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AN
AMERICAN ISSEI
Robert Brady
(from
KJ#31)
I came to Japan from
the old country over twenty years ago with no intention of being an
immigrant; I was just a traveler who stopped. Like age, immigrancy was
upon me before I knew it.
I am the first generation
of my family to visit Japan, let alone live here. My wife, who is Japanese,
is about the 900th generation of her family to live here. Our children
therefore are second generation immigrants and about 901st generation
natives, which makes them thoroughly indigenous nisei, and so
extremely interesting in many respects. They are more Japanese than
me, though less American, and less Japanese than my wife, though more
American than her, and more international than either of us.
As for my own multiply grafted family tree, some of my great-great-grandparents
were intentional immigrants from Ireland to their new country America,
while other of my great-great-grandparents were scions of native Americans
who had "immigrated" across the Aleutian chain from Asia 40,000 years
and more ago, so maybe it was in my blood all the time to reconnect,
and what I was really doing wasn't traveling, as I'd thought in the
narrow confines of my just one lifetime, but was continuing in my turn
the journey my ancestors set out on, that has continued since before
the dawn and will go on beyond the sunset. The journey certainly can't
be done in only one lifetime. Such transcendent concepts were likely
common knowledge 40,000 years ago, before there were visas.
Needless to say, I am the most American person in my Japanese family.
I speak my mind, just like that, nakedly right out there in the open,
shockingly point-blank in front of everybody. I prefer good bread to
good rice, though that balance has changed a good deal since I first
became an alien. Certain of my native words, and with them, native ways
of thinking, are fading also, as my native country becomes more and
more of an old country and the new exerts its influence on my being.
My mental America is in fact becoming archaic, as I become more Japanese
than I ever thought possible. Still, I speak best the language of the
old country, and remember the old country with fondness when in Japan
I sit out on my mind's back porch. But of course that old country no
longer exists except on the mind's back porch, where all old countries
are. Whenever I visit the country that's America now, I feel perhaps
more a foreigner than I do in Japan; I am surprisingly surprised to
be treated as an American, as though that state were still and fully
native to me. When I'm in America, I wear shoes very gingerly indoors;
I can't take a bath with the soap in the water; people look me right
in the eye as they talk to me; and everyone speaks English, which can
be unsettling. But being foreign really doesn't require another country;
one can feel foreign just by changing neighborhoods, or growing old;
my great grandmother, who was 16 when Lincoln was assassinated and who
lived to hear of the atomic bomb, was about as foreign to the 1950's
as possible. For her, Elvis was from a non-parallel universe, much the
way golden-haired Japanese rappers on roller skates are to me of the
Elvis generation. I'm already a foreigner to teenagers of both my countries.
I'm also more of a foreigner to who I used to be: I look at old photos
of myself in the fully American days and remark how truly different
was my ignorance then.
My children's Japanese school friends look upon me, I imagine, much
as I used to look upon my immigrant friends' grandfathers back in New
York when I was a kid: someone who looks and dresses and talks and acts
-- well, foreign.
As to the biological bottom line of all this, the geneticists assure
us that the differences between the races are infinitessimal in genetic
terms -- skin color, hair, eye shape etc. collectively comprising no
more than a breath of a wisp of a molecule of a drop in the global ocean
of the human genome. At that level, the difference between me and the
Japanese is about the same as the difference between me and me. Cultures
too are thought to reside in that 'difference,' when in fact they are
matters of time and place. To realize that prejudice is really a matter
of not-knowing is to take a big step; and big steps, like living in
another country, can lead to big discoveries, like what a heavy and
useless burden is enmity.
My grandchildren will be sansei in Japan, unless one of my children
or their children has children with someone of yet another nationality
and so carries on that grand wandering that is native to the human family.
Perhaps even, one day, my great-grandchildren will emigrate back to
my old country, and find themselves a new continent there. Or they may
stay here, and astound their friends by telling them that their great-grandfather
was, believe it or not, of all things, an American.
Robert
Brady is KJ's poetry editor. Author of 'Further on this Floating
Bridge of Dreams' (Katydid); has two tapes out: Rambo Gets the
Mail and Dining with the Beast
Copyright
held by the author
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