among “body, community, and cosmos.”

Obasan’s careful recycling and continuation of Sunday afternoon tea implicate those around her, as they must constantly interact with the transformed objects in their new function as containers, furniture, and teacups. Serving as a foil to Obasan, Naomi’s brother Stephen engages in similar activities of repetition and preservation, but with the opposing effect of isolating himself. Naomi recalls, “Stephen remains in the rubble. He is quick to anger. He catalogues, categorizes, and tries to control the debris. He puts precise labels on every book and photograph. He preserves Father’s music on cardboard. His notes are meticulous and detailed” (22). Like Obasan, Stephen is fastidious in the routines that recall better times. Stephen, however, “remains in the rubble,” stuck in the past and unable to find a way to ground himself in Slocan and Granton. He inclines toward control and stasis—the containment of “debris” rather than its reuse. Whereas Obasan’s tea taking and recycling have a radiating force, drawing the other family members into practicing the custom or using her refashioned objects, Stephen’s cataloguing seems only to draw him further into himself. Years later, Naomi watches Stephen, now a famous violinist, on television, and observes that her brother has adopted displacement as a fundamental mode of existence: “He’s turned himself into one of those unreal TV people. There he was, like so many of them, wearing a decapitated rose on the lapel of his jacket. No stem. No thorn. No roots” (292). Pristine in his isolation, Stephen has severed all messy ties to the unpleasant past, their broken family, and other Japanese Canadians.

In setting Stephen’s tendencies against those of Obasan, the novel suggests that repeated, quotidian efforts to connect to a preinternment life are not inherently recuperative. Such practices are, however, everyday acts of survival, seemingly minor efforts to grapple with the pressures of internment and dispersal. For Naomi, Obasan’s tender routines, with their distinctly collective inclinations, demonstrate the potential for displaced customs and modest habits to sustain, manage, and reshape the relations between peoples and places undermined by exile.

The Tasks of Redress

Naomi’s accounts of Obasan’s routines reveal how such activities exceed their obvious practical functions by managing the contradictory pressures placed on Japanese Canadians and encouraging the enactment of rejected communal ties. Obasan’s persistent recycling and reinstatement of Sunday afternoon tea require those around her to perform their bonds, however fraught, to one another and to their various Canadian homes. Ritualized routines, specifically those tied to political mobilization, are also prominent in the second half of Itsuka, which offers a detailed portrayal of the Japanese Canadian redress movement. Following Naomi’s transformation from a figure of isolation and a skeptic of the movement to a dedicated proponent of redress, the novel tracks the gradual, tentative process by which her participation realizes rather than follows her political beliefs. It shows that adequate reparation for the internment and the dispersal required more than the apology and monetary compensation that the government ultimately offered. While charting the movement’s official accomplishments, Itsuka calls attention to the ritualizing by-products of routine organizational tasks, which not only serve practical purposes, but also materialize, through repeated enactments, the connections made untenable by the dispersal. Through her participation in the movement’s day-to-day undertakings, Naomi comes to embody—in its full corporeal and visceral sense—the community that it seeks to represent.

In contrast to its depiction of the internment and dispersal, which is fragmentary and dense with imagery, Itsuka narrates the Japanese Canadian redress movement in a largely linear, documentary fashion. The movement achieved its explicit goals on September 22, 1988, when Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney formally apologized for the internment and offered both individual and community reparations before the House of Commons. The government’s settlement with the National Association of Japanese Canadians, however, was reached only after five years of fraught negotiations and decades of silence. In 1947, soon after the internment, the government assigned Justice Henry Bird to lead a commission to reimburse Japanese Canadians for property losses. The Bird Commission eventually distributed $1.2 million based on very limited criteria for calculating damages and stipulated that recipients waive all future claims for compensation. With its meager offering, the commission refused to acknowledge the extent of the losses suffered by Japanese Canadians, and stifled further efforts to hold the government accountable. Nonetheless, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the release of classified wartime records, the 1977 commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Japanese immigration to Canada, and the establishment of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians helped invigorate the movement for redress in Canada. The National Association of Japanese Canadians led these efforts, but when its National Redress Committee began negotiations with the government in 1983, an internal struggle ensued between George Imai, the chair of the committee, and NAJC members who advocated for wider participation in determining the terms of the settlement. For several years, the NAJC grappled with both the government’s conditions for offering reparations and arguments among Japanese Canadians concerning appropriate procedures. In 1988, however, a successful rally for redress in Ottawa and the signing of the Civil Liberties Act in the United States, which offered compensation to Japanese Americans, helped bring about the long-anticipated “Settlement Day.”

Although Kogawa changes the names of the groups and individuals involved in the redress movement, she otherwise offers a meticulous account of its development. The leadership struggles, thorny negotiations, and milestones find close parallels in Itsuka.37 Yet Naomi, as the first-person narrator, specifically recounts these events from the perspective of someone who is initially skeptical of the movement and the need to build a Japanese Canadian community. Roped into participating by Emily, Naomi confesses, “I wouldn’t dare admit it right now, but I’m not a true believer in redress. I’m not a true believer in anything much” (185). Her account of the movement therefore tracks not only its history, but also her gradual transformation into a “true believer.” The novel begins in September 1983, after Naomi has fled from the affectionate touch of her friend Cedric, who, like Emily, encourages her to become more involved in the movement. Eventually returning to this opening moment after taking many winding detours into the past, the novel explicitly marks this point as transformational: Naomi relates, “I’m sick of my safe old dead-end tale. Give me a crossroads where the beginning of an altogether new story touches a turning point in the old” (165). Frightened and inspired by her budding romantic relationship with Cedric, Naomi seeks a different narrative in which to belong. At this self-declared “crossroads,” the novel matches Naomi’s change in outlook with a change in style, leaving behind the fragmentary structure and lyrical language of Obasan to move forward chronologically with an account of the redress movement. Despite Cedric’s importance in bringing about this transformation, the “new story” that Naomi comes to inhabit is the tale of the movement for redress, rather than a love story.38

While the second half of the novel unfolds in a markedly different style from the first, quotidian activities continue to play a critical role in animating communal bonds. Through the day-to-day activities of the movement, Naomi comes to embody the beliefs that her involvement ostensibly precedes and brings into being the community that she is supposed to represent. In other words, Naomi helps to perform a Japanese Canadian community in the dual sense of presenting and achieving. In the following passage, for example, the task of putting together a mailing list takes on a symbolic, performative significance in excess of its explicit practical value:

I was going through the Anglican church directory and finding a few names of kids I knew in Slocan. . . . It was like the day when I first came to Anna’s house and raindrops were plopping onto my face. Something wet and unexpected was seeping up out of childhood and tingling through the dry rootlets of my memories. . . . The niseis seem to be innately organized. In the midst of the paper chaos, they understand what needs to be done—the cross-checking for duplication, the alphabetical ordering, the phoning to get apartment numbers and to check ambiguous names. . . . I could feel the passion beneath the banter. It was contagious. Each name mattered. Each life. (191–92)

Naomi takes on basic organizational duties with the practical goal of easing political mobilization by creating a database of contacts. The passage indicates, however, that these highly organized, repetitive acts have a ritualistic as well as instrumental function. Regardless of how the group actually uses the completed list, Naomi’s execution of the routine tasks involved in its creation already begins to materialize the goals of the movement. Stimulating her dry and dying “rootlets,” it connects Naomi to the people and places of her past, as well as to the other volunteers. The “contagious” banter of those around her implicates her in their passion and rouses a visceral engagement with their political commitments. An admitted nonbeliever, Naomi nevertheless comes to perform community through the rather prosaic activity of making a mailing list. The novel thus suggests that attending only to the most instrumental effects of the movement’s activities obscures the ritual elements that realize political beliefs and communal bonds.

