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| The old house and neighbor Paul checking out the magnolia |
Kaneko’s childhood was
disrupted on 19 February 1942, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066 commanding the evacuation of all people of Japanese
descent on the West Coast, including citizens born in the United States. Racism
against the Japanese had long been simmering, but the official justification
given to the public for the evacuation was national security interests in
response to the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Over 110,000
Japanese and Japanese-Americans were rounded up and processed at various
assembly centers and then relocated to internment camps in Idaho, California,
Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Arkansas. These detainees were forced to
abandon businesses, property, friends, schools, and personal belongings and
spend several years behind barbed wire in crudely constructed camps far from
their homes.
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| A building in the area looks like an old barrack |
Kaneko and the
other members of his family were among those who experienced this catastrophic
disruption of their lives. He was three years old and an American citizen (a
Sansei) when his family was uprooted from their home in Seattle and herded to
the assembly center in Puyallup, Washington. From there the family was removed
to the Minidoka camp in Idaho.
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| This road sign is posted on the old camp grounds. |
The Kanekos
remained confined there until the camps were decommissioned in 1945 and they
were released. The relocation camp experience was a major turning point in
Japanese American history in general; it certainly changed the Kaneko family
and profoundly affected the development of the author. The trials of camp life
are the subject of Kaneko’s short story “The Shoyu Kid” (1976), and the
lifelong residual effects of internment are explored in poems such as those
collected in his book, Coming Home From Camp (1986).
Kaneko’s family returned
to the Seattle area after the camps were closed and attempted to resume their
old life. Kaneko attended the University of Washington, where he received a
B.A. in English in 1961. He went on to earn a M.A. in Writing in 1963,
and that year he married. He and his wife had two children—a son, William, in
1969, and a daughter, Shayna, in 1970—but they divorced in the 1970s.
In 1966 Kaneko was
hired fulltime as an English instructor at Highline Community College outside
Seattle, where he has won various accolades for his teaching. Kaneko has
remained in the Seattle area, living on a rural island outside of the city. He
has continued to work at Highline Community College, where he still teaches and
served as chair of the Arts and Humanities Division.
Kaneko began his literary
career with the publication of poetry and short fiction in the 1970s. His most
widely-anthologized work, “The Shoyu Kid” was originally published in the Amerasia
Journal in 1976. It gained even wider exposure when it was reprinted in
1991 in The Big Aiiieeeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese
American Literature. “The Shoyu Kid” is a coming-of-age tale within a
particular set of social and historical circumstances: it is a rare firsthand
fictionalized account of life in an internment camp. The story has received
attention for both its unusual and provocative cultural perspective and for its
relevance to gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic critiques.
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| A barely surviving root cellar like this may have been used. |
“The Shoyu Kid”
focuses on four young boys growing up behind barbed wire, making trouble and
marking time within the confines of their small universe. The protagonists are
Itchy (Ichiro), Jackson (Hiroshi), the narrator Masao, and the gang’s
beleaguered follower, the Shoyu Kid. The action centers on the boys’ hunt for
the Shoyu Kid and the mystery of his frequent absences and endless candy
supply. The boys’ quest uncovers the disturbing fact that the Kid’s chocolate
bars are gifts from the camp’s red-haired soldier, given in return for sexual
favors. The climactic scene depicts the boys’ reactions of confusion and shame,
and their violent humiliation of the victim himself.
In analyses of
“The Shoyu Kid,” critics such as David Eng and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong have
praised Kaneko’s unsettling depictions of how cultures conspire to construct
racial and sexual hierarchies. American cultural mythology has traditionally
associated the Asian male with yellow or “brownness” (in the story, the Shoyu
Kid’s nickname derives from the brown snot continually running down his face)
and emasculation. The young protagonists of “The Shoyu Kid” identify themselves
with the dominant culture of John Wayne and cowboy movies. They refuse to be
called by their Japanese names and imitate Hollywood action heroes in their
interrogation of the Shoyu Kid. Yet, the element of prostitution in the Shoyu
Kid’s actions, of selling out to the enemy for chocolate bars, makes the boys
ultimately aware of their subjugated position and impotence: despite their
role-playing at John Wayne, they are not virile Western heroes. The boys’
racial position and sexual identity is called into question.
The dynamics of
power, victimization, and complicity playing out within the camp’s hierarchy is
a central motif in “The Shoyu Kid.” In his dealings with the red-haired
soldier, the Shoyu Kid is considered a betrayer to the cause, but the other
boys subconsciously understand their own complicity. They too have been
co-opted into desiring Western culture and its prizes and aligning themselves
with its dominating forces. Their guilt only fuels their fury. “The Shoyu Kid”
eloquently reveals the way violence begets more violence. The white government
subjugates the Japanese, while the Japanese American boys vent their feelings
of rage and impotence by humiliating the Kid. As Sau-ling Wong notes,
“The Shoyu Kid” is a “meticulously wrought moral allegory . . . mak[ing] the
point that the potential for domination and violence is universal, found within
even the weakest and most oppressed.”
