Introduction, Sophie Chase
“Between
the barracks,” recalled Japanese-American and former Jerome internee, Sada
Murayana, “there was a trellis with morning glories, forming a tunnel of
flowers. One block in particular was a showplace. Any outside visitors were
taken there.” Perhaps an unremarkable scene to the busy passerby today these
small purple and pink flowers certainly captured Murayana’s attention. That
they not only captured Murayana’s attention, but also were captivating enough
to warrant a visit from “outside visitors,” is compelling. Upon further
consideration however, perhaps that Murayana and other internees were enchanted
with small flowers freely blossoming within the bared wire confines of a World
War Two U.S. Japanese Internment camp is not so surprising. For the over
120,000 Japanese Americans that the U.S. government forcibly relocated and
replanted in harsh, desolate and unfamiliar locations across the United States
following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an otherwise insignificant flower,
humble tomato plant or indistinguishable patch of grass on the outside would
have quite possibly meant something much more on the inside. During a period in
American history in which the garden, as historian Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant has
shown, became synonymous with victory, patriotism and American identity, it is not
so farfetched to consider the garden as transcending its own conventional
“purpose,” whatever that may be, to then say something more about Japanese
American experience, responses to confinement and identity. Perhaps then that
Japanese American internees planted morning glories among barracks, cultivated
communal “victory gardens,” in line with U.S. government sponsored “food for
victory” movements and arranged stones, water and wood to form Japanese Shima all under the watchful eyes of the
U.S. government and War Relocation Authority (WRA) officials is neither as paradoxical nor as
surprising as it may seem from the outside of the barbed wire.
That
the garden can be understood as a site of creative coping, resistance and
identity making within a confined space is not a new concept. Through a rich collection
of historical works on the experiences of confined persons in a variety of
spaces from POW camps to WWII era, Jewish ghettos, editors Gilly Carr and
Harold Mytum showcase how prisoners, internees and captured persons creatively
engaged with the “materiality of their lives” to combat boredom, cope with
horrible conditions or even resist authority. In the particular case of
Japanese American internment, no historian has shed light on internees use of
the garden as form of creative coping and “place-making” better than Iowa State
Professor Jane E. Dusselier. Often forcibly relocated to hostile and unfamiliar
spaces multiple times, Japanese American internes looked to the land to engage
in what Dusselier coins, “re-terriorialization.” By altering barren and dusty
“spaces” into “places” marked by flowers, vegetable and rock garden, Japanese
American internees made “space” that was not their own, legally, into safe
“places” they could not only identity with, but could also up-root and take
with them during the relocation process.
Although
Dusselier’s argument for gardens role in “portable place-making” in Japanese
American internment camps is altogether conclusive, she only discusses gardens
as sites of identity-making and subversive resistance to authority in Japanese
Americans internment camps briefly. Moreover, as historian Jere Takahashi
correctly points out, Japanese-Americans were without a single national and
cultural identity during WWII due to generational differences, which led to
considerable tensions within the group. Dusselier, however, fails to make any
distinction between Nisei and Issei use of the internment garden spaces, thus
generalizing the experience with these spaces across generations. Finally the
flower, vegetable and rock gardens of Japanese American internment camps at
times complemented and at other times stood in stark contrast to the popular
“victory garden” imagery projected by the U.S. Government to the American public
in pamphlets, posters and other visual media. That Japanese Americans, at least
to a certain extent, appeared to buy into the idea of the “victory garden,” and
what it stood for, despite having been propagated by the very government that
unfairly condemned them seems paradoxical and deserves serious consideration. A
creative space that has long captured the imagination of United States and its
individuals, the garden, particularly the “victory,” garden, demands closer
examination. It is has implications not only for understanding how we can use
non-conventional ways of examining the human experience, but also understanding
more specifically how Japanese Americans navigated confined spaces, negotiated
seemingly contradictory identities of “American-ness,” and “Japanese-ness,” and
formed responses to WRA and U.S. government authority.
No comments:
Post a Comment