By representing in A Tale two secret diaries which document the myriad and
overlapping forms of bullying found in both wartime and postwar Japanese society, Ozeki calls into question the conventional assumptions that view Japan as having successfully
22 For a detailed study of the social, political, and capitalist mechanisms through which the difference of Okinawan identity is produced, sustained, and exploited, see Matsumura’s The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community. See also Takahashi’s The System of Sacrifice:
Fukushima and Okinawa for a critical discussion of Japan’s justification of its continued exploitation of Okinawa and its residents through the rhetoric of “noble sacrifices” (toutoi gisei).
23 See Arasaki; and Muto for further elaboration on this point.
transformed itself into a peaceful, non-violent nation after World War II. Drawing attention to how Imperial Japan’s wartime atrocities are not disconnected from, but rather constitutive of, the state of peace and stability that postwar Japan has been able to enjoy, she has provided her readers a new perspective to understand and relearn genealogical lineages between Japan’s past and present. As an effective means to call for reflection on the enduring effects of state-directed violence that different generations of Japanese people might have continued to struggle against after World War II, Nao’s and Haruki #1’s diaries have also, however, introduced at least some of their readers to new misconceptions. As Ozeki has noted in one interview, the unsettling contents of Nao’s secret diary, in particular, have seemingly allowed her “American and European” readers to view “[their] countries” as being safe and even exceptional when compared to Japan—a “terrible place” where “cruel bullying” occurred repeatedly.24 While Ozeki has made clear that it was not her intention to promote this kind of imaginary distinction between Japan and the West,25 she has fallen short in explaining
whether there are certain passages in Nao’s diary that have led her readers to see bullying as an exclusively Japanese phenomenon. Taking as a point of departure the dichotomous renderings of Japan as dangerous and the West as safe that a reading of Nao’s diary might facilitate, I seek to explore: What are the meanings that Nao’s accounts of bullying—stories that are set exclusively in Japan—generate when they arrive at the hands of Ruth, a resident of Cortes Island in Canada? Do these accounts merely reinforce the presumptions that a certain group of Ozeki’s readers have apparently made about Japan and their respective
24 In an interview with Brendan Dowling, Ozeki was asked to talk about the reaction she has received from readers about the cultures of violence depicted in A Tale. She replied that “What’s interesting . . . is that I was writing about Japan, and American and European readers very often comment on this and say, ‘Wow Japan must be a terrible place because of all of this terrible, cruel bullying. This would never happen in our country.’ This is always shocking to me . . . [because] [t]he stories I hear from bully victims [in the West] make Nao’s experience look quite tame. In Japan these stories about bullying have been around and are very common . . . whereas in the West, it’s still very deeply repressed, we’re not really talking about it. It’s interesting to have a book like this out in the world that seems to be inviting people to speak up and discuss it. And I hope that’s a good thing.” See Ozeki “Shores.”
25 I am following Ozeki’s usage of the term “the West” in her interview with Dowling; see Ozeki “Shores.” For an elaborate discussion about the processes by which “the West” is constituted as an ideological and
geographical entity different from “the Rest,” see Sakai.
countries? If not, can they possibly introduce alternative forms of remembering or relearning of the West’s histories of racism and dispossession—unsettling moments that might shatter the aura of safety with which the West has veiled itself?
Before answering this cluster of questions, I believe it is necessary to first examine the ways Ozeki has structured her novel—an important factor that determines how Nao’s diary can be read and received. A Tale is divided into four parts, each containing two interlocking sections titled “Nao” and “Ruth.” As implied by their respective titles, these sections detail Nao’s first person account of her family history and her life in Tokyo as well as Ruth’s effort to locate the whereabouts of Nao with the help of the residents of Cortes Island and
elsewhere. By structuring A Tale in this way, Ozeki is able to direct her readers’ interpretation of Nao’s diary in specific ways that are arguably determined by her fictional characters living in Canada. One notable example can be found in Ruth’s response to a particular entry in Nao’s diary which revolves around Old Jiko’s unexpected visit to the Yasutani household in Tokyo. In a somewhat rebellious tone, Nao recounted in that entry her reluctance to comply with her parents’ decision that she should spend her summer vacation in Old Jiko’s temple, located in Miyagi. In addition, she has also briefly drawn her imaginary readers’ attention to how her parents have been able to manage a “lifestyle” in Sunnyvale, California (136). She explains that though being “strange and different,” her parents were “tolerable, because in Sunnyvale, it was kind of special to be Japanese. The other [American] moms would ask [her] mom to teach them how to make sushi and flower arrangements, and the dads treated [her] dad like a small pet that they could take for a run . . . and teach new tricks” (136).
