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2 INTERVIEW A Japanese,
born in the US of A
David
Mura is a poet, writer of creative non-fiction,
critic, playwright and performance artist. A
Sansei or third-generation
Japanese-American, Mura has written two memoirs:
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
(Grove-Atlantic), which won a 1991 Josephine
Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was
listed in the New York Times Notable Books of
Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An
Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996,
Anchor/Random). Mura's third and most recent
book
of poetry is Angels for the Burning (2004,
Boa Editions Ltd.). His novel, Famous Suicides
of the Japanese Empire, will be published in
2009 by Coffee House Press. He speaks to E
Ethelbert Miller.
E Ethelbert
Miller: As a well-known Japanese-American
writer, do you find yourself looking over your
shoulder at economic, political and cultural
events taking place in Japan today?
David Mura: I do pay
attention to these matters. But I don't feel I'm
looking over my shoulder - in the sense of being
worried that something troubling or unsettling
might come up.
I did have that feeling
back in the 1980s when the anti-Japanese sentiment
here [in the US] seemed to be reaching a dangerous
pitch. Indeed, this became a backdrop to my
memoir, Turning Japanese, about a year I
spent in Japan in 1985. There were the angry auto
workers in Detroit smashing up Japanese cars and
the killing of the Chinese-American Vincent Chin
by two white men who thought he was Japanese.
The Michael Crichton novel and film
Rising Sun, with its depiction of a vast
Japanese corporate conspiracy bent on taking over
America, seems ludicrous now, and even more so the
book The Coming War with Japan. But such
predictions were taken seriously back then. All of
this went away as the Japanese economic bubble
burst in the late 1980s.
I do believe that
there is a need in this country, both psychically
and politically, to create enemies for the
domestic population to focus on, and it's better
if these enemies are of - how might I put this? -
a darker hue. For a while, with incidents like the
case of Wen Ho Lee [the Chinese-American scientist
accused of espionage, whose case was dismissed
except for one minor charge], it seemed that the
target was going to be China. But then came
September 11 [2001], and the focus switched to the
Muslim world and the Middle East.
By
saying there's a need to create enemies, I'm not
saying that there may not be some real threat
involved in these three instances - Japanese
corporations, Chinese espionage, and Islamic
terrorists. I am saying that governments, both
ours and other governments, use such threats and
often exaggerate them for domestic purposes.
Indeed, the one time recently I was
worried about Japan's international relations
occurred when I visited China. The Chinese
government was obviously highlighting issues
stemming from World War II and Japanese
atrocities, as well as the current reluctance of
the Japanese government to acknowledge Japanese
war crimes. The Chinese government encouraged the
demonstrations against Japan as a sort of pressure
valve to let off steam from domestic social unrest
and divert attention away from governmental
repression and economic difficulties within China.
I am somewhat troubled by a few
pronouncements lately that indicate that Japan may
be becoming more militarily active. I don't
believe such a move would be good either for Japan
or for the international community. On the other
hand, I still think there is not a great deal of
sentiment within the Japanese population for
taking on a more extensive, much less a more
aggressive, stance in its international relations.
And Japan's very minimal participation in our
[America's] Iraq debacle has certainly not
encouraged the Japanese to think otherwise.
EM: Are there Japanese
words, traditions or beliefs that you attempt to
keep alive in your work?
DM:
My feelings about answering this question are
rather complex. Instead of giving an initial
answer, I think some background is necessary.
I'm a Sansei, a third-generation
Japanese-American, and my grandparents came to
this country about 1905. I grew up speaking no
Japanese and knowing very little about Japanese
culture. In this, I'm not much different from
other third-generation Americans. The culture of
my grandparents was nowhere near as central to my
growing up as it was for my parents.
In my
case, though, there is one particular difference:
along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans, my
grandparents and parents were imprisoned during
World War II. The ostensible reason for this was
military security. But even the government has now
admitted that this was not the case and, in an
official apology to the Japanese-American
community in 1988, acknowledged that the real
reasons for the internment camps were wartime
hysteria, a failure of leadership, and racism.
For my parents' generation, the internment
camps were something many did not talk about to
their children. My own take is that they were
imprisoned for their race and ethnicity, and
because of this, both their race and ethnicity
became explicitly and implicitly something they
should not call attention to. This was
particularly true for my parents.
Growing
up in a largely Jewish Chicago suburb, I wanted to
think of myself as white and shunned associations
with Japan and Japanese culture. It was only in my
late 20s, after reading authors like Frantz Fanon
and James Baldwin, that I began to question all
this. My trip to Japan and my writing of a memoir
about that trip helped precipitate a change in the
way I identified myself - as a person of color, as
a Japanese-American.
And yet, as I've said
above, I did not grow up knowing much about
Japanese culture. I use Japanese words in my
writing, particularly in relationship to writing
about my family past. Certainly, there are
Japanese art objects - posters and woodblock
prints, pottery, scrolls, statues of Buddha - in
my house. My children have gone to Japanese camp
and probably know a little more about Japan and
Japanese culture than an average American kid.
But jitsu wa - to be truthful - my
most real relationship with Japanese culture is
one of amnesia, something that has been lost
through the process of Americanization and through
the political and historical trauma of the
internment camps.
In recent years I've
been interested in the ways Japan, in part through
anime and in part through science fiction,
has come to occupy a futuristic alternative
cultural space. For me, it is almost
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