In the 1970s and
early 1980s, Kaneko turned his energies to drama and wrote the plays Lady is
Dying (1977), and Benny Hana (1984) and rescripted a British version
of a Japanese folk drama,. Twilight of a Crane (1982), Lady is Dying,
which Kaneko wrote with Amy Sanbo, was produced by the Asian American
Theater in San Francisco. Kaneko received the Henry Broderick Award for that
year as well as the Asian American Playwright Search Award. The play
illuminates the collision between American values and Japanese traditions as
immigrants come of age and grow old in America. The protagonists are a Sansei
couple who must deal with their aging parents and the slow death of the father.
In the play Eastern and Western cultures clash as traditional Japanese customs
of parent/child responsibility (“oya-koko”), including assuming care of
the widowed mother, creates conflict for the younger generation in the family,
which has been living with a different outlook and following a different set of
social codes in modern-day America.
Kaneko next turned
his attention to poetry, producing a chapbook titled Coming Home from Camp that
was published in 1986. The title poem, which has been anthologized in several
collections of Asian American writing, is told from several different points of
view spanning several decades as different family members speak about the
residual effects of the war. The mother’s voice begins the piece, and she
describes the struggle to rebuild a life after losing everything in the camps.
The family is crammed into one room again, the father cannot find a job, and
the twenty-five dollars the family received upon leaving camp does not begin to
cover food and rent. The mother begins to sound hopeless as she notes the
lethargy of the husband and the false optimism of the aphorism “Things
will get better.” She knows better: “Nothing changes. It just repeats./
And then you stop.”
The father speaks
next, fourteen years later, complaining of the endless drudgery of life and the
stagnation of his marriage. He compares the family’s past authority in their
community with his present situation as a day laborer cutting grass and
slaughtering chickens. His lack of ambition is revealed to be a lasting
consequence of the internment experience when he questions the value of working
hard to rebuild their lives if it can all be destroyed: “It’s just as well. I’d
hate to lose it all / again. There’s less to lose like this.” He hopes the
future will bring better opportunities for his son.
The son’s words
close the piece and continue the theme of legacy. The son introduces the term “Minidoka-response”
to define the fear, silence, and paralysis he inherited as a child. He sees his
parents as imprisoned by the apprehension derived from the camp experience, a
fear that infected and silenced him also. He wants to end that legacy of fear and
leave his teenage children free to speak, act, and live according to their
hearts.
Other poems in Coming
Home from Camp develop similar questions of memory, legacy and family
relationships. “Camp Harmony: Puyallup Fairgrounds, 1978.1942” recounts the first
Day of Remembrance in 1978 when Japanese Americans gathered in Puyallup,
Washington, to reenact and remember their “temporary internment” at the
assembly center called Camp Harmony. The occasion also sparks rumination on
legacies and memory, an analysis of the forces that shape people and the ways
in which some forces and experiences are passed on to the next generation.
Another poem in the collection, “On Ordinary Days,” documents the endless
monotony of camp days, with inmates penned in like sheep, attempting to fill
the time with woodcarving and needlepoint. Despite their best attempts to
forget, the inmates are beset with “memories of homes beyond the fence.”
Other poems
foreground the often troubled relationships between parents and children. “Butcher”
recounts the deterioration of the relationship between a father and a daughter;
the distance between them is apparent as he slaughters a chicken she has
lovingly raised. The father is too “trapped / in his personal darkness” to feel
the death of life and love as he continues his work like an automaton. “Violets
for Mother” depicts a parent who rocks in her chair for days on end, lost to
fear and memories of the past. Another poem, “The Secret,” addresses the death
of the author’s father and his attempt to come to terms with it.
In the 1990s
Kaneko turned to nonfiction to reflect on the lasting effects of the camp
experience on Japanese American families and his own development. In his 1993
essay “Of Rice and Bread,” published in Daily Fare: Essays from the
Mutlicultural Experience, Kaneko explores how racism and interment created
a group of parents who raised their children with caution, instilling a desire
to conform rather than rebel. The title of the piece refers to his generation’s
drive to assimilate as symbolized by families abandoning rice for bread and
kendo for basketball. Kaneko understands the fear that motivated this behavior,
but he believes it came at great expense to his generation, those people—like
himself— who did not speak up for their principles, allowed wrongs to go
unchallenged, and became passive recipients of what life handed them. He calls
for the next generation to be “assemblers of [their] own lives”—to follow their
own vision and forge their own path.