Presented as a mere digression in thought, Nao’s recollection of the multicultural tolerance that she and her parents enjoyed in the United States failed to capture Ruth’s attention, which was drawn exclusively to the location of Jiko’s temple—Miyagi—an important hint that might reveal Nao’s fate after Japan’s 3.11 disasters. In the “Ruth” section that corresponds to Nao’s retelling of her distrust over the decision her parents made, nothing is mentioned about
the Yasutani family’s experience in the United States. Instead of being offered a critical reflection on the way the United States manages its tolerable, immigrant populations, Ozeki’s readers are provided with details about the geographical location and historical background of Miyagi as well as that of Fukushima and Cortes Island.26
In highlighting the factors in A Tale that might condition the possible ways of interpreting Nao’s story, I do not intend to argue that Ozeki has structured her novel in a manipulative fashion that somehow prevents her readers from engaging with the text from different angles. Rather, I wish to suggest that as useful as it is to provide supplemental additional information about what might have become of Nao and her family after Japan’s 3.11 disasters, Ruth’s own preference for how Nao’s diary should be perceived has its own limitations. In particular, it allows Ozeki’s readers to overlook the covert or subtle forms of racial bullying in American society as depicted by Nao. In his review of A Tale, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis draws attention to how, as the primary character who reads and annotates Nao’s narrative, Ruth has restrained herself from commenting on the alienation that Nao, growing up as a racial minority, might have experienced in the United States. He points out that despite the fact that “[t]here is undeniably a host of resonance between the two
characters” in terms of their racial “mixedness,” Ozeki’s novel “never openly addresses them.”27 Such avoidance, according to Davis, might be read as Ozeki’s refusal to make Nao’s story “Ruth’s alone to engage” because “Ruth is some kind of racial bridge, because she is mixed, because, as ‘part’ culturally Japanese, ‘part’ racially Asian, she can and has a responsibility to make sense of Nao’s story in ways others can’t.” While I agree with Davis’s observation that Nao’s story is not presented in A Tale as a narrative about Japanese
Americanness with which only a mixed-race Japanese American/Canadian such as Ruth is
26 For a discussion about the inventive ways through which Ozeki represents histories of dispossession that are seemingly unrelated to each other, see Beauregard.
27 In addition to the issue of racial mixedness, the relationship between Ruth and Nao can also be analyzed through a transnational feminist lens. See Parikh for a further elaboration on this point.
entitled to engage, the problems accompanying Ruth’s selective inattention to instances of racial micro-aggression that Nao has recorded in her diary—problems that correlate with Ozeki’s readers’ misconceptions about how the West appears to be safe when compared to Japan—remain to be addressed.
In the diary entries where Nao recounts her school life experiences before and after her family’s resettlement in Tokyo, the United States is almost never cast in a negative light.
