Perfect Peace

Although I consider myself an armchair anti-war activist, I have to admit that growing up on military bases was one of the best things that happened to me and my sister. Ironically, we spent our teen years as peaceniks protesting the Vietnam War and the "military industrial complex". But looking back now, I see that had it not been for the U.S. Army I wouldn't have been born me. The only reason my father was in Japan was because of war. Had he not met and married my mother, I might've ended up with a Japanese otosan. What a strange concept to consider!

But back to childhood. Even though we were unaware of it at the time, those military bases were havens of perfect peace for us kids of mixed marriages. Shortly after WWII, American military men took warbrides from Europe, Asia and Australia. Many GI's ended up with German and Japanese wives. During our years at Ft. Lewis, I remember having lots of friends with Japanese or German mothers. Their fathers were sometimes white, sometimes black.

In any case, I never heard a single racist comment during that period. Instead, I learned snippets of various languages and cultural traditions from all of my classmates. My best friend, Sondra, whose family was Puerto Rican once invited me to her Catholic Church. Although I consider myself agnostic, it was richly rewarding to be exposed to someone else's religion. My sister's best friend, Tessie, was Filipina and I remember that meals served in her home were markedly different from what Sondra's family dined on. The mother of the Mexican family next door taught my mother to make a popular noodle dish. In fact, there was so much ethnic diversity in our neighborhood that it was like living at the United Nations. Only no one seemed to notice that everyone was different because being different was normal.

Several years later, when my father moved us to an all-white, middle-class neighborhood in nearby Tacoma, our neighbors there rolled up the welcome mat and tossed it out. Today, I realize that the only reason no one burned crosses in our yard was because they thought they had too much class although they probably thought about doing it. A fireman who lived across the street called my sister and me the "n-word" one day as we walked past his house. Huh? How'd you like to have him come put out the fire at your house? Let's see, "Ya'll are nothin' but a buncha "n-words" so I'ma jest let yo home burn down." Most of the kids in our 'hood just told us point blank that they weren't "allowed" to play in our yard like we had a disease or something. Only one girl, whose parents both worked in factories, ever actually came inside our house. I guess, in the eyes of the rest of the neighbors, her having laborer folks put her in the same class with us coloreds.

When I was in high school, my two best friends were also the offspring of warbrides. Silvia's mother was Austrian while Helen's mother was French. I was also friends with two girls who both had German mothers although one had a black father, and the other a white. I don't think any of us were particularly conscious of it then, but one of the reasons, I figure, that drew us together was our having mothers with accents. Having a foreign-born mother is what separated us from other classmates more so, I believe, than being mixed-race, or even black. I mean, it was a pretty big deal to attend some mother-daughter school function and present your mom to "real Americans" who would gawk at her before rudely demanding of you, "What did she say? I can't understand her." Of course, there was probably some remaining hostility towards Germans and Japanese who had been America's enemies during the war. Still, common sense would dictate that warbrides had been screened and approved for immigration by the U.S. How harmful could they've been? Was my mother toting a machine gun during the war? Was she the one who ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Between dodging bombs dropped by Americans and running to bomb shelters, she barely survived on the few rations doled out by her government.

While we've come a long way since the days of outright animosity towards foreigners, we still have a ways to go. That's evident by some of the events that took place post-9/11. A friend of mine who is half black and half white, but looks of Arab descent, caught hell the first year following 9/11. When he once visited me in Los Angeles, he was stopped from taking photos of the LaBrea Tar Pits! No kidding.

These days, I'm grateful for my military upbringing although I remain vehemently anti-war. Still, I believe the only answer to peace is education. Until people learn the truth by studying accurately recorded history, we are doomed as a species to continue battling one another based on some physical trait.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

HAPA Birthday, Again, b.r.

Last Friday, I wished my sister, br, HAPA Birthday right here on this blog. A long-time friend then wrote me asking how Beverly Rhea got her name, so I'll hapa-ly explain.

Although I was born in Tokyo and promptly given a Japanese name by my Japanese mother, my sister made her way into the world via Richmond Texas. I've written before (see earlier blog titled What's In A Name?) that my mother argued with her Japanese doctors about naming me Yayoi--which, in accordance to the month I was born, was way too late in the season for me to be called thusly. But do you think my mom would allow herself to be bullied by a couple of authority figures? Not that OG rebel. She liked the name, and she didn't care if they ridiculed her or snickered in her face, she was naming me Yayoi and that's all she wrote.

