In an interview with David Palumbo-Liu, Ozeki has explained how a pluralistic sense of selves has helped to shape her novel, especially the construction of her narrators. For Ozeki, as opposed to the “Self” with a capital “S” which implies a “fixed and singular entity, a God-like Self,” the “self” with a lowercase “s” can be perceived as a something “shifting”
and “pluralistic.” Ozeki observes that in Buddhist thinking, the “self” is recognized as a no-self or anatman: that which cannot remain unchanged in time and exist separate and independent from other beings. Another name for this Buddhist notion of no-self is what Thich Nhat Hanh has called “interbeing.” According to this tradition of thought, the self, Ozeki argued, is more like “a collection of fluid, interpenetrating, interdependencies that change and flow through time.” She pointed out that not only does the term time being used in the title of her novel reflects this idea of the self; her two narrators, Ruth and Nao, have also served as “a kind of overt performance of these Buddhist propositions of interbeing and time being” (Ozeki “Where We Are”). While my reading of A Tale has not touched upon the topic of Zen Buddhism, Ozeki’s discussion of her understanding of the self as being
pluralistic, fluid, and more importantly, interdependent, can be helpful to bring to light one of the key concerns of this chapter: transpacific interconnectedness. More specifically, I have attempted to examine how the secret diaries of Nao and Haruki #1—messages in a Hello Kitty Lunchbox that has presumably travelled across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Canada—can be read in a way that might open up a critical reconsideration of the
genealogical linkages between Japan’s presumed imperialist past and pacifist present, the interwoven instances of racialized violence in American history, as well as capitalist forms of dispossession that place lives across the Pacific, including in Canada, under precarious living conditions. I have contended that instead of conceiving in a reductive way the forms of bullying detailed in Nao and Haruki #1’s diaries as a Japanese problem alone, readers of A Tale might take those scenes of violence as a reflexive point to engage with the West’s own varied histories of (neo)colonial violence.
Yet as much as it is about transpacific interconnectedness, Ozeki’s novel is also about the possibility of disconnections, irretrievable absences, and loss. From the onset of A Tale, Ozeki has invited her readers to ponder the dangerous possibility that, being initially regarded as “someone’s garbage” (8), the Hello Kitty Lunchbox might never receive the chance to be opened at all, not to mention Nao and Haruki #1’s diaries being read, and their stories
retrieved. One particular scene that further invites readers’ contemplation on the possible loss of Nao and Haruki #1’s stories is one that depicts the disappearance of a Hello Kitty
backpack. When trying to direct her readers’ attention to the destructiveness of Japan’s 3.11 disasters and its traumatizing impact on those who survived, Ozeki created a character named T. Nojima, a former resident of the Miyagi Prefecture in Japan whose family members, home, property—including a Hello Kitty backpack that belongs to his daughter—were dragged away by the strong waves of the tsunami. What was left in the original township in which Nojima lived was a field of debris, with only “splintered houses and crumpled cars, cinder block and tangled rebar, boats, furniture parts, smashed appliances, roof tiles, clothing, stuff”
in sight (112). Unlike the backpack that Nojima has lost, the Hello Kitty Lunchbox that carried Nao and Haruki #1’s diaries was fortunate enough to have reached Cortes Island. Yet it is precisely through such differences that A Tale urges readers to imagine an alternative fate for Nao and Haruki #1’s diaries had they sunk directly into the seabed or had they been buried deep in a debris field in the aftermath of the 3.11 disasters.
Besides the possible loss of Nao and Haruki #1’s diaries, Ozeki has filled her novel with other moments of sudden or gradual disappearance of information. In one rather comical scene, Ozeki has managed to capture Ruth’s frustration when dealing with the limited access of an online journal article listed on an academic archive site. A long cry of “NO!” erupted as Ruth, trying to download the article, was confronted with a message that says: “[t]he article you have requested has been removed from the database and is no longer available. We apologize for this inconvenience” (173). In another scene, Ozeki has demonstrated how Japan’s 3.11 disasters have “rarely made the front page [of newspapers] anymore,” noting that while “[i]n the two weeks following the [triple disasters], the global bandwidth was flooded with images and reports from Japan . . . But then the uprising in Libya and the tornado in Joplin superseded the quake, and the keyword cloud shifted to revolution and drought and unstable air masses as the tide of information from Japan receded” (113). In attending to these diverse moments of loss, disappearance, and disconnection, I aim to highlight how A Tale does not only explore the possible and unexpected ways human and non-human lives across the Pacific can become interconnected. It also calls attention to the material conditions that make the production and circulation of certain forms of knowledge difficult, if not impossible. By foregrounding the dialectics of connections and
disconnections, Ozeki’s novel urges readers to develop practices of remembering, relearning, and reimagining that might prevent transpacific memories of war, displacement, and
dispossession from slipping away into an ocean of forgetfulness.