The novel’s preoccupation with the routine processes of political mobilization complements the position it takes with respect to the actual debates that emerged among Japanese Canadians during the redress movement. As I mentioned above, a disagreement transpired within the NAJC between George Imai and members who wanted wider participation in negotiating a settlement with the government. Kogawa depicts a parallel situation in Itsuka, in which the character Nikki Kagame seeks to expedite the redress process by carrying out talks with the government without conferring with the larger community. Narrated from Naomi’s perspective, the novel is unabashedly skeptical of Nikki’s approach. In a crucial moment of the narrative, delegates representing the various branches of the National Japanese Canadian League (the NAJC’s fictional counterpart) vote to implement structural changes to expand involvement and thus reject Nikki’s proposals. Attending this decisive meeting, Naomi enthuses, “I drink in the excited faces around me. We all know that something significant has just happened. A tiny green political shoot has nudged its way through a long winter’s sleep. And in the wall of our community’s long silence, a faint crack has appeared. A thin spear of light leaps toward us” (199–200). Recalling the depiction of Naomi’s reawakening as she helps organize addresses, this passage extends the metaphor of a plant stirring back to life with the imagery of Naomi’s “dry rootlets” growing into a “tiny green political shoot.” Much like the contagious “passion beneath the banter,” the “excited faces” of her fellow attendees leave a decidedly physical impression on Naomi. Characterizing Naomi’s response as a “drinking” of ecstatic visages, Kogawa conflates two understandings of partaking: the vitality afforded by consumption is inseparable from participation, as Naomi is nourished by her involvement in the activities of the NJCL. Furthermore, the metaphor suggests both an upward and a downward growth: Naomi and the other members are revived to the extent that they are rooted, and thus to the extent that they are able to ground themselves on the land from which they have repeatedly been displaced.

Like the gathering of names, the vote to change the group’s structure has specific practical, organizational effects, yet it also synchronically performs and brings into being the community that it projects into the past (the community that was dissipated) and the future (the community that will be forged through redress). The “excess” effects of these routine procedures highlight the limitations of Nikki’s plan to attain redress as quickly as possible. Although her plan would accomplish the instrumental objectives of the movement, it also disregards the significance of the “ritualizing” energies of the mundane, which symbolically and physically join Japanese Canadians in collective practices that materialize ties across time and space.

In returning to the imagery of the reanimated plant, the passage noticeably widens the scope of the metaphor’s tenor to encompass the revitalization of Japanese Canadians at large. At this point in the novel, Naomi’s “I” becomes increasingly subsumed by a “we” designating a robust Japanese Canadian community, not one inclined toward self-disintegration. Naomi’s increasing use of the plural “we” actualizes the community it denotes; as Connerton argues, to assert the pronoun is to constitute its referent: “The community is initiated when pronouns of solidarity are repeatedly pronounced. In pronouncing the ‘we’ the participants meet not only in an externally definable space but in a kind of ideal space determined by their speech acts. Their speech does not describe what such a community might look like, nor does it express a community constituted before and apart from it; performative utterances are as it were the place in which the community is constituted and recalls to itself the fact of its constitution.”39 Reiterations of “we,” like the mundane rituals described in the novel, perform community, bringing it into being through the continual rearticulation of bonds in an embodied present. Although Kogawa’s depiction of Naomi’s increasing involvement in the movement through organizational activities remains in the realm of narrative description, its intersection with a distinct turn to performative utterances of “we” also suggests an extra-diegetic ambition to constitute community in the spatial and temporal present of the reader.

Yet despite continual pronouncements of “we” from this point in the novel until its last passages,40 Kogawa maintains a tension between Naomi’s articulations of a singular and a plural voice. Naomi explicates,

Although, as we all know, we must speak with one voice, there is more than one view. From within the turmoil, it’s commitment that’s being formed. We’re no longer on the sidelines watching others. Japanese Canadians are in the spotlight’s glare.

Government’s intention is that we should harmonize in perfect Government-approved song. But no matter how ardently the choirmaster flails his arms, we sing out of tune. It’s a cacophonous choir, howling its way through the redress blues. I expect that any moment the curtain will thud at our feet. But some people having discovered their voices, will no longer be still. (240)

The passage highlights Naomi’s increasing identification with the movement for redress, as she speaks primarily as part of a collectivity. Yet the “we” that constitutes this collectivity—and becomes the voice of the novel—is hardly uniform. The pronoun’s referent is not always clear, variously gesturing to the larger Japanese Canadian population, those directly advocating for redress, and the smaller community with which Naomi works most closely. Furthermore, Naomi emphasizes that disagreements and turmoil are what forge commitment, rather than jeopardize it. Although the government demands that calls for redress be channeled into a single voice (preferably that of Nikki), Naomi suggests that for the choir to continue singing, it must sing “out of tune.” The image of the “cacophonous choir” captures the movement’s struggle to speak as a unified community while allowing divergent voices to emerge.41 Given that essentialist notions of race and accusations of self-segregation were used to justify the internment and the dispersal, cacophony is perhaps the only viable way to articulate a productive dissonance that simultaneously rejects gross characterizations of Japanese Canadians and affirms communal ties as necessary to defying the mandate to disappear.

Naomi describes the community’s rowdy “song” as the “redress blues,” drawing a parallel between their experiences of internment and dispersal with the oppression of African Americans in the United States. Ralph Ellison, in his essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” suggests that the blues offers the possibility of surviving and overcoming tragedy by delving deep into one’s sorrow: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”42 Ellison’s emphasis on the evocative function of the blues, its continuous reanimation of suffering in musical form, elucidates why it resonates with the redress movement. Given the wide-ranging repression of wartime and postwar injustices, by both the government and those dispersed, the “redress blues” serves as a delayed effort to keep alive “the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience.” Moreover, the image of blues sung not by an individual but by a choir underscores the importance of expressing “personal catastrophe” as part of an inharmonious collective.

Through its depiction of Naomi’s fitful inching toward belief in the struggle for redress, Itsuka stresses that communal affiliations are not the inevitable or inherent result of a shared ethnic identity. In her sociological study of how nisei women remember the internment, Sugiman observes that it was necessary for Japanese Canadians to develop a sense of collective memory from individual recollections of the internment in order to make a case for redress; she adds, “In future years, community bonds may paradoxically rest not on ‘racial blood’ but rather on shared memories and a place in this nation’s political history.”43 Kogawa’s novel proposes that the narration and politicization of these memories must also be accompanied by their literal incorporation as part of embodied practices. Melding the organizational with the restorative, Naomi contemplates, “And within our cocoons, new life is being formed. One by one, we are coming forth with dewy fresh wings. The more meetings we attend, the more we need to attend. We’re learning how to fly by stuffing envelopes” (243). Naomi explicitly connects the proliferation of banal activities with the emergence, from dispersed and cloistered “cocoons,” of a vibrant movement and community. To the extent that Naomi’s participation in such tasks precedes her pronouncements of a collective identity, the performativity of her discordant “we,” its actualization of community, is inseparable from the collection of addresses, the attendance of meetings, and the stuffing of envelopes. Such activities resonate beyond the practical to give a flexible body and rhythm to the “cacophonous choir,” holding it together in the face of internal and external pressures to disband.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing “War Brides”