Kaneko recognizes
a potential side effect of this exhortation: the path his children choose may
not be a recognizably “Japanese” one. He comforts himself, however, by
recognizing that his children will always have the wisdom of their Asian and
American cultures to draw on as they make their way in a new multicultural
society. Kaneko continues his efforts to come to terms with the camp
experience in “Journey to Minidoka,” which was published in Where the
Morning Light’s Still Blue: Personal Essays about Idaho (1994). Spurred by
Kaneko’s journey back to Minidoka on the fiftieth anniversary of Japanese
Americans’ relocation to the camps, the essay is marked by reminiscences of
scenes from his early childhood and experiences reading newspapers of the time.
The outpouring of hatred for the Japanese revealed in the papers was
astonishing to him, and his shock was only somewhat alleviated by some
unexpected outpourings of support. Kaneko then relates his attempts to relocate
himself in the landscape of Minidoka, and find some mark of the love and loss
and courage that took place on that land. Ultimately, however, he finds all
that remains of the inmates’ time there is the unmarked sky and earth.
In his 1995 short
story “Nobody’s Hero,” Kaneko returns to his fictional version of Minidoka and
revisits the characters from “The Shoyu Kid.” The main action occurs
during an evening of torrential rains in the mud soaked camp. The boys ransack
the camp store, an act of sabotage that Hiroshi dreams will shake up the
complacent internees and demonstrate a heroic defiance of camp authority.
Although the gang’s escapades do render them camp heroes, their moment of glory
is short-lived when the newspaper prints a fraudulent story of their
confession. Their reputations quickly tailspin from heroes to traitors. The
story ends with the impotent rage of Hiroshi and the narrator’s sense of
futility. “Nobody’s Hero” raises questions of rebellion and of what it means to
be a hero or a traitor in a limbo world where there is no clear agreement on
who the enemy actually is. The young Japanese American men are stymied in their
desire to fight for their county because their ancestry makes them suspect.
They do not know how to prove their loyalty to a country that views them as the
enemy. In the midst of the sabotage, Masao explains that he feels “like a
soldier behind enemy lines, doing something brave for my country, but I
couldn’t figure out why it was brave or how it was good for my country.” The
internees are told they are detained for their own protection, yet the
government’s official rationale for the camps is national defense. Hiroshi’s
anger about his circumstances reflects the inner turmoil of a generation of
American citizens made to feel suspect. “Nobody’s Hero” also deals with
generational conflict, especially the frustration of the younger Nisei and
Sansei at what they view as the complacency of their elders.
In 1999 Kaneko
published the poem “Wild Light” and the short story “Old Lady”in the Seattle
Review. “Wild Light” is narrated by a young boy who has been ripped from
his home and placed in barracks under the Idaho sky. The poem captures the
moment the boy begins to realize the strength of will and leap of imagination
that will eventually free him from the barbed wire that currently circumscribes
his universe. Meanwhile, “Old Lady” presents an intergenerational family
conflict: a daughter-in-law tells the story of her relationship with her
husband’s stepmother. The narrator describes the old woman’s past abuse and
battles her continued interference in the family.
Although “Wild
Light” and “Old Lady” are seemingly disparate works, Kaneko finds great
similarities in their origins. As he notes in his “Commentary” that accompanies
the pieces, “both deal with Japanese American experience and are attempts to
understand, interpret, and reconcile events that have placed the world of their
participants in turmoil within themselves and against each other and the barely
visible external culture.”
Through his poems,
plays, essays and short stories, Lonny Kaneko has added a vital thread to the
American literary tapestry. His perspective as a Sansei is vital to his
illuminating explorations of the perennial conflict between immigrants, their
children, and their grandchildren as they all attempt to define themselves in
America. Through his short stories Kaneko has questioned the role of
Western culture in constructing Asian and Asian American identities.
Furthermore, in his eloquent and evocative poems and short stories about
Japanese internment camp life, Kaneko gives voice to a chapter of American
history that has long been silenced.
Sources--
David L. Eng, “Primal
Scenes: Queer Childhood in ‘The Shoyu Kid,’” Racial Castration: Managing
Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001),
pp. 104–136;
Lawson Fusao Inada, ed.,
Only What We Could Carry: the Japanese American Internment Experience (Berkeley:
Heyday / San Francisco: California Historical Society, 2000);
David Palumbo-Liu,
“The Minority Self as Other: Problematics of Representation in Asian-American
Literature,” Cultural Critique, 28 (Fall 1994): 75–102;
Ronald Takaki, Strangers
from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1989);
Sau-ling Cynthia
Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Bio written by Jennifer Collins-Friedrichs,
Highline Community College, circa 2004;
lightly edited by LK
Published in Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 312: Asian American Writers, 2005.
Published in Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 312: Asian American Writers, 2005.
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