Chapter Three
Remembering Cold War Amnesia
Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote back this:
現在地で始まるべき. You should start where you are.
—Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
As I was writing this thesis, Fukushima’s nuclear disaster has marked its sixth anniversary. Since March 11, 2011, the Japanese government has attempted to clean up the vast area of land contaminated by radioactive materials released from the crippled reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. As a result of the state-directed efforts to make Fukushima safe and livable again, layers of contaminated soil and other forms of debris have been removed from designated “Special Decontamination Areas,” piling up elsewhere, in zones to which are more difficult—if not impossible—for former residents to return.
According to official data released by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, the volume of removed soil and debris has, as of May 2017, amounted to 7,548,030 bags.35 The rapid increase of the number of these bags of radioactive waste has been followed by an ever-expanding number of water tanks being installed adjacent to the nuclear power plant to hold tons of contaminated water, generated through efforts to cool down the molten fuel debris of the three destroyed nuclear reactors. Precisely, 1000 tanks have been built to hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water. Despite the fact that Fukushima’s nuclear disaster is far from being controlled, the Japanese government has decided to lift the evacuation orders of parts of four municipalities near the nuclear power plant, including Namie, Tomioka, Kawamata, and Iitate. The lifting of evacuation orders signals the termination of public housing
35 For more information about the Japanese government’s efforts to decontaminate Fukushima and areas contaminated by radioactive materials, see the official website of the Japan’s Ministry of the Environment:
http://josen.env.go.jp/en/decontamination/#special.
assistance for “voluntary evacuees”—people who have evacuated from areas located outside of the remaining “difficult-to-return” zone in Fukushima. While in a 2017 speech
commemorating the 3.11 disasters, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe identified the ongoing decontamination efforts in Fukushima as a sign of “progress,” an editorial from The Japan Times, entitled “Lifting Fukushima Evacuation Orders,” has argued that “government decisions alone will not return evacuees’ lives to a state of normalcy.”36
This thesis is concerned with how memories can be unframed and connections
remapped in the aftermath of the 3.11 disasters, a crisis that has continued to mar the lives of many. Chapter One of my thesis has taken as a point of engagement Operation Tomodachi to consider the militarized interconnections between Fukushima, Okinawa, and other sites differentially subjected to the violence of U.S. nuclearism, militarism, and imperialism.
Focusing on discourses of “hope” that celebrate the effectiveness of this rescue operation, I have examined the tactics the governments of Japan and the United States have employed to render obscure or justifiable the forms of violence they have jointly produced and
perpetuated. Having exposed the stakes involved in producing stories, knowledge, and memories about the violent nature of the U.S.-Japan imperial alliance, I then turned to how Asian American studies might serve as a counterhegemonic field of knowledge. While scholars such as Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins have voiced their discontent about an U.S.-centric Asian American studies, arguing that it might reproduce the logic of American
“intellectual imperialism” by “privilege[ing] American experiences over the experiences of others” (20), I have drawn on the insights of scholars including Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, Kandice Chuh, Jodi Kim, Chih-ming Wang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and Candace Fujikane to explore how emerging forms of Asian American studies, including forms
produced in Asia, may potentially serve as an intellectual and political project that calls for an
36 Abe’s 2017 speech commemorating the sixth anniversary of the 3.11 disasters is available at the website of Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet; see http://japan.kantei.go.jp/.
end to U.S. racism and imperialism in Asia, the Pacific, and America.
