In his “A Stone Voice: the Diary of a Japanese Transnational Migrant in Canada,” Keibo Oiwa accentuates the significance to break the silence of Japanese Canadians and find their own voices in making history. Based on his research and observation about Japanese Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, Oiwa claims that Japanese Canadians seemingly “had never played a creative role in their own history” and thus Japanese Canadian history has been “a history in the passive voice—a history in which a people, instead of being the main actors and thinkers, were the objects of other people’s action and thought” (125).10
According to Oiwa, as Japanese Canadians were commonly presented in history as victims of discrimination, incarceration and dispersal, Japanese Canadian history was reduced to what the persecutors did. In order to complement this kind of “history in passive voice,” he suggests that we should turn to first-hand accounts of Japanese Canadians’ experiences, particularly in terms of what they “felt, thought, or wished to do (or failed to do),” so as to provide an insider’s view of Japanese Canadian history (125). Nevertheless, Oiwa at the same time admits that finding the active voice of Japanese Canadians, especially the voices of the Issei, is not an easy task. Indeed, before the redress movement in the 1980s, Japanese North Americans had often been characterized as reticent people who avoided saying anything about their past. Even though some Nisei and Sansei had endeavored to break the silence and articulated their own history since the late 1970s, the Issei remained largely silent, saying
9 Shin-Issei refers to Japanese post-Second World War immigrants. The prefix, “shin,” means “new” in Japanese.
10 Oiwa initially illustrates his idea of “the passive voice” in Japanese Canadian history in his Stone Voices:
Wartime Writings of Japanese Canadian Issei (1991). “A Stone Voice: the Diary of a Japanese Transnational Migrant in Canada” is a condensed version of the book, collected in Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures (2006).
nothing about their experiences even to their own children. The image of muted Issei has been vividly presented in Japanese North American narratives. For example, in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), the protagonist Naomi describes her Issei aunt, Obasan, as a person who lives
“in stone”—that is, a person who lives without expressing in words her deep thoughts and feelings (32). Also, in Obaachan’s Garden (2001), the documentary director Linda Ohama indicates that her grandmother kept her past in silence over the seventy years in Canada and
“more of what we [Ohama’s family] know is from what’s not said than what is said, which leaves a lot of things buried in that silence.”
The multiple reasons for Issei’s voicelessness have intrigued much scholarly interest. It is widely believed that Issei’s reticence was induced by years of racial prejudice as well as the embarrassment and fear incurred by World War II. In the prewar, wartime, and immediate postwar periods, the Issei remained silent, obliterating their Japanese past in an attempt to enable themselves and their offspring to be recognized as North Americans. Remarkably, Issei’s voices were extremely marginalized not only outside but also within the Japanese Canadian community. Before the 1980s, a sentiment akin to self-hatred permeated Japanese Canadian community. It was a time when Issei, along with the traditional Japanese customs and manners they embodied, was regarded as humiliating to Japanese North American community. As Midge Ayukawa, a Nisei historian, suggests, “people of my generation” often felt “the shame of being Japanese” and thus “I have rejected everything about my heritage”
(qtd. in Ferguson 53). Meanwhile, some scholars indicate that Issei’s silence, to some extent, could be viewed as a manifestation of their Japanese cultural heritage. Indeed, nonverbal communication and indirect speech are part of Japanese culture. According to Tsukasa Nishida, “[t]he emphasis on action rather than words is expressed in many sayings in Japan, such as ‘Express in deed not in words’ . . . ‘To say nothing is a flower.’ . . . Verbalization is considered a means of covering one’s timidity, ill will, or weakness” (45-46). Kogawa in an
interview with Susan Yim indicates that many Issei have preserved this cultural legacy as she observes that “To the issei, honor and dignity is expressed through silence” (qtd. in Cheung, Articulate Silences 126). Additionally, some feminist scholars further illustrate Issei’s cultural reticence, arguing that Issei women’s voicelessness reflects their double oppression from racial discrimination and Japanese patriarchal culture. Apart from these political, cultural and gender issues embedded in Issei’s silence, it is notable that Issei’s limited English proficiency has fundamentally foreclosed their communications with not only Caucasians but also their English-speaking offspring. According to Oiwa, due to the linguistic barrier, “it became difficult to distinguish what the issei did not want to talk about from what they wanted to talk about but could not express” (“A Stone Voice” 126). Despite the fact that some Japanese North Americans have gained revitalized interest in their Asian legacy since the late 1970s, the language barrier has continually hindered cross-generational conversations and caused many miscommunications between Issei and their descendants.
