The Family Table: Three Decades of Sentimental Appeal
The popularity of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s 1973 memoir, Farewell to Man- zanar, written with her husband James D. Houston, regenerated the story of
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the Japanese American family for the political activism of the 1980s. Although Houston’s memoir poignantly tells a tale of familial decay, she also explicitly reflects at some length on the question of agency, blaming teenage willfulness as well as the incarceration for the Wakatsukis’ unraveling.
You might say it would have happened sooner or later anyway, this sliding apart of such a large family, in postwar California. People get married; their interests shift. But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the pro- cess, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible.
Using language found in later accounts, Houston starts with the destruction of domesticity: “It began in the mess hall. Before Manzanar, mealtime had always been the center of our family scene. . . . Now, in the mess halls, after a few weeks had passed, we stopped eating as a family.” Her mother, valiantly trying to fulfill her appropriate domestic role, “tried to hold us together for a while, but it was hopeless.” At home, Papa had been the one who headed the table. The children, however, enjoyed their new freedom.
My older brothers and sisters . . . began eating with their friends, or eating some- where blocks away, in the hope of finding better food. . . . Kiyo and I were too young to run around, but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time. We all did.
By “confessing,” Houston takes some responsibility for familial breakdown; we didn’t resist enough, she implies.40
In her account, Houston notes, although she does not make much of it, that the camp administrators did worry about the effect on the family.
A couple of years after the camps opened, sociologists studying the life noticed what had happened to the families. They made some recommendations, and edicts went out that families must start eating together again. Most people resented this; they griped and grumbled. They were in the habit of eating with their friends. And until the mess hall system itself could be changed, not much could really be done. It was too late. (33)
Houston’s memoir, itself a mélange of the explanatory, condemnatory, and conciliatory, is at its most confused here, retreating to impersonal analysis to avoid talking any more about her family’s breakdown. Rarely is Houston’s tone
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scholarly; she almost never invokes sociologists or any other outside “experts” or sources on the incarceration. She also avoids the question of authority regarding this mess hall horde and does not mention who was sending out or loosely enforcing the edicts on families eating together.
Houston’s narrative does have another, more important beginning than the mess hall. Even though the abrupt arrest of her father, a fisherman on Ter- minal Island, breaks up the family before they even enter the camp, she does not even mention this. Instead, several days later, when her father is charged with delivering oil to Japanese submarines, she says, “This was the beginning of a terrible, frantic time for all my family.” (8) Nonetheless, she confines this “terrible, frantic time” to a finite and proportionally small section of the narra- tive, implying that other times, including the arrest itself, were less terrible and less frantic. When she says that her mother’s weeping was terrible or that her family’s disintegration “began in the mess hall,” it is a false, sentimental start- ing place with which her mainstream audience can identify. Beginning at the beginning would require a cross-racial identification with the loss of a father dragged off by police for being a dangerous enemy alien spy. Houston bleakly concludes this section with “My own family, after three years of mess hall liv- ing”—notably, not “camp living” or even “internment living” but specifically blaming the mess hall—“collapsed as an integrated unit” (33). Even though this time also included three years of her brother’s enlistment against her father’s wishes, her near conversion to Catholicism, and various hardships for her family members, the mess hall retains its rhetorical primacy. The fact that the bulk of Houston’s camp narrative does address her father’s tragic alcoholism, illness, and loss of patriarchy makes her rhetorical stress on the mess hall all the more curious a choice. Houston was either consciously or unconsciously drawing on decades of discourse about the breakdown of the family attributed to the mess halls, but Farewell to Manzanar’s success ensured its continuance.