Building upon this scholarly discussion of the ways Asian American studies can serve as a decolonizing and deimperializing force in Asia and beyond, Chapter Two has provided a detailed reading of Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being to foreground an alternative understanding of transpacific interconnectedness, one that is different from the transpacific imperial alliance that Japan has sought to consolidate with the United States. Opening with a discussion of how the transpacific crossing of tsunami debris generated by the 3.11 disasters has served as a major source of creative inspiration for Ozeki’s writing project, I have investigated how A Tale enables its readers to imagine unexpected forms of encounters, contacts, and exchange between lives from seemingly unrelated spaces and locations across the Pacific. I have identified a group of critics—including Michelle N. Huang, Guy
Beauregard, Chih-ming Wang, and Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis—who share a similar interest in Ozeki’s mediation of Japan’s 3.11 disasters in her novel, and whose analyses have served as important bases from which I have developed my reading of Ozeki’s text. Placing my critical focus on Ozeki’s representation of similar but differentially produced experiences of precariousness across the Pacific, my reading of A Tale examined the interwoven imperial pasts and presents of Japan, the United States, and Canada. From a discussion of the
genealogical linkages between Japan’s wartime and postwar cultures of bullying; a study of tolerance and intolerance of racialized immigrant/enemy populations, from “Japs” to
“Muslims” in the United States; to an examination of Canada and the tar sands industry’s capitalist exploitation of Indigenous communities and how such forms of exploitation might serve as a reminder of other “zones of sacrifice” around the globe, my reading of A Tale has called attention to the transpacific connections as well as disconnections between dispersedly located and differentially produced sites of violence. In so doing, I have attempted to
elucidate how a reading of A Tale can intervene into dominant imaginaries and discourses of
“hope” that have served as useful tools for the United States and Japan to rationalize their
imperial projects.
In this concluding chapter, I wish to examine the implications of developing a reading of Ozeki’s novel in Taiwan to ask: What kind of memories need to be unframed here? What sets of connections can be remapped? Within the historical context of Japan’s still-unfolding nuclear crisis, an event which stirs dissonant memories about the radioactive legacies of U.S.
nuclearism in Asia and the Pacific and beyond, it might be appropriate to consider how a reading of A Tale in Taiwan can potentially facilitate a critical reflection on how and why Taiwan has come to embrace nuclear power since the 1970s, regardless of its vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis, natural catastrophes that might wreak havoc on its coastal nuclear power plants. Such a reflection might also open up space for a relearning of the multiple instances of violence, displacement, and dispossession facing communities—including those of Han Chinese and Indigenous Tao people—coerced to house nuclear power plants and facilities storing low-level radioactive waste. Scrutinizing the historical formation of Taiwan’s nuclear industry and the traumatizing experiences of differentially racialized subjects exposed to radioactive contamination, is, however, but one task readers of A Tale in Taiwan can engage with. In what follows, I will investigate how other forms of
interconnectedness may be remapped by turning to a preservation campaign organized by students and faculty members from National Taiwan University, an academic institution to which I am currently affiliated as an M.A. student.
In 2009, a group of students and faculty members from NTU launched a historic preservation campaign to prevent the demolition of an F-100 jet fighter aircraft that had been showcased on campus for more than twenty years.37 This jet fighter aircraft arrived at NTU in 1989, when the Ministry of National Defense decided to send one of its retired military properties to the Department of Mechanical Engineering in NTU for research, education, and
37 For more information about the preservation efforts of students at NTU to prevent the F-100 aircraft from being demolished, see the website of the “NTU F-100 Preservation Group”: http://ntu0218.blogspot.tw/.
exhibition purposes. Initially developed by the United States Air Force (USAF) in 1954 to be a substitute for the F-86 Sabre jet dominantly used during the U.S. military involvement in the Korean War (1950–1953), the F-100, properly known as the North American F-100 Super Sabre, made its first entrance to Taiwan’s military history in September 1958. During a military conflict between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), one commonly known as the 823 Artillery Bombardment or the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, the USAF deployed six of its F-100 aircrafts from Clark Air Base in the Philippines to Chiayi Air Force Base in Taiwan for air defense purposes. For those who called for the preservation of the retired F-100 on the NTU campus, the military aircraft served not only as an important piece of cultural and historical heritage that was integral to the campus. More importantly, it signified an anti-communist alliance between the United States and the Republic of China during the Cold War, especially at a time when the PRC’s military aggression against the ROC was evident.
Figure 1: A shattered piece of the canopy that was part of the retired F-100 NTU received in 1989 is displayed at the Gallery of NTU History. Engraved onto the canopy are the words of Kung Huang, the canopy’s donor, in commemoration of the aircraft: “Super Sabre Never Rusts / Just Swings into Glory.”
