Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [49]
The capstone of their plan was to bring my older sister and me back to Japan each summer so we could attend school in June and July. We began at a private school called the Family School, whose mission was to assimilate returnee children like ourselves into Japanese society. The place carried an aura of wrongfulness. Japanese children are not meant to leave Japan, as it is believed only children raised in Japan can become true Japanese.
Many of these students were half Caucasian, what the Japanese call konketsuji, or “children of confused blood.” Over lunch, we debated whether it was better to be haafu—half Japanese—or pure. The haafu would say it was easier to be pure Japanese, because we could pass. People didn’t rake us with their eyes in the subway, children didn’t run after us yelling “Haroo.” We pure Japanese would retort we were expected to be more Japanese than we actually were. The Japanese proverb says “the protruding nail gets hammered,” and all Japanese society seemed entitled to do the hammering. A pure girl described a taxi ride. Her driver kept asking her questions, and grew increasingly exasperated by her broken Japanese. Suddenly, he pulled the cab over and slammed open the partition between them. The words came in a mist of spittle—he asked if she wasn’t ashamed to be so ignorant. It was when his face softened and he asked if she was retarded that she fled the cab in tears.
When I was in fifth grade, my parents decided the Family School was inadequate. How could we learn to be Japanese from returnee children? They enrolled us in a normal Tokyo public school. I do not know how they convinced the superintendent to let two nonresident children flit into his school for two months of every year. Perhaps the urgency of the case spoke for itself. Where else would I have learned to inhabit a Japanese body—to rise, to straighten, and to bow; to do morning calisthenics on the count of eight; to sit ramrod straight in my high-collared uniform; to pass the handkerchief, tooth, and fingernail tests? Where else would I have read textbooks mandated by the Ministry of Education—a curriculum whose uniformity makes the most conservative American defenders of the Western canon sound recklessly pluralistic? From whom but my Japanese peers would I have learned the “Japlish” lyrics to the latest hit song by the Pink Ladies and to mispronounce these and all other English phrases, so as not to be pummeled for being arrogant? Where else would I have heard a teacher try to thwart suicides around college examinations by describing how students soiled themselves in midair as they jumped off buildings?
Perhaps my allergy to assimilation began at Higashiyama School, in Matsumoto-sensei’s fifth-grade classroom. The class had a darling. She could have been the heroine of a shojo manga, the ubiquitous comics for preteen girls, with her chestnut eyes set off by double eyelids, and skin so vellum-thin blue deltas shone at her wrists. When she stood to answer a question, the other girls would croon “Kawaiiiiii,” elongating the word for “adorable.” The class also had a pariah, a stoop-shouldered mumbler. He would elicit the cry “Kuraiiiii,” an extension of the word for “gloomy.” Matsumoto-sensei smiled benignly at these rituals. It was good to come to consensus.
The Japan scholar Edwin Reischauer once compared the Japanese to a school of fish, darting one way together, then, if startled, darting the other, but always in seamless synchronicity. Over the years, I would conjure other similes for my classmates, who seemed at times like army ants with their single hive mind, or, when bobbing through their calisthenics, like the chuntering pistons of a well-tempered