Tomoko Makabe’s Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada, which I propose to analyze in this chapter, is created in the early 1980s to retrieve Issei women’s voices to make their own history. Makabe, a post-Second World War immigrant (Shin-Issei), became an overseas student in Canada in the early 1970s and received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. During her school years in Toronto, her transnational experience and her proficiency in Japanese enabled her to make acquaintance with several Issei women. As Makabe reported, “when they [Issei women] heard I was from Japan, they seemed to grow nostalgic, and sometimes, a normally taciturn individual would become voluble” (Picture Brides 1-2). Hinging on her seamless interactions with Japanese female immigrants, Makabe in Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada dispels the stereotype of quiet Issei women and foregrounds the linguistic barrier between Japanese Canadian
generations. According to her, “[t]he Issei have a chronic source of discontent” because “a
practically, impenetrable language barrier between them and their Nisei (second-generation) children” continually “prevents them from holding real conversations” (Picture Brides 2). On account of their poor English ability, Issei women were unable to fully express themselves within Japanese Canadian community. Moreover, based on Makabe’s research, Issei women are also gradually forgotten by their Japanese compatriots in Japan as she found that
“[e]migration, in the form of temporary labour, has become a far-off memory even for the old [Japanese] people” (Picture Brides 73). Makabe felt worried about that Issei women’s voices might be permanently buried in the history when senility steadily took its toll on these women’s health and memories. Thus, she began her project to record Issei women’s life stories from the late 1970s and eventually in 1983 published Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada in which she offers a detailed transcription of five Issei women’s oral testimonies. The first edition of this book appeared in Japan. Twelve years later, it was translated into English and published in Canada. According to Makabe, during the years in Canada, she observed that many Sansei and Yonsei “have a strong sense of regret and sadness”
because “they have been unable to relate to their grandparents and it was too late for many even to get to know them as persons” (Picture Brides vii). Thus, she expects the English version of this book could “deepen the understanding between the generations in our
community” (Picture Brides viii). As Makabe emphasizes picture brides’ significance in both Japanese and Japanese Canadian history, Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada is not simply a work to recover Issei women’s muted voices, but also a work that paves a new way to understand picture bride experiences. In Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada, Makabe actually builds up the linkage between Japan and Japanese Canadian society and features Issei women as central figures in the making of Japanese Canadian cross-Pacific history.
Undeniably, Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada has its limitation in historical
representation as Makabe relies on merely five individuals (four in Toronto and one in Alberta) to represent a large number of Japanese picture brides in Canada. Yet, it is crucial among picture bride narratives, for Makabe presents Issei women’s transnational experiences from a Shin-Issei’s point of view. Though Makabe is a post-Second World War immigrant elite, who is often considered different from prewar working-class immigrants in terms of her class and identity formation, she feels that she shares similar transnational experiences with Japanese picture brides, demonstrating great empathy for them. She evinces her intensive interest in the history of Issei women because she regards them as her precursors. As she claims, “my role was to follow in their footsteps—to try to live and to work as an immigrant and as a member of the minority group of Japanese Canadians” (Picture Brides 1).
Significantly, Makabe not only focuses on these Issei women’s Canadian indigenization but also highlights their Japanese experiences. She insists that the study of Japanese picture brides’ transnational experiences should incorporate thorough investigations on these Issei women’s prefectural origins. In effect, she records in her book her visits to the hometowns of the five picture brides and offers a comprehensive geohistorical research of them. Given that Makabe’s personal involvement in her making of Japanese picture bride history offers interesting materials for inquiry, studying the oral testimonies of the five Issei women is not the sole purpose of this chapter. Rather, I argue that Makabe’s own position as a Shin-Issei should be investigated first since it may enrich our understanding of the Japanese picture bride history.
Based on the five Issei women’s memories and their life accounts, Picture Brides:
Japanese Women in Canada is written in the form of oral history. However, technically, Makabe did not follow the principles of preparing, conducting, and processing oral historical interviews when producing the five Issei women’s testimonies. According to Donald A.