(Photo by Teng-io Chung; reproduced with the permission of the Gallery of NTU History)
The group of students and faculty members trying to overturn NTU’s decision to demolish the retired F-100 on campus invested tremendous effort to produce and disseminate knowledge about the military aircraft. Most notably, in Fall 2009, Sung-ju Huang, the leader of the “NTU F-100 Preservation Group,” actively involved himself as a teaching assistant in a general course entitled “Introduction to the Culture Heritage of NTU” to raise students’
awareness about the historical significance of the retired F-100 on campus. In 2010, Huang and other concerned students successfully persuaded NTU’s Student Activity Division to recognize the F-100 a proper part of the university’s cultural heritage. Yet despite the various efforts made to preserve the F-100 aircraft on campus, then NTU President Si-chen Lee remained unpersuaded. In a University Affairs meeting held in September 2011, participating teaching and administrative staff ruled that as military equipment, the retired F-100 bore no historical relevance and pedagogical significance to NTU and therefore should be removed from the campus.38 Later that year, the retired F-100 was eventually returned to the Ministry of National Defense for restoration and refurbishment. Such a relocation, however, has not fully severed the interwoven ties the military aircraft and NTU have forged over the years. In 2012, the restored F-100 received a new name, “Taida” (a shortened Mandarin Chinese term for Taiwan University), from the Ministry of National Defense seeking to celebrate and commemorate its long service and presence at NTU. Since its restoration, “Taida” has been showcased in the Chengkungling military training base in Taichung, an outcome of what
38 For further details about the 2011 University Affairs meeting at NTU, see Tseng and Ling. Before the administrative decision to remove the retired F-100 from NTU was finalized, members of the “NTU F-100 Preservation Group” attempted to tease out how, as military equipment, the F-100 could be historically relevant and pedagogically significant to NTU students. They proposed to relocate the aircraft to the southernmost tip of the NTU campus, with the argument that the area was where part of Taipei Air Station once stood. From 1966 to 1976, Taipei Air Station served as the administrative headquarter of all USAF units stationed in Taiwan. The relocation of the retired F-100 to an area marked by former U.S. military presence in Taiwan, according to members of the preservation group, might serve as an opportunity for NTU students and others to relearn the militarized development of the NTU campus. Although such a proposed relocation of the retired F-100 was eventually rejected, it helpfully illuminates the complex interrelationships between NTU and the U.S. military stationed in Taiwan. For further information about the proposed relocation, see https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Campus-plan/M.1276272086.A.07A.html.
members of the “NTU F-100 Preservation Group” have called “difficult decisions.”39 While “Taida,” or F-100 jet fighter aircrafts in general, are commonly perceived in Taiwan as a symbol of friendship and collaboration in Taiwan with the United States, they register an entirely different set of memories and feelings in Okinawa, one that is punctuated by an unsettling sense of trauma, pain, and precariousness. In June 1959, almost a year after the 823 Artillery Bombardment broke out across the Taiwan Strait, an F-100 crashed into Miyamori Elementary School and its surrounding neighborhood in what was then called Ishikawa City (currently Uruma City) in U.S.-occupied Okinawa, killing 18 people, 12 of whom were students, and injuring 210 others, including 156 students. Reportedly, the malfunctioned F-100 had been deployed to Taiwan in May the same year for maintenance.
Due to an engine fire, however, the aircraft crashed during its testing flight from Kadena Air Base, located in the south of Ishikawa. For the USAF, the crash was documented simply as one among many accidents that the F-100, known for its flight instability and other structural problems, inevitably caused. For the victims, however, the deadly accident which brought Miyamori Elementary School into an instant ball of flames evoked the traumatic memories of the Battle of Okinawa whose protracted destructiveness could still be seen, felt, and
Due to an engine fire, however, the aircraft crashed during its testing flight from Kadena Air Base, located in the south of Ishikawa. For the USAF, the crash was documented simply as one among many accidents that the F-100, known for its flight instability and other structural problems, inevitably caused. For the victims, however, the deadly accident which brought Miyamori Elementary School into an instant ball of flames evoked the traumatic memories of the Battle of Okinawa whose protracted destructiveness could still be seen, felt, and