Although the Canadian and U.S. governments largely carried out their respective internments as separate if parallel projects,44 the fates of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were closely intertwined, both during the war and long after its conclusion when the two redress movements flourished. With decorated veterans and elected officials among the former Japanese American internees advocating for redress, the movement in the United States helped propel similar efforts in Canada, where the dispersal policies and a smaller Japanese Canadian population made the fight for recognition more difficult. By the 1980s, Japanese Americans had also been designated by various media reports and politicians as a “model minority” whose educational and economic achievements apparently exceeded those of the white majority. Capping a narrative of triumph from adversity, the U.S. government’s offer of an apology and reparations in 1988 reflected the political changes enabled by the civil rights movement and the growing backlash against its gains. As Chapters 3 and 4 elaborate, critics of the model minority myth have called attention not only to its elision of significant disparities between and within racialized groups, but also to its deployment in efforts to dismantle affirmative action and other programs intended to alleviate race- and class-based inequities.45

Narrating the transformation of Japanese Americans from enemy aliens to ideal citizens, however, required glossing over the immediate postwar era. Tetsuden Kashima observes that studies of Japanese Americans during this so-called period of transition are sparse, and contests the notion that it was characterized by steady advancement. Instead, he asserts that this period was marked by crisis and social amnesia.46 Building on Dorothy Swaine Thomas’s extensive study in The Salvage of the voluntary dispersal program that relocated Japanese Americans from internment camps to white, middle-class communities,47 Caroline C. Simpson also emphasizes the disappointments that prevailed in the years following World War II. Remarking on the volunteers’ struggles to adapt to their new homes and abide by pressures to avoid ethnic affiliations, Simpson notes, “The resettled population’s inclusion as ‘loyal’ Americans was ultimately purchased at the price of their alienation from both the white and Japanese American communities.”48 In her analysis of the decade following World War II, Simpson argues that it was the Japanese wives of U.S. soldiers, rather than Japanese Americans returning from internment, who functioned as precursors to the Japanese American model minority myth inaugurated in the 1960s.

Various factors in the postwar period helped bring about the immigration of Japanese “war brides” to the United States: a shift in U.S. relations with Japan from antagonistic to paternalistic, the attenuation of race-based restrictions on immigration, and the beginnings of a decisive reckoning with Jim Crow. The U.S. military’s central role in the postwar reconstruction of Japan facilitated contact between American soldiers and Japanese women, while legislation allowing the wives of servicemen to immigrate despite racial quotas and the gradual elimination of the quotas themselves enabled couples to marry and move to the United States.49 Tracing a shift in popular representations of “war brides” from predictions of failure to fulsome accounts of success, Simpson contends that these women came to serve as exemplars of American cultural pluralism and harbingers of successful integration. She argues that they made more appealing candidates for this role than either African Americans, who were haunted by a long history of slavery and struggling with the persistence of Jim Crow laws, or Japanese Americans, who had just emerged from internment and were struggling with the disappointments of the resettlement policies.50

The Saturday Evening Post article by William L. Worden that begins this chapter participates in the elevation of Japanese “war brides” as embodiments of successful racial integration. The story moreover repeatedly implies that racial discrimination is no longer a problem, or at the very least, it has not impinged on the brides’ ability to assimilate. Worden raises the possibility that racial prejudice might persist only when he discusses the hostility directed at the women by “the Japanese who were here earlier than the brides”—that is, by those similarly racialized.51 He quotes a second-generation Japanese American social worker as saying, “The existing Japanese community just doesn’t accept the brides.”52 Although the social worker points to differences in class and education as the reason behind this rejection, Worden insinuates that his remarks reveal lingering racial intolerance by offering them as the potential counterargument to another interviewee’s theory that “apparently we Americans are losing our race prejudice.”53 Worden therefore makes the perplexing suggestion that racial discrimination against the “war brides,” if it exists at all, comes from Japanese Americans. He then proceeds to dismiss these Japanese Americans from his story by declaring, “At any rate, few of the brides cling to Oriental communities.”54 Worden thus sets recently immigrated Japanese “war brides,” whom he characterizes as paragons of American pluralism, against recently released Japanese Americans, who insist on racial differentiation by staying within ethnic communities. Even as the government was on the verge of enforcing desegregation and still in the process of lifting prohibitions on miscegenation and Asian immigration, the article maintains that successful assimilation is the result of individual choice and sheer determination.55

Yet in its praise of the women’s disappearance, the article paradoxically makes their difference all the more visible. It begins by setting up a presumably familiar scene:

The house is large, two-storied and almost precisely like its neighbors in Seattle’s slightly academic university district. Children’s swings in the yard duplicate equipment up and down the street, and in the living room a visitor is likely to be shown school reports—two children doing very well—before the children’s short and smiling mother will talk about anything else. . . .

Perhaps this is nothing unusual: a mother-in-law proud of her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Conrad Cotter. The unusual aspect is that Mrs. Frederick Cotter is a tall and graying Caucasian; her son, Conrad Cotter, is a Cornell University graduate student studying governmental economics. The daughter-in-law Michiko, and her two children are Japanese.56

Opening with a description of a house that seems to resemble those that surround it, Worden reveals rather dramatically that the daughter-in-law in question and her children (from a previous marriage) are Japanese. Worden therefore materializes the ostensibly disappearing “war bride,” and makes her closeness to American norms (“almost precisely like”) remarkable rather than banal. She is visible in her invisibility, peculiar in her familiarity.

Worden’s study of these women began several years earlier, with an article he cowrote with Janet Wentworth Smith titled “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” which was published in the January 19, 1952, edition of the Saturday Evening Post. A story to which Worden’s 1954 article could serve as a sequel, it reports on the immigration of Japanese “war brides” and describes their enrollment in schools established by the Red Cross to help prepare them for life in the United States. The sub-headline proclaims, “Six thousand Americans in Japan have taken Japanese brides since 1945, and all the little Madam Butterflys [sic] are studying hamburgers, Hollywood and home on the range, before coming to live in the U.S.A.”57 Intended to instill the women with the values and domestic skills of middle-class American housewives, the bride schools, which began in 1951, adopted and transmitted a limited notion of proper American behavior.58 Although the article can only speculate about the outcome of these efforts to “Americanize” the “Madam Butterflys” before their arrival in the United States, it assumes that they desire and greatly need this training. Smith and Worden recount,

Country girls not only are innocent of slip technique but imagine that they are being American by having their sleek black hair frizzled into dulled mops in “Hollywood” beauty salons on Japanese side streets. They mix unbelievable hues in their outer clothing and have no idea of what to do with a girdle, although they buy them, thus annoying the life out of slightly spreading American women who find the PX never has the right size at the right time because some Japanese bride just bought it, perhaps to hang on the wall of her home as a decoration.59

As in Worden’s article on the disappearing brides, the apparent aspiration of these women to be more “American” only brings into relief their difference. Elena Tajima Creef, whose mother was one of the subjects of this article, observes, “The Japanese women are disciplined and trained by the brides’ schools to imitate domestic American culture and style yet at the same time are subjected to the Post’s ridicule for presuming such an affectation.”60 Although the two stories are dissimilar in tone, the earlier one tending to mock the brides and the later one largely praising them, they jointly articulate the contradictory logic of the racial mundane: they insist that the women should (and should want to) seek assimilation, yet their very movement toward this elusive horizon—tracked by their enactment of quotidian domestic tasks—comes to serve as a persistent measure of their difference.

Moreover, while assimilation receded as a constantly deferred and interrupted possibility, the “war brides” were propelled to its promise by the disintegration of social ties. Numerous factors coalesced to isolate these women: the disapproval of miscegenation in Japan and the United States; the defamation of these women as opportunists, “Japs,” and prostitutes (despite the rigorous examinations to which they were subject before the military would approve their marriage);61 the breaking of bonds with family and friends in Japan, whether as a result of geography or social censure; and the dispersal of the women in scattered locations throughout the United States (mostly army bases or their spouses’ hometowns), where they were largely dependent on their husbands and their husbands’ family.