Unlike Japan, represented by Nao as a homogeneous society that regards an individual’s difference—in terms of his/her social status, behavioral habits, national belonging, and more—as a threat that needs to be contained, the United States is depicted as a multicultural haven for immigrants. As Nao makes clear in one of her diary entries to which I have drawn attention, not only has she been well received by her classmates and teacher in Sunnyvale, California; her parents—although not as Americanized as Nao—have also been tolerated for their racial otherness and allowed to manage a “lifestyle” (136). Remarkable for its
appreciation of cultural diversity and racial mixedness, the United States as portrayed in Nao’s diary seems to be a place of safety, acceptance, and tolerance. Yet a closer examination of the Yasutani family’s immigrant experiences might offer new insights into how the haven that Nao has longed to return to could be perceived otherwise. As demonstrated in the same entry of Nao’s diary as mentioned above, in fact, as immigrants, Nao and her parents were treated by their American classmates, colleagues, or friends at best as companions or cultural informants whose knowledge of all things Japanese—from pop culture to anime to sushi-making and flower arrangements—is valued; at worst as “tolerable” strangers or a “small pet” which could be taught “new tricks” (136). They were socially accepted and allowed to enjoy a comfortable “lifestyle” in the United States partly because their Japaneseness is recognized—if not fetishized—as something “cool” (136). While their racial otherness plays an important role in facilitating their integration into American society, it also keeps them in an outsider status, a subordinate position where the United States presumes its tolerable but
“foreign” populations to hold.28 The processes of racialization that Nao and her family have undergone in the United States, though presented as marginal information in Nao’s diary that Ruth is reluctant to comment on, call attention to the problems of racial intolerance from which the United States is not immune.
To further tease out the implications of Nao and her parents’ immigrant experiences in the United States, it is helpful to turn to Wendy Brown’s conceptualization of tolerance as something more than an act of kindness that an immigrant population receives from its host country. In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Brown seeks to elucidate how the mobilization of tolerance in contemporary American society aims not only to reduce violence and enhance the peaceful cohabitation between different racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual communities. She argues that instead of understanding tolerance in its conventional sense, that is, as an individual virtue or personal commitment to counter abuse or harassment directed against members of minority groups, the term should be
comprehended in relation to “power and as a productive force—one that fashions, regulates, and positions subjects, citizens, and states as well as one that legitimates certain kinds of actions” (10). As a discourse of power, then, its productive and regulatory effects include “the enactment of social, political, religious, and cultural norms; certain practices of licensing and regulation; the marking of subjects of tolerance as inferior, deviant, or marginal vis-à-vis those practicing tolerance; and a justification for sometimes dire or even deadly action when the limits of tolerance are considered breached” (13-14). The kind of “dire or even deadly action” that the discourse of tolerance helps to justify involves racist and imperialist state violence directed against populations, communities, or countries deemed intolerant, barbaric,
28 In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lowe has observed that even when Asian immigrants or Asian Americans were granted the access of citizenship, they were still racialized as the
“foreigner within” (5). She argues that “[a] national memory haunts the conception of the Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of actual laws prohibiting Asians from citizenship and sustained by the wars in Asia, in which the Asian is always seen as an immigrant, as the ‘foreigner-within,’ even when born in the United States and the descendant of generations born here before” (5-6).
fundamentalist, and as such act as enemy to tolerance, diversity, and freedom—values that the West embodies. As Brown makes clear, in the aftermath of September 11, tolerance was invoked for “genuinely new purposes”—it legitimated “a new form of imperial state action in the twenty-first century, a legitimation tethered to a constructed opposition between a
cosmopolitan West and its putatively fundamentalist Other” (6). Deployed as a “civilizational discourse,” it “identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West, making nonliberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism” (6).