Houston’s memoir is the best example of a post-incarceration adaptation of the sentimental novel’s depiction of family. As numerous scholars have argued, the classic American sentimental novel may have assumed that a conventional family structure existed, but it frequently depicted its heroines in unconven- tional scenarios and communities that break apart the family and sometimes demand the type of cross-racial identification that Houston’s narrative required of white American readers. Glenn Hendler writes, “Sentimental plots repeat- edly transgress both the internal and the external limits of the family structure which domestic ideology held up as its overt ideal.” The incarceration mem- oir, however, generally depicts such transgressions in service of its larger mis- sion and twentieth-century audience, to introduce Japanese Americans into
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mainstream American acceptance. Houston and other protagonists emerge from their unconventional camp situations with new bonds of sympathy con- necting them to an outward society rather than to a restored nuclear family. The normative family, however, is still assumed as a function of sentimentality, even as it may be transgressed by the narrative.41
It matters little that—as Stephanie Coontz has most popularly argued—the idyllic nuclear family image most powerfully identified with the next decade did not actually exist as the American norm in the 1940s.42 Image was every- thing to the incarcerees who, judging from their own memoirs, might have been the only American population accustomed to dining family style. Far more likely, of course, is that sympathetic writers, both incarcerees and others, understood the power of family as a rhetorical device. The 1950s black-and- white television family, an image that undoubtedly also influenced Houston’s depiction of her family table, can actually be seen partly growing out of the depictions of incarceration. Girls in home economics clubs across the coun- try were carefully instructed in creating proper nuclear family homes, with the camps’ “new type of community” held up as a sad counterexample. A 1943 magazine article asked them to consider the plight of fellow young American citizens who also liked jitterbugging and cokes. “Family life as known in the ordinary American home is largely absent. . . . As meals are served cafeteria style in mess halls, there is no dinner table around which the family can thresh out everyday problems.” Once again, the lack of a dinner table, and not the lack of civil liberties, is the sentimental tragedy. But homemakers have done wonders in these sad circumstances, and “evacuee girls find that home eco- nomics, more than almost any other subject, helps them improve life in the center and gives them a firm foundation for the future.” This future is one in which the “ordinary American home” can flourish for girls of all ethnicities, who will have the privilege of setting their own dinner tables.43
The fulfillment of this idealized image also appeared in mainstream film. In the 1960 black-and-white film Hell to Eternity starring Jeffrey Hunter and Sessue Hayakawa (and featuring George Takei in a supporting role), poor young orphan Guy Gabaldon is adopted by his Japanese American gym teach- er’s family, an idyllic nuclear family of father, mother, and two sons, an image that was too sentimental for the New York Times reviewer.44 Mama and Papa Une welcome Guy kindly, and the only moment when he shows any uneasi- ness arises when his friend and new adoptive brother, George, jokes that they eat seaweed and octopus for breakfast; Guy is then relieved to find cornflakes and other familiar foods on a nicely set table worthy of any sitcom of the 1950s. The film takes the path of least resistance, not suggesting that Japanese food or
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customs can be genuinely American, but instead showing that Japanese Amer- icans were fully “Americanized” in this area, sitting down together at the table until the incarceration breaks them up forever.45
Conclusion
While embracing the traditional depiction of the mess hall, more recent accounts of Japanese Americans’ incarceration also reveal new details of how families circumvented the rules and preserved themselves in unsanctioned ways. The mess hall story, effective as it was, mostly ended with the family’s destruction, creating a story of victimhood rather than survival. Tashiro, who had almost been separated from his family during his first meal in Gila River, writes an astonishingly frank account of his teenage years in the camp, full of pranks, name calling, sexual awakening, and friendship. Such frankness would have been unheard-of in the sentimental memoirs of the early years or in the era of redress. His recollections seem to be accurate, though, because his mother one day announced to him that he was becoming a “yogore”—an unsavory character, sometimes translated as a gangster—in the camp, and so his family was sending him to live with relatives in Minneapolis. Among other, more serious offenses, his mother tells him that the mess hall crew reported that he had loosened the caps on the salt and pepper shakers, causing people to dump the entire contents all over their food.
Tashiro’s pleas and promise to behave in the mess halls did nothing to change his mother’s mind. Determined to save him from the lack of structured life in camp, his mother, acting as agreed by correspondence with his father serving in France with the 442nd, speedily packs him off. Significantly, their last act as a family was to buy a chicken from a Native American. They pluck it together—Tashiro still remembers the stench of the feathers—cook it on their little barrack stove, and make teriyaki chicken for his lunch on the journey. In this narrative, it is the Tashiros’ ability to buy food independently, cook it as a family, and pack it for a child that enabled him to escape the mess halls that were turning him into a delinquent. With his bento (lunch) box, Tashiro, escorted by his grandfather, heads out for his new life in the Midwest, leaving his mother and baby sister behind. Instead of a story of decay, it is the Tashiros’ enduring strength as a family unit that allows them to overcome all the obsta- cles of the incarceration, albeit at the price of the temporary separation that closes the memoir.46
The disintegration of the family structure in the mess halls three times a day, symbolizing the lack of both a family home and the freedom to choose and
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prepare food they liked, was certainly a source of great discomfort and emo- tional trauma for the incarcerated Japanese Americans, making their impris- onment even more difficult. Houston’s account, as well as other memoirs and testimonies, made the mess hall a subject of sympathy and interest, paving the way for the redress movement that further cast it as accepted fact. Ironically, the discourse on which the movement drew was, during the incarceration itself, much more politically double-edged. The mess hall imagery generated great sympathy from a mainstream audience and rallied the incarcerees to preserve what home life they could through a variety of methods, but for all audiences, it drew attention away from the causes and the legality of the incarceration, as well as the WRA’s plans to scatter the Japanese American community as widely as possible across the rest of the country. Substantiating historians’ claims that the nuclear family was not as sacred to Americans as the midcentury myth would have it, public outcries over cafeteria-style dining and familial separation came even from sympathizers only at strategic moments. The mess hall was not simply pitied, but feared. Pushing past the politics of this sentimental image exposes the depths of prejudice that caused the incarceration in the first place.