In contrast to Worden’s implicit censure of any inclination to “cling to Oriental communities,” Velina Hasu Houston’s drama Tea insists that the discrepancy between the promises of “Americanization” and its frustrations makes the development of a community among “war brides” both difficult and imperative. First produced in 1987 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Tea is the third installment in a trilogy inspired by the experiences of Houston’s mother, who immigrated to the United States from Japan after marrying an American soldier. Asa Ga Kimashita (1981) introduces Setsuko Shimada and Creed Banks, the characters based on Houston’s parents. American Dreams (1984) then follows the couple to New York to meet Creed’s family. In the course of this play, they learn that the army intends to send Creed to a base in Kansas. In contrast to Tea, which employs role-doubling and a fluid temporal structural, these earlier plays follow a more straightforward realist style, and everyday behaviors primarily convey the characters’ attachments to Japanese or American conventions. In Asa Ga Kimashita, for example, the mundane helps to dramatize growing tensions in Japan after World War II between those, like Setsuko’s father Kiheida, who resist the changes that accompany the American occupation, and those, like Setsuko’s cousin Fumiko, who embrace them. Thus, Fumiko’s insistence on hugging Setsuko draws her uncle’s reprimand that it is a sign of “Western indulgence.”62 While this initial chastisement suggests a gruff affection for his niece, he later explicitly prevents the two from embracing in a gesture that connects hugging to a more serious offense. Kiheida berates Fumiko for her friendly relationships with Americans and argues with her about the transformations they are effecting in Japan. When he then stands in Fumiko’s way as she reaches for Setsuko, the thwarted hug symbolizes his refusal to let what he regards as damaging Western and American influences touch his family.

When Fumiko and Setsuko reunite in New York in American Dreams, hugging returns to provide a measure of the different paces at which they adjust to American life. The stage directions instruct, “The women laugh joyously and bow. They then embrace, a move which appears awkward for Setsuko but she tries all the same.”63 The awkwardness that Setsuko should exhibit while hugging indicates her lingering resistance to adopting, as her cousin swiftly does, a different set of cultural norms. Setsuko moreover persists in bowing to people as is customary in Japan. Bowing, rather than hugging, is a more significant point of contention in this play, a difference that highlights the change in setting as Creed tries to persuade Setsuko to stop the practice once they arrive in the United States. When Setsuko declares in the play’s final scenes that she will stop bowing, she makes it clear to Creed that her decision reflects not accommodation, but critique: “And I am not going to bow. Americans do not understand the honor of a bow.”64 Whereas hugging in Asa Ga Kimashita expresses a rupture in Japanese society and emphasizes Kiheida’s destructive rejection of all challenges to the status quo, Setsuko’s eventual refusal to bow in American Dreams tenders a bodily critique of postwar American society, where segregation continues, anti-Japanese sentiments linger, and interracial couples are marginalized.

In Tea, the mundane retains its metonymic function, reflecting the characters’ relationships to one another and to Japan and the United States. Yet Tea’s more experimental, ritualized style also intensifies the mundane’s performative force. It is not that everyday behaviors are no longer symbolic in Tea, but that these representational aspects lend texture to performances that above all facilitate community building across difference. Whereas gestures such as hugging and bowing add to Asa Ga Kimashita and American Dreams but are not entirely necessary to our understanding or experience of the play, the enactment, transmission, and transformation of the mundane are critical to the rituals choreographed by Tea.

Tea picks up Setsuko’s story several years after the end of American Dreams. Creed has passed away, leaving Setsuko in Kansas to raise their two daughters. Although Setsuko remains a central character, Tea disperses its attention among five “war brides.” The play opens with the suicide of one of these women, an event that brings the others to her home to clean and take tea. The sharing of tea, which frames the women’s conversations and the flashbacks that make up a substantial portion of the drama, notably occupies a middle ground between ritual and routine. As Houston explains in an interview with Roberta Uno, “This is not tea in the Japanese ceremonial sense, but the ritual of everyday life.”65 Gathering to observe an acquaintance’s passing but not participating in a formal ceremony, the women’s tea drinking on this occasion reflects—and ultimately reshapes—how they share tea on a more quotidian basis. As in Itsuka, the ritualization of the mundane plays an integral role in forging a community among the women in the midst of numerous pressures and inclinations to maintain their solitude. Tea, however, specifically explores the productive “liminality” of ritual—what Victor Turner theorizes as its characteristic ambiguity—as it materializes in casual, day-to-day activities. In the play, these “rituals of everyday life” are the means through which the women come to perform community as the continuous reenactment and renegotiation of their relationships with one another.

Set in 1968 in Junction City, Kansas, the play begins with the suicide of Himiko Hamilton, a woman whose loneliness was exceptional even among the fragmented group of “war brides” residing near the Fort Riley army base. Living by herself after the deaths of both her abusive husband Billy, whom she shot in an apparent act of self-defense, and her daughter Mieko, who was raped and murdered after running away, Himiko had few friends. A “dance hall girl” from a poor family when she met her husband in Japan, she was shunned by other women for her suspected improprieties and eccentric behavior. Four of them nevertheless gather at her home to take tea after her death: Setsuko Banks and Chizuye “Chiz” Juarez, the two women who attempted to befriend Himiko while she was alive; Atsuko Yamamoto, who scorned Himiko but comes out of duty and curiosity; and meek Teruko MacKenzie, whom Atsuko treats as a sidekick. As the women prepare and take tea together, the performance moves between present and past, offering glimpses of their lives in Japan and early experiences in the United States, as well as scenes involving their husbands and daughters. During the performance, Himiko’s ghost remains onstage, speaking to the audience and frequently interjecting her own thoughts into their discussions.

A recurring theme in the women’s conversations is their relationships (or lack of relationships) with one another. A tendency to reject their shared identification as “war brides”—because of its denigration, class differences, or pressures to assimilate—reinforces the women’s solitude. When Chiz expresses surprise that so many people were interested in joining for tea after Himiko’s death, Setsuko admonishes her and explains, “After all, this is a difficult occasion for us: the first time a member of our Japanese community has passed on.” Chiz counters, “What ‘community’?” and Himiko concurs with her skepticism, explaining to the audience, “Yes, what community? We knew each other, but not really. . . . We didn’t care enough to know.”66 Like Itsuka, the drama highlights its central characters’ ambivalent feelings about forming a community around a denigrated identity. While Setsuko suggests that this community already exists by virtue of their shared ethnicity and history, Chiz and Himiko express doubts about its existence and its desirability.

As the women debate the status of a Japanese “war bride” community, the sharing of tea simultaneously manifests differences and forges connections. In her introduction to Tea in the anthology Unbroken Thread, Uno underlines the dual function of this everyday ritual: “The ritual of drinking tea becomes a device that draws [the characters] together, forcing them to examine their common experiences and the essence of what being Japanese means. Houston illustrates the women’s differences through the very manner in which they take tea.”67 Uno’s observation that tea both brings the characters together and illuminates their differences points to a central tension in the play between claims about essential Japanese qualities and reiterations of fundamental differences between the women. The drama stresses each woman’s distinct personality, and tea-drinking preferences help establish the characters as representatives of specific types. For example, the energetic and humorous Chiz, who is the most overtly “Americanized,” explains as the women introduce themselves to the audience that she takes her tea “Very hot. In a simple cup” (164), and later asks for coffee instead. In contrast, Atsuko, the snobby wife of a Japanese American nisei, prefers fancy cups and her own special tea. Meanwhile, mild-mannered Teruko likes her tea “cool” in any cup.

This emphasis on typical differences among the women, however, is set against references to a quintessential “Japaneseness.” Chiz remarks, “Ever since [Himiko] shot her husband two years ago, she’s kind of haunted me. It made me remember that underneath my comfortable American clothes, I am, after all, Japanese. (a quick smile) But don’t tell anybody” (170). Suggesting a Japanese core masked only by her American clothes, Chiz’s unexpected comment is one of several made by characters that imply inherent ethnic qualities. These claims, however, often lead to disputes about who is more or less Japanese. Thus, rather than reveal a consensus about what constitutes a Japanese “essence,” they manifest efforts by the women to articulate their relationships to one another. The following dialogue typifies these discussions:

Chiz: [Himiko] was not crazy.