But by the time my sister was born, we had left Japan. Having arrived only recently to the U.S., my mother was shy and unfamiliar with things like family hierarchy. Therefore, she quietly acquiesced to her new mother-in-law, the so-called black matriarch.

Shortly after giving birth, my mother was resting in her hospital bed when she was presented with the child she had so laboriously brought to the planet. Looking down at my baby sister, my mother was shocked to see that a name tag around her daughter's wrist showed that she had already been named without the consultation of her own birth mother!

To add insult, my mom couldn't even pronounce her new daughter's name. Try this on for size: Beverly Rhea Winfrey.

That's right. Now, if you know anything about the Japanese language, you're aware that there are no phonetics for the letter "v", and that there are no words that end with consonants--unless it's an "n". Their letter "f" is pronounced like our "wh", and their letter "r" is a combination roll that sounds like our "d". Our "l" is pronounced like an "r", and so forth. What a nightmare for my poor mom.

She probably said something like this: Beh-boo-rdee Rdee-ah Win-who-rdee-oo.

To this day, she calls my sister Beh-boo, or sometimes, just Beh. To make matters even more complicated, about 15 years ago my sister changed her name to just the initials b.r. (lower case, no space, no periods--I added them).

Sugoi, ne?

That's my mom, above, posing with my grandmother who was visiting us in Washington State in the 1960's.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

Hey, fellow hip hapas, don't forget that new Hapa*Teez t-shirt designs will be uploaded soon.

Check out: http://www.cafepress.com/hapateez

And, stay tuned for the fabulous Mia Gonzalez' update of the Watermelon Sushi website.

War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely, Uh, Something!

Earlier, I wrote about the tensions between Japanese in Nippon v. the J/A's (Japanese Americans) in the U.S. Even though I slammed Mr. Sulu for his snide remarks about how I pronounced my name, I didn't mean to make light of the issue of Nipponese v. J/A's. Certainly, there is much to be said about the suffering on both sides.

J/A's languished behind the barbed wire of interment camps and were separated from family and friends, lost careers, property, and--most important of all in Asian culture--face. The Japanese in Nippon, also lost face along with millions of innocent lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were destroyed by American atomic bombs. My own mother, living in Tokyo at the time, often found herself racing towards a bomb shelter to avoid the constant rain of B52 bombs dropped by Americans. One day, she arrived at work only to find her office in shambles; completely demolished by bombing.

No one ever really wins a war. The devastation comes not only in the loss of lives, but also in the deeply psychological pain that often lingers following the trauma of war.

But if there's any kind of light at the end of the tunnel to be celebrated, it's the births of thousands of mixed-race babies who would've never been born had it not been for a war somewhere. So, war can be a kind of cultural bridge, too.

Who would've ever thought that an African American man from the South, whose ancestors were brought in chains from a place he has no recollection of, would end up marrying a Japanese woman whose own sad personal history made her eligible to move to America? And, who would've ever thought that a spirited and artistic Japanese woman would marry a man who should've been considered a representative of the enemy of her people?

But it happened. And, it happened to many others like my parents. It happened to Germans and Italians, too. One of my best friends in high school had a French mother and Swedish American soldier father who had met his bride while he was stationed in Europe. Another had an Austrian mother and Caucasian American father. War brides are what they called these women, but they were so much more. They were brave souls who struggled to recover from the devastation of war and, if that meant marrying a stranger from a strange land, whether or not love fit into the equation, so be it. I'm sure most of those women loved the men they ended up with, but who among us can say how we would behave romantically after losing our families, friends, countries, and even our hope.

About 3/4's of the kids I knew while our family lived at Ft. Lewis were either Japanese and black or Japanese and Caucasian, and German and black or German and Caucasian. Quite frankly, if it hadn't been for a war, I wouldn't be me.

Still, it's too bad that it takes a war to bring some folks together. Perhaps in the future, people will make an effort to not segregate into tribes and, in the words of Bob Marley, "Spread out! Spread out!"

Cool runnin's, ya'll.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

P.S. That's me and Moms, above, with her bike in Tokyo many moons ago.