Ritchie’s definition in Doing Oral History, “oral history collects memories and personal
commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange in audio or video format” (19). However, as Makabe admits, she learned Issei women’s life stories not through formal interviews but through her frequent chats with them. Also, she had no forethought to choose who would appear in the book. She eventually retold the five picture brides’ life stories simply because their experiences were those she “was able to hear in particular detail” (Picture Brides 4). Additionally, while
Ritchie points out the necessity of recording the interviews because “[b]y preserving the tapes and transcripts of their interviews, oral historians seek to leave as complete, candid, and reliable record as possible” (24), Makabe did not use a tape recorder until at the middle stage of her project. She even admits that only part of the interviews was preserved in tapes and some materials in the transcripts “were supplemented by [her] memory and [her] notes”
(Picture Brides 5). Given Makabe’s unorthodox way to collect Issei women’s voices, Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada cannot be regarded as a strict oral historical work.
Nevertheless, Ellen Scheinberg in her “In Their Own Words” indicates that just because Makabe did not adhere to the principles of traditional oral history interviews, she created certain flexibility, which allowed her interviewees more space to narrate their own stories.
According to Scheinberg, Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada is praiseworthy since it “succeed[s] in using oral history” to “give voice” to the muted Issei women (204). She admires Makabe’s “commitment to let the narrators speak for themselves” and suggests that Makabe’s “open interviewing style,” which enables Issei women to “tell their stories without any direction or interruption from the researcher,” is “more democratic than the traditional method of interviewing” (205). Without the historian’s interference in traditional interviews, Makabe’s interviewees were more likely to express themselves freely. From Scheinberg’s point of view, the testimonies recorded in Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada are
supposed to be more “authentic” than traditional oral historical interviews.
Remarkably, while Scheinberg points out Makabe’s unique style of interviewing picture bride individuals, what I am particularly interested in is how Makabe demonstrates her position as a Shin-Issei in the making of picture bride history in Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada. As mentioned above, Makabe in the beginning of the book defines herself as the follower of Japanese picture brides. In fact, Makabe’s emphasis on her linkage to Issei women is indicative of Shin-Issei’s eagerness to join the Japanese Canadian community in the 1970s and 1980s. From the 1960s on, the Canadian government initiated to revise its
immigration regulations and eventually removed the exclusionary policies against immigrants of Asian ancestry in 1967. According to the amended immigration law, the criterion for individuals to gain their admittance to Canada was determined by their occupational skills rather than by their race or nationality. Yet, while the Canadian government opened its door for Asians with occupational skills to immigrate to Canada, the number of Japanese new immigrants was relatively small.11 It is believed that the small number of Japanese new immigrants in Canada should be attributed to the postwar economic conditions of the two countries. Indeed, during the postwar years, Japan’s economy expanded at a stunning pace, whereas Canada experienced its economic recession. According to Patricia E. Roy, “[a]s the revival of Japan’s economy made it an important country for trade and ultimately a source of investment in Canadian industry, Japan became a partner and friend, not a foe. Thus, Canada had to pay attention to Japan’s interest in shaping its immigration policies and symbolically announced the revisions of 1967 in Tokyo” (The Triumph of Citizenship 306). Notably, while the Canadian government welcomed immigrants from Japan, Roy indicates that “Japan’s
11According to Patricia E. Roy’s research in “The Re-creation of Vancouver’s Japanese Community, 1945-2008,”
with the exception of 1973, when 1,020 arrived, fewer than 1,000 Japanese arrived in Canada each year between 1949 and 1992. As Tatsuo Kage indicates in “Postwar Japanese Immigrants and Their Involvement in the Community,” compared to those from Hong Kong, India, Korea, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Vietnam, fewer immigrants were from Japan. He further suggests that “Hong Kong and India sent around ten times as many immigrants as Japan in the 1970s” (14).
prosperity meant that relatively few Japanese wanted to emigrate to Canada” (The Triumph of Citizenship 306). Similarly, Tatsuo Kage in “Postwar Japanese Immigrants and Their
Involvement in the Community” also pinpoints that “Japan had become an economic superpower. It was, therefore, not easy for a person with skills and experiences in Japan to achieve a better financial status in Canada. So it seemed that there were few reasons for Japanese to emigrate” (14). Given the small number of Shin-Issei in Canada, many of them felt anxious to become involved in the local Japanese Canadian community. The Bulletin, a reputable bilingual (English/Japanese) magazine in West Canada, announced in 1970:
We have to be aware that immigration from Japan was interrupted for many years [;]
therefore, we notice some discrepancies in thinking and the point of view between us new arrivals and those who have been here for many decades. However, we have to adjust ourselves in the new environment as quickly as possible since we intend to stay here permanently. . . . In other words, we should strive for bridging the gap between us and the longtime residents. (qtd. in Kage, “Postwar Japanese
Immigrants in the Vancouver Area” 3)
Obviously, notwithstanding the different mentalities between Shin-Issei and the members of settled Japanese Canadian community, Japanese new immigrants were encouraged to integrate themselves into the established Japanese Canadian community during the 1970s.