Teruko: It is the Japanese way to carry everything inside.

Himiko: Yes. And that is where I hid myself.

Atsuko: [Himiko] came from Japan, but the way she dressed, the way she walked. Mah, I remember the district church meeting. She came in a low-cut dress and that yellow-haired wig, (mocks how she thinks a Korean walks) walking like a Korean.

Setsuko: Atsuko-san, ne, we have something in common with all the Oriental women here, even the Vietnamese. We all left behind our countries to come and live here with the men we loved. (172)

As descriptive claims, Teruko’s assertion that silence and suppression are the “Japanese way” and Himiko’s confirmation of this view assume an essential Japanese quality; considered in terms of their broader perlocutionary intent,68 however, these statements reflect an impulse to connect Himiko to a Japanese identity and an imagined community by associating her with the qualities assumed to be typical of it. Setsuko similarly refers to their common background to insist on their ties and responsibilities to one another. She reminds the women, “we are all army wives—and we are all Japanese” (171), and suggests, “But we’re here today because we’re Japanese” (171). Yet despite the importance she places on being Japanese, Setsuko extends the basis for identification in the dialogue above by pointing to a history shared with “all Oriental women” who came to the United States as “war brides.”

In contrast, Atsuko makes references to an essential Japanese character in order to establish differences and implement a hierarchy. Responding to Teruko’s comment that Himiko behaved in a “Japanese way,” Atsuko is quick to point out that Himiko, despite coming from Japan, did not act like a proper Japanese woman. She later criticizes Chiz in the same manner, remarking snidely, “I don’t expect Chizuye to understand the importance of being Japanese” (188). In making a distinction between coming from Japan and exhibiting the behaviors and beliefs appropriate to that heritage, Atsuko assumes the role of standard-bearer and distances herself from Himiko and Chiz.

In their variety, these declarations of being more or less Japanese, similar or different, work strategically and performatively. “Japanese” becomes a dynamic point of reference through which the women build and break ties, and calibrate their proximity to Americanness.69 Yet it is also haunted by the potential to slip, truncated, into a racial epithet, as in Teruko’s husband’s offhand remark, “Kinda like shooting at Japs again” (190), while on a hunting trip. Such derogatory associations shadow the positive pitch of Atsuko and Setsuko’s claims about Japanese identity and cast doubt on its use as a basis for affiliation. Here, as in Itsuka, the notion of a community based on a shared history of migration and racialization is fraught: the scorn directed at both “Japs” and “war brides” competes with the need to offset the accompanying alienation by connecting with those who made similar choices to marry and leave Japan.

Despite occasional attempts by Setsuko to invoke Japanese identity as a unifying force, such verbal declarations alone prove to be infelicitous, as J. L. Austin designates unsuccessful performative utterances. The other women, particularly Atsuko and Chiz, largely qualify, dismiss, or reject such claims. Instead, Tea emphasizes the significance of everyday rituals in allowing the women to enact a community, one that reveals relationships of both incongruity and affinity, and mediates between the siren calls of disappearance and the derisive calls of racism.

The play namely explores the productive intersection of ritual’s “liminality” with the mundane rhythms of everyday life. Victor Turner’s seminal work on rituals drew attention to the generative possibilities of hybrid, ambiguous identities. Turner’s theories are particularly instructive here, however, for thinking about how ritual as a process functions within the play. Inspired by Arnold van Gennep’s identification of the three phases of rites of passage as separation, limen (margin or threshold), and aggregation, Turner seizes on the middle, “liminal” phase as crucial to rituals and offers a particularly evocative description of this state:

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.70

Liminality is a condition of suspension between established social positions. Occupying an interstitial, undecided space, liminal personae are marked by ambiguity. They moreover manifest a society’s ambivalence, the uncertainties and contradictions within its accepted “network of classification.” This “betwixt and between” state, however, does not imply a paralyzing indeterminacy. Instead, ritualization exploits the dynamic potential of liminality’s ambiguity. Turner argues, “The liminal phase is the essential, anti-secular component in ritual per se, whether it be labeled ‘religious’ or ‘magical.’ Ceremony indicates, ritual transforms.”71 Through ritual, liminality acquires a transformative force.

This does not mean, however, that liminality (or ritual) is inherently subversive or radical. The debates in ritual studies that I described above highlight ritual’s conservative effects as well as its oppositional possibilities, and the ambiguity of ritual is often part of larger practices that consolidate and maintain established social orders. Jon McKenzie’s critique of the “liminal-norm” in performance studies, “where the valorization of liminal transgression or resistance itself becomes normative,”72 cautions against ignoring liminality’s more conventional inclinations, which Turner himself recognized. Hardly a naïve celebration of liminality, Tea stresses the burdens placed on “liminal personae” to sustain existing social distinctions, and imagines mundane rituals as practices of surviving, rather than subverting, their ambiguous positions. The passage supposedly afforded by liminality (and thus its efficacy) is, moreover, complicated in the play by its attachment to the everyday.

Liminality is in many ways the predominant mode and preoccupation of Tea. In presenting the women as participants in a ritualized routine, the performance also takes on the structure, trajectory, and rhythms of a ritual, with a particular focus on its liminal attributes. Fittingly set in Junction City, Kansas, it situates itself between life and death, the United States and Japan, and the past and the present. Himiko explains to the audience, “I am suspended between two worlds. There is no harmony here (indicates the women in the tatami room) nor here (indicates her soul)” (167). Himiko’s gesture suggests that the other women are also in a limbic state, even if they are not trapped, as she is, in a more literal purgatory. The music that begins the play further emphasizes that the characters occupy the uncomfortable interstices between “Japanese” and “American”: the stage directions stipulate, “In the darkness, an unaccented, female American voice belts out ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ A traditional Japanese melody—perhaps ‘Sakura’—cuts into the song’s end as lights fade slowly half to suggest a netherworld” (162–63). The intermixing of two culturally emblematic songs immediately locates the characters in an ambiguous space between nations, which the dim lighting then infuses with further uncertainty by overlaying it with the “netherworld.”

Tea’s temporal structure and its use of role-doubling further heighten its liminal quality. Kimberly Jew suggests that these devices manifest a shift from the “real world,” where Himiko is ridiculed for occasionally donning a blond wig and otherwise “acting out of character,” to an explicitly theatrical world in which such behavior is no longer aberrant: “In the real world, Himiko’s attempts to escape her identity were painfully unsuccessful, interpreted as signs of her mental instability. But in the unreal world of her interiority (i.e., the theatrical performance of Tea), her transformative acts are no longer unnatural.”73 The fluid movements between times, places, and characters establish role-playing and ambiguous identities as the conventions and norms of the performance and the world it represents, and thus situate the play in Himiko’s limbo.

In terms of its temporal structure, the performance continuously vacillates between the present, in which the women are taking tea, and various moments of the past, such as the women’s difficult lives in Japan immediately after World War II, their encounters with U.S. soldiers, and their first experiences in Kansas. In these shifts between past and present, the drama weaves the five women’s stories in alternating patterns of likeness and difference. Bickering with Atsuko, who is protesting that she is not a “war bride” since she did not marry the war, Chiz remarks, “And then we came here—to Kansas. Not quite the fairy tale ending you ordered, eh, Ats?” (185). Chiz’s remark then seems to trigger a “flashback” to their arrival in the United States, with each of the women recalling her difficulty adjusting to the move: Atsuko reenacts her efforts to find a Japanese restaurant, while Setsuko re-creates her indignation at discovering that she and her husband cannot stay at a hotel because they are an interracial couple. As the women then list Japanese foods that they miss, the dialogue takes on a repetitive, incantatory style:

Atsuko: Sasa-dango.