Brown’s discussion of tolerance, its regulatory effects, its relation to power, and the purposes of its deployment can potentially help to unpack the complexities of racism in the United States that Ozeki has sought to represent in A Tale. As I have discussed, such racism, cloaked under the guise of tolerance and inclusion, is difficult to identify in the multicultural society portrayed in Nao’s diary. Without carefully examining the ways Nao and her parents were tolerated in the United States, Ozeki’s readers might miss the chance to reflect on the subtle forms of discrimination, ostracism, and bullying that members of the Yasutani family faced. When read alongside A Tale, Brown’s theorization of tolerance in terms of power, on the one hand, can make visible the asymmetrical relationship between the “tolerable”
immigrant family of Nao and those who have tolerated them from a position of racial superiority, calling into question whether the race problem in the United States has been resolved or alleviated through the country’s embrace of multiculturalism. On the other hand, it can draw attention to the normative processes through which Nao and her parents’
Japaneseness is recognized, regulated, and domesticated—processes that distinguish whether some form of racial otherness can be embraced as cool, exotic, and attractive, while others are deemed to be unpleasant, provocative, and intolerable. Indeed, by bringing together in A Tale the two separate worlds that Nao and Ruth—characters of Japanese descent—inhabit, Ozeki has demonstrated to her readers that the meaning of Japaneseness is not fixed but is contested and negotiated under different social, historical, and political contexts. The
“coolness” associated with Nao and her parents’ racialized identity, for example, is not a given attribute shared equally among different generations of Japanese Americans living in the United States. Through creating a scene in which Ruth reveals her mother’s experience of being interned during World War II (32), Ozeki has sought to draw attention to how during the years of military conflict between Japan and the United States, individuals racialized as
“Japs” were treated with suspicion and contempt. Being classified as an intolerable “enemy alien,” they were targeted by the governments of the United States as well as Canada for forced relocation, incarceration, and in the case of Canada, dispossession. By depicting the shifting attitudes American society has expressed towards subjects of Japanese ancestry, Ozeki does not simply seek to celebrate the progress or improvements that the United States has been able to achieve as a multicultural nation. Rather, her novel helps to reveal what Brown has called the “productive force” of tolerance, one that “fashions, regulates, and positions subjects, citizens, and states” (10).
If examining the immigrant experiences of Nao and her parents entails a reflection on the normative processes through which Japaneseness is constructed and perceived, it also invites discussion about how Muslimness has almost become synonymous with terror in post-9/11 America, posing questions about how subjects associated with Muslimness have come to be recognized as a national threat, or an enemy that cannot be tolerated. Through specific scenes in A Tale, Ozeki has drawn attention to the anti-Muslim sentiments that erupted in American society following the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One scene involves Ruth and Oliver watching George W. Bush, then president of the United States, vowing to “hunt down the terrorists” with exclamations that include: “Smoke ‘em out of their caves. Git ‘em running so we can git ‘em” (271). Another scene narrates Oliver’s interaction with a waitress in Harlem, Montana. When asked to explain the early closing hours of the restaurant, the waitress, who “looked like she might be Mexican,” answered: “You never know who they’re gonna target next” (272). While Oliver initially understood the “they” that the waitress cited
as reason for the restaurant’s security precaution as “Arab terrorists,” he soon realized that it was the enraged American public ready to hunt down terrorists that the waitress feared. In
“How Does It Feel to be a Problem?,” Moustafa Bayoumi has pointed out that in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there were renewed efforts “to classify the Arabs in [America]” (85).29 These efforts, whose main purpose was to single out an enemy population and to distinguish between the good (us) and the evil (them), have not only left destructive consequences on the lives of Arab Americans who might or might not be Muslim. They have also given rise to “hundreds of hate crimes”—“many directed at South Asians and Iranians whom the perpetrators misidentified as Arab” (85). As Bayoumi suggests, what Arab Americans and others have experienced as targets of racial profiling in post-9/11 America was not far from what Japanese Americans faced after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Invoking the experiences of “over 110,000 Americans of Japanese
descent” who were “rounded up and placed in detention” after former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Bayoumi argues that under the post-9/11 climate of hate and fear in the United States, “being Muslim means you are worthy of incarceration”
(88).
By examining how Nao and her parents’ immigrant experience could serve as an entry point from which to reconsider the regulatory—if not overtly discriminatory—ways the United States handles its racialized minority populations, I aim to offer a reading of Nao’s diary that might bring forward a relearning, rather than disavowal, of the unsettling instances of racialized state violence in American history. More than a text that identifies the problems of poverty, precarity, social ostracism, school bullying, and sexual exploitation of teenage
By examining how Nao and her parents’ immigrant experience could serve as an entry point from which to reconsider the regulatory—if not overtly discriminatory—ways the United States handles its racialized minority populations, I aim to offer a reading of Nao’s diary that might bring forward a relearning, rather than disavowal, of the unsettling instances of racialized state violence in American history. More than a text that identifies the problems of poverty, precarity, social ostracism, school bullying, and sexual exploitation of teenage