From this perspective, the project of Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada and
Makabe’s emphasis on her intimate connections with Issei women could be understood as her endeavor to establish her position in Japanese Canadian community. She shows that as a Shin-Issei, she has not only lived up to the daring spirit of her female predecessors, but also contributed to Japanese Canadian community in preserving Issei’s unheard voices and bridging the generational gap generated from the language barrier.
It is worth pointing out that as a Shin-Issei or, more precisely a Japanese overseas
student, Makabe not only attempts to become an approved member in Japanese Canadian community but also holds fast to her Japanese identity. According to Chih-Ming Wang’s Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America, as overseas students have engaged in the writings and political activities on both sides of the Pacific, we may consider them “trans/national intellectual subjects with deep commitments to both place [sic] of ancestry and of residence” (1). Concentrating on Chinese foreign students’
transnational experiences, Wang suggests reading overseas student writings in both English and Chinese, and analyzing the texts within the tension of translingual and transcultural practices. Wang particularly indicates that overseas students’ choice of languages mirrors themselves: “[i]f writing in English represents for foreign students a translingual passage toward acculturation, writing in their mother tongue signals a reluctance to let go of Asia, a promise to keep Asia ‘in the heart’” (Transpacific Articulations 12). Explicitly, although Makabe claims that “I felt I wanted to establish myself in this society [Canadian society]”
(Picture Brides 1), she always keeps Japan in her mind. Her dual affiliation to Japan and Canada is demonstrated when she continuously publishing books in both countries, including the bilingual versions of Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada, How Can Japanese Management Make a Positive Contribution: Redesigning the Organization for Productivity Improvement (1991), The Canadian Sansei (1998), and カナダ「地域」と「国」を旅する (Canada in Perspective of Its Regions) (2011).
Certainly, Makabe’s mindset as an overseas student also accounts for her attention to Japanese picture brides’ transnational experiences. If we compare Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada with Ohama’s Obaachan’s Garden, we would find that although both texts make efforts to recover picture bride stories, Makabe adopts a strikingly different attitude towards Japanese materials from that of Ohama, a Canada-born and -raised Sansei. Feeling her grandmother’s life stories would not be complete without drawing in her Japanese
memories, Ohama incorporates amounts of images of Japan. These images of Japan—the archival footage and the recording of Ohama’s family trip to Japan—are extravagantly used in the documentary, providing glimpses of Japan’s national history such as the Meiji
Restoration, the developments of Japanese nationalism and imperialism, the two atomic bombs during World War II as well as Japan’s postwar economic growth. While Ohama draws on Japan’s national history so as to reconnect Japanese Canadians with their ancestral country, Makabe writes Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada not only for Japanese Canadian community but also for her compatriots in Japan. According to Wang’s “Thinking and Feeling Asian American in Taiwan,” “[t]o study abroad was not meant only as a passage to individual career development; an overseas student was also a national asset expected to be a ‘knowledge element’ (zhishi fenzi 知識分子) organic to his/her society” (143). Indeed, overseas students from Asia are usually expected to devote what they have learned in the
Restoration, the developments of Japanese nationalism and imperialism, the two atomic bombs during World War II as well as Japan’s postwar economic growth. While Ohama draws on Japan’s national history so as to reconnect Japanese Canadians with their ancestral country, Makabe writes Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada not only for Japanese Canadian community but also for her compatriots in Japan. According to Wang’s “Thinking and Feeling Asian American in Taiwan,” “[t]o study abroad was not meant only as a passage to individual career development; an overseas student was also a national asset expected to be a ‘knowledge element’ (zhishi fenzi 知識分子) organic to his/her society” (143). Indeed, overseas students from Asia are usually expected to devote what they have learned in the