Teruko: Kushi-dango.

Chiz: Hot oden.

Setsuko: Kaki. There’s nothing like Japanese persimmons.

Atsuko: He never told me there would be no Japanese food.

Setsuko: He never told me about “we reserve the right.”

Chiz: I never thought he would die and leave me here to be an American without him.

Teruko: I never thought they would be scared of us, too.

The shrill whistle of a tea kettle blasts through the air, bringing the women back to the tatami room . . .

Teruko: More tea.

Himiko: (to audience) Yes. Please. They must keep drinking. (186)

Framed by Chiz’s provocative statement and the piercing call of the tea kettle, the scene draws attention to each of the characters’ distinct personalities and experiences even while progressively highlighting parallels with recurring words and sentence structures that recall the highly stylized, conventional speeches of formal rituals. The repetitions of “He never told me” and “I never thought,” for example, establish analogies between their respective disillusionments. Although the women are ostensibly not doing much more than talking and sipping tea, the play infuses their recollections with a ritual style that underscores the dynamic adjustment and readjustment of their relationships. Despite the antagonism between Chiz and Atsuko, Chiz’s bitter remark points to their common disappointments, which are remembered in a chant of missed foods and unpleasant revelations.

The five actors, however, must play not only the women in the “present” and their younger selves, but their husbands and children as well. The scenes in which they take on these different roles are introduced with appropriate remarks during the conversation and initially suggest a reenactment of the women’s memories much like their remembrances of arriving in Kansas. The actor playing Setsuko begins the role-doubling by performing her husband’s reaction to her first, failed attempt to use a washing machine: “Uh, Baby-san, why are you staring at the washing machine? . . . Yes, I promised it’s all automatic. But honey, even when it’s automatic, you have to push the button to turn it on” (188). Re-creating an interaction between wife and husband, the scene seems to be presenting the latter as the former remembers him (thus, as mediated by her perspective in the aftermath of Himiko’s death). As the role-doubling continues, however, it begins to include situations in which the women would not have been present, such as their husbands’ hunting trip and their daughters’ sleepover. In these later scenes, the actors seem to play these characters as roles distinct from the “war brides” and their memories, although the three characters taken on by an actor remain linked by familial bonds. The performance therefore makes it difficult to determine if the reenactments of other family members represent the women’s memories or projections, or mark a more complete shift to other roles.

This ambiguous layering of roles underscores the liminality that persists in theater in the nebulous relationships it makes possible between actors and characters. Moving from a “war bride” to her husband or her daughter, the actor carries traces of each role into the others. Marvin Carlson argues that actors are not transparent vehicles for characters but are instead haunted by previous performances.74 In Tea, the assignment of several roles to one actor in a single production makes the haunting more acute.

While the uncertainty of the relationship between the minor roles and the primary characters adds to the liminal quality of the performance, the device also highlights the wider social networks in which each woman is situated—networks that become discernible through the changes in minute behaviors that accompany the actors’ passages between roles. The doubling (or more precisely, the tripling) of roles joins the characters of one family together and makes the boundaries between them more permeable, but it also brings into relief the gulfs and differences between them by staging the actor’s shifts from one character to the next, and thus the work required by such a passage. This work takes place largely through the mundane—that is, through the adoption of alternate mannerisms, accents, and other behavioral tendencies, as well as through repeated commentary on the quotidian disorientations of the “war brides.”

The secondary characters of husbands and daughters explicitly verbalize their difference from the “war bride” characters performed by the same actor through remarks that stress the latter’s apparent peculiarities, particularly those that seem to reflect their distance from normative American behaviors. Setsuko’s husband thus explains to her that she must turn on the washing machine, while her daughter recounts to her friends, “Mom’s so funny. We were separated in a store and, over the intercom, I heard: ‘Japanese mother lost in dry goods. Will her daughter please claim her?’” (196). Such anecdotes would fit neatly into Smith and Worden’s article on the Red Cross schools intended to “Americanize” Japanese women married to U.S. servicemen. The women’s lack of proficiency in carrying out domestic tasks such as washing clothing and buying groceries becomes the sign of their difference and further accentuates the disparities between characters by highlighting their varying degrees of ease with everyday American living.

These accounts of quotidian behaviors that seem to set the women apart, however, are complicated by the shifts in minute bodily expressions that must accompany the leaps between characters. In moving from one character to the next, the actors must simulate the behavioral transformations demanded of the “war brides” by becoming their “more American” husbands and children. The switching of roles, while clarified and emphasized by the ensuing dialogue, must initially be indicated by a change in comportment: when the women first play their husbands, “they appear rigid, stoic with the carriage of men” (188). As the actors adopt corporeal expressions of masculinity and military training, their bodies become sites of incomplete transformations. Haunted by their previous enactments of the “war brides” as well as physical attributes and habits that exceed their performance in the play, they materialize both the possibility and the impossibility of becoming another. The daughters’ sleepover captures an even more complicated dynamic: during this scene, several of the teenagers mockingly imitate their mothers’ accents as they share stories of the latter’s eccentricities. As the same actors who play the mothers also play the daughters mimicking the mothers, verbal inflections must embody subtle degrees of proximity and distance. When imitating their mothers, the daughters must suggest their familiarity with their parents’ verbal tendencies, even as their accents must be distinguishable from the actors’ direct performances of the mothers, which would not be channeled through the daughters’ voices and bodies. As the three roles assumed by each actor reflect on and interact with one another, they manifest each character as the incongruent coalescence of family relationships.75

By assigning actors multiple roles, each accompanied by specific temporal and spatial shifts, the play locates each “war bride” in a constellation of sociohistorical exigencies and familial bonds, which, when juxtaposed, situates them in an increasingly complicated matrix of social relations.76 This interplay of difference and affinity, enacted through the mundane and patterned by the stylized repetitions and heightened liminality of ritual, propels the performance as the women continue to talk and take tea, and constitutes the flexible, provisional community they form by its conclusion. The last scene connects an explicitly religious ritual with the more quotidian sharing of tea among friends, thus emphasizing the productive joining of the sacred and the mundane. The scene begins with the women doing a Buddhist chant to call Himiko to join them for tea. Chiz then sets down a fifth cup for Himiko: “The women sit for a last drink of tea. Himiko joins them. They lift their cups simultaneously and slightly bow their heads to one another. Himiko forms a cup with her hands and drinks from it in unison with the others. She looks happier” (200). If, as Turner argues, ritual transforms, the primary transformations traced by the play are the passage of Himiko’s spirit from limbo to the afterworld and the development of a community among all of the women. Or more precisely, Himiko is able to find peace through the women’s ritualized performance of community, which transforms their limbic state “between two worlds” from a condition of solitude to a site of generative bonds.

As significant as rituals are to the play, however, it is their ongoing engagements with the mundane that promise to sustain the characters’ dynamic ties to one another. As the women leave Himiko’s home, Chiz seems to confirm the ritual’s success by declaring, “I am glad I came here today. Somehow, I feel at home with you women, you Japanese women. (smiles) Today” (200). Chiz’s statement suggests an affirmation of their solidarity, but it also leaves some uncertainty as to whether or not the community they perform is sustainable. By claiming that she feels at home with “you Japanese women,” Chiz simultaneously identifies with them and sets herself apart. Furthermore, she punctuates her remark with “Today,” suggesting their friendship may be transient. The ambiguity of Chiz’s statements thus suggests that the women must continually perform and re-perform their fragile community, materializing it in the repetition of distinctly everyday rituals—those that are not framed and rarefied as special if regularly repeated events, but are instead integrated into the restless, uneven currents of daily life.

Ritual at the Limits of Form

The publication and production records of Itsuka and Tea, respectively, suggest broad cultural dispersals that aptly flout the pressures to disappear exposed in each work. Itsuka, while not matching Obasan’s popularity or reputation, was nevertheless a best seller in Canada. Tea is Houston’s most frequently performed work and one of the most staged plays by an Asian American writer, with over fifty productions in a range of cities in the United States, as well as in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. The recipient of numerous awards, Tea has been continuously produced since its world premiere in 1987. These public disseminations, however, have also been accompanied by strikingly parallel criticisms of the novel and the play as excessively documentary and political, alternately too prosaic or ornate, and insufficiently novelistic or dramatic. These reviews, like any other, reflect particular assumptions about evaluative criteria and the proper relationship between politics and art, as well as the critics’ own social positions and aesthetic preferences. Yet the discomfort elicited by the two works’ interest in the ritualized mundane also sheds light on the inevitable limits of demonstrating, through literary and dramatic representation, the significance of practices that require continuous, communal enactments. In other words, the play and the novel must paradoxically stay unconsummated efforts to convey the generative force of the “rituals of everyday life” precisely in order to remain consistent with the importance they place on sustained, collective participation in quotidian acts.

Tea’s numerous performances suggest its effectiveness as a medium for sharing what Houston describes in her dramatist’s notes as “the virtually undocumented historical fact of communities of Japanese ‘war brides’ who have lived in Kansas over the last twenty to forty years” (162). Lukewarm reviews of the drama in mainstream publications, however, seem to stand in contrast to its frequent and widespread production. I am not implying here that there should be a direct correlation between critical reception and popularity, but contradictory patterns in critical and popular responses can help illuminate a work’s complex engagements with its audiences. In the case of Tea, I find reviews of the play instructive not so much for cataloguing its weaknesses, but for registering the entirely apposite limits of its attempt to straddle the gap between conventional theater and mundane ritual.

The New York Times review of the Pan Asian Repertory’s 2007 production of Tea illustrates the kind of dubious reaction that, I suggest, must be considered in relation to the drama’s preoccupation with “the ritual of everyday life.” The article is one of several that criticize the play as insufficiently theatrical and too documentary, prone to stereotypes, clichés, and melodramatic language, or simply tedious.77 The writer, Anne Midgette remarks, “Since the plot calls for a climactic catharsis, one almost forgets to notice that the characters’ actions don’t actually seem enough to trigger it.”78 Midgette thus criticizes the unmotivated nature of the change that the characters undergo. Yet as a performance of the ritualized mundane, the play depends on a different logic of causality and efficacy. Grimes argues, “Ritualizing requires meandering; it is not reducible to causal, narrative, or rational sequences. This driftiness of logic and storyline is undramatic, even though ritualized events may be thick with theatrical elements.”79 Grimes likens the cadence of ritualization to a distracted tapping rather than a carefully developed crescendo.

Furthermore, in a ritual, transformation depends on participation and execution as much as conflict and resolution. Although the climactic moment in which Atsuko threatens to leave and then decides to stay may seem insufficient to reviewers as the trigger for catharsis, the effectiveness of everyday rituals is intrinsically tied to the collective execution of mundane activities. Feeling insulted one too many times by Chiz, Atsuko rises to leave and demands that Teruko follow. The usually compliant Teruko, however, insists on staying:

To [Atsuko’s] shock, Teruko even more firmly turns away. Devastated, Atsuko moves toward the door and then, defeated, falls to her knees; Himiko immediately comes to her side.

Himiko: Atsuko-san, stay. If you leave now, no one will rest.

Himiko stands in front of Atsuko and, without touching her, helps her to stand and balance using her hands as delicate guides. Atsuko fights with herself and then turns back to the women. She bows in apology to Teruko who bows back. She turns toward the door again, but Setsuko bows to her. Feeling much better, Atsuko returns the bow. Still uncomfortable, Atsuko glances at Chiz who motions kindly for her to sit down. (195–96)

This scene (and, ultimately, the play) turns on Teruko and Atsuko’s decision to remain until the women have finished taking tea together. Teruko’s tendency to defer to Atsuko and Atsuko’s tendency to belittle the other women make both of their decisions not to leave a significant departure from their preceding behaviors. Himiko’s plea for Atsuko to stay, or “no one will rest,” raises the stakes of the choice. Although nothing particularly distinctive occurs before or after the women decide to stay, they tacitly affirm the necessity of developing their nascent community. Culminating not in a dramatic revelation but in the women’s resolution to keep sharing tea, the play advances participation as the crucial undertaking that enables transformation. Teruko and Atsuko’s continued involvement allows the tea taking to “meander” and “drift” along to its completion in a rhythm characteristic not only of ritual, but also of the everyday.

The play’s investment in collective undertakings extends to the relationship it strives to develop with the audience, which it occasionally invokes as ritual participants as opposed to theater spectators. According to Richard Schechner, “The move from theater to ritual happens when the audience is transformed from a collection of separate individuals into a group or congregation of participants.”80 By setting Himiko as an intermediary not only between life and death, but also between the audience and the stage, the performance cultivates a more participatory relationship with the audience. In the opening scenes, as the women prepare to gather for tea, Himiko “holds out her arms in welcome to the audience as the other women exit,” and ostensibly invites the audience to join the gathering: “Come, . . . it is time for tea” (165). This gesture insinuates the audience’s involvement in the ritual about to unfold. By aligning spectators with Himiko, it situates them in a murky, limbic space between silent witness and active participant. Himiko continues to address the audience throughout the play, but the script calls for her to speak “as if she is on trial and offering a matter-of-fact defense” (165). She therefore implicates the audience as her interlocutor yet assumes that they, like the other “war brides,” view her life critically. In the final scene, however, the performance presents the possibility of a different relationship between Himiko and the audience, one that replicates the community instantiated among the women: “Himiko kneels downstage center. Holding the cup outward, she bows gracefully to the audience and then drinks the tea with extreme thirst that appears to be satisfied from the drink. She sets the cup down in front of her and smiles a half-smile, perhaps like that of Mona Lisa, to the audience. She bows low, all the way to the floor” (200). When Himiko turns to the audience at the play’s end, taking her final sip with them after the women leave, she asks those in attendance to see themselves not as spectators, but as participants in a ritual of continuous community making.

In addition, other conventions employed by the play, such as the assignment of multiple roles to one actor, highlight the liminal aspects that endure even in dramatic productions that enforce a segregation of audience and actor, or emphasize (theatrical) entertainment over (ritual) efficacy.81 Repeatedly blurring the lines between spectator and participant, between actor and role, and between the doubled roles, the performance prompts the audience to manage their indeterminate boundaries. In other words, it accentuates the audience’s active engagement in the processes of theater making as they accommodate the passages that an actor makes between her multiple roles.

Despite these gestures toward turning actors and audiences alike into Schechner’s “congregation of participants,” Tea ultimately remains a theatrical representation of ritualized practices. As I argued above, the play’s particular rhythm, logic of causality, and arrangement of typical (or stereotypical) differences become comprehensible when viewed as a reflection of its investment in mundane rituals. Yet this very emphasis on ritualization and the everyday strains against its concurrent enforcement of a now more conventional divide between actors and spectators. If, as Tea suggests, cultivating a community that can flexibly negotiate the dual pressures of racialization and assimilation requires repeated, collective, and quotidian practices, audience members as witnesses who ultimately remain on one side of the stage/seat divide must drift, like Himiko in the play’s beginning, at the edges of its ritualizing force, where the productiveness of liminality remains only a potential.

Reviews of Itsuka even more explicitly point to what I characterize as the novel’s ritualization of the mundane as its major weakness. In a review that Kogawa cites as having eroded her confidence as a writer,82 Stan Persky simultaneously praises Obasan and lambasts Itsuka. Denouncing the second half of the novel for subsuming aesthetics to politics, he declares that “scenes that unfolded like the paper birds of origami in the earlier novel give way to a clunky succession of public meetings, demonstrations, and office-bound strategy sessions,” and later adds, “The rhetoric of Community Studies 101 is laid on with a trowel in Kogawa’s earnest, well-meaning, ultimately lifeless documentary-a-clef.”83 Comparing Obasan’s aesthetic merits to the elegance of origami, Persky’s review characterizes Itsuka’s interest in the mundane details of political mobilization as an unfortunate deviation from the poetic sensibilities of the first novel.84 Like Persky, Mary di Michele in the Toronto Star hones in on what they both regard as Kogawa’s excessive chronicling of the redress movement’s organizational activities. She claims, “Through too much of the novel the reader is lost at the back of the room in meetings where characters are not people but a show of hands,” and muses, “Kogawa appears to be overwhelmed by the aesthetic problems of depicting the workings of a bureaucracy.”85 Di Michele supports the latter criticism with a passage from the novel that I quoted above: “The more meetings we attend, the more we need to attend. We’re learning how to fly by stuffing envelopes” (243). For di Michele, these lines exemplify the difficult marriage of figurative language and bureaucratic minutiae. Transforming characters into votes and envelopes into wings, Kogawa (these reviews claim) has turned her novel into an uneven work of historical or political—but not literary—interest.

Emphasizing a clash between the novel’s more documentary accounts of political mobilization and its more expressive accounts of Naomi’s personal development, these reviews illustrate their awkward merging by highlighting the passages that depict the ritualization of mundane behaviors. Di Michele thus turns to the scene of stuffing envelopes to demonstrate the strain between politics and aesthetics, or between a bureaucratic “show of hands” and an inspired portrayal of a character’s blossoming. Like Midgette, di Michele seems puzzled by the significance bestowed upon banal occurrences by aesthetic effects, such as the assumption of dramatic catharsis or elaborate metaphors.

What I have argued in this chapter, however, is that in Kogawa’s novel and Houston’s drama, these quotidian activities are efficacious for those who practice them precisely because they seem unremarkable and routine. The symbolic links they construct between bodies and stories are cemented by being interwoven with the familiar textures of the participants’ everyday motions. Furthermore, they achieve their full effect (namely, the performance of community) only through repeated enactments. The uneasiness generated by the novel and the play’s efforts to incorporate the “I” into the “we,” or to join metaphors of healing with an ardently political rejection of disappearance exposes, then, a gap between reading or seeing their performances of community and materializing community as an everyday performance. The limits reached by the novel and the play in conveying the significance of such practices therefore aptly, if somewhat paradoxically, make the case that scrupulous documentation, dense imagery, and even staged representations can only partially capture the force of the ritualized mundane.

With respect to Tea, however, extending the boundaries of analysis to include the processes leading up to its productions unveils other sites that might more fully realize its conception of everyday rituals. Schechner contends that “the workshop-rehearsal process and the ritual process are analogous,”86 and emphasizes that the former is “‘betwixt and between’ the fixed world from which material is extracted and the fixed score of the performance text.”87 In her study of the 1993 performance of Tea by the Horizons Theatre in Washington, D.C., Susan Haedicke describes these preproduction processes and highlights their consistency with the drama’s themes. She argues, “This intercultural exploration [of the ‘between-world’ condition] turned out to be conducted more in the process of mounting the play than in the actual production.”88 She then describes how the rehearsals included the sharing of stories and food, replicating the exchanges that take place in the play. During these gatherings, one of the actors recounted her mother’s experiences as a “war bride,” while the director, who is Jewish American, initiated a discussion of ethnicity by describing her experiences confronting prejudice after moving from New York to the Midwest.89 In this instance of life imitating art, Tea’s ritual potential was realized not in the execution of the final performance, but in its participants’ collective involvement in the routine processes of theater making.

While some form of ritual possibility might inhere in the rehearsal process itself, the specific models of interaction (exchanging food and stories) as well as the subjects of discussion (social alienation, lineage, and geographic displacement) were directly informed by Houston’s script. The concerns of the drama and the modes of performance that it presents are thus not insignificant to what the rehearsals accomplished, and how. Although the audience members of an already rehearsed performance might be the assumed addressees of a dramatic script, at least one intended for production, the cast and crew that stage a play are, necessarily, its first audience, and the one that accompanies it from the initial readings to the final performances. When Himiko therefore begins the play by “hold[ing] out her arms in welcome to the audience,” and bidding them, “Come, . . . it is time for tea” (165), her invitation extends to the audience of actors, directors, and stage crews already charged with turning these words into a live performance. By writing her mother’s story as theater, Houston etches into the script the promise that communities will come together to take tea and share stories and, through everyday practices on and off the stage, continuously forge new constellations of affinity and difference.

* * *

In 1988, the Nikkei International Marriage Society, headed by Kazuko Stout, held the first convention for Japanese American “war brides,” which brought together over three hundred participants. International conventions followed in Hawaii in 1994 and in Japan in 1997, and the latter became the first visit back to Japan for several attendees, who had been reluctant to return earlier due to lingering feelings of shame.90 According to Regina Lark, Stout chose to use the term “international bride” for the convention because of the negative connotations still carried by the term “war bride.” Lark relates, “Stout aims to change the sobriquet ‘war bride’ [to] mean courageous and strong, rather than passive and dependent. The annual meetings help to see her goals to fruition.”91 A tireless organizer who strives to build and maintain connections among the women, Stout is reminiscent of Itsuka’s Aunt Emily. Her desire to redefine a “war bride” identity indeed resonates with the climactic moment of Kogawa’s novel, when the prime minister offers an official apology. Naomi recounts, “Aunt Emily and I look at each other and smile. We’ve all said it over the years. ‘No, no, I’m Canadian. I’m a Canadian. A Canadian.’ Sometimes it’s been a defiant statement, a demand, a proclamation of a right. And today, finally, finally, though we can hardly believe it, to be Canadian means what it hasn’t meant before. Reconciliation. Liberation. Belongingness. Home” (328). For Emily and Naomi, the success of the redress movement transforms what it means to claim a Canadian identity. Once fraught with a history of rejection and mistreatment, it comes to mark the homecoming of Japanese Canadians on their own terms—that is, not through dispersal and disappearance, but through the struggle for redress.

In their influential work Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant stress that the rearticulation of identity is crucial to social movements and political change: “Social movements create collective identity by offering their adherents a different view of themselves and their world; different, that is, from the worldview and self-concepts offered by the established social order. They do this by the process of rearticulation, which produces new subjectivity by making use of information and knowledge already present in the subject’s mind. They take elements and themes of her/his culture and traditions and infuse them with new meaning.”92 Rearticulation imbues existing “elements and themes” with a different significance and force. It is made possible by social movements, but also shapes their course and effects. Omi and Winant argue, for example, that the “rearticulation of black collective subjectivity” from one of survival to struggle was vital to shifting the civil rights movement in a more radical direction.93

The cultivation of new views, self-concepts, and knowledge, however, always occurs alongside and in tension with quotidian practices and habitual behaviors. Itsuka and Tea make the case that the collective, repeated embodiments that constitute everyday rituals are integral to materializing and sustaining such rearticulations. Combining the transformative liminality of ritual with the subtle authority of the mundane, such performances charge shared identifications and realize declared affiliations. The point is not that political battles are won and lost in the field of the mundane, but rather that an engagement with the everyday is critical, as well as inevitable.