Displacement

“I felt out of place here, tailing behind mom as we looked for evidence of any real connection to the neighborhood.”

Kiku and her mother walk around Japantown in San Francisco and do not understand the street and store signs because neither of them read or speak Japanese. Kiku briefly hints here at one of the overarching themes of the story, which is her disconnection from the Japanese language and thus from her Japanese heritage. She expands on this feeling of disconnect and the reasons for it throughout the graphic novel. The novel suggests that is this feeling of disconnectedness in the real world which triggers Kiku’s “displacement” into the past.

“I heard the music first. And when I opened my eyes, all I could see was a thick fog. But when it cleared at last…I was somewhere entirely different.”

This is the moment of Kiku’s first displacement in time and location. It is also the first occurrence of the motif of Ernestina’s violin, seen first as the visual markers of music notes drifting across the page and then in the form of Ernestina herself playing her violin on a stage.

“It hadn’t really occurred to me until then how little I knew about my family history. I had a smattering of facts that fit together like a puzzle that’s missing half its pieces.”

This quote highlights how little Kiku and her mother talk about their family’s past or heritage. Kiku knows almost nothing about her grandmother or grandparents. Kiku eventually comes to challenge this culture of silence around her family history and the history of the camps in general, and this will bring the generations of her family together.

“I never felt particularly Japanese. I was only half, and we rarely took part in any Japanese culture. Did I belong in that line with those Japanese American families?”

Kiku voices a common theme among third and fourth generation Japanese Americans, and among children of immigrants in general. Kiku feels she does not belong within the racial or cultural category of “Japanese,” because she is only half-Japanese, and because her family does not participate in their Japanese heritage. This once again highlights the disconnection she feels from her Heritage and Immigrant Identity.

“I never knew, until that day in SFO Airport, that anyone with one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry or more was incarcerated. So I would have been standing in that line with my mom and sister, no matter how white-passing we were. But that certainly didn’t mean we belonged there. Nobody did.”

Following from the previous quote, Kiku comes to understand that despite her inner sense of not being Japanese enough, she is clearly marked as Japanese (and therefore a threat) from an outside perspective. In one sense, therefore, she realizes that she does belong. On the other hand, she also argues that no one of any background belonged in this unjust situation.

“But some things, you can’t escape. […] Some things happen whether you’re paying attention or not.”

This quote, separated though it is by a page of Donald Trump’s speech playing in the background, is clearly intended to be read together, combining into a warning of sorts. Kiku implies that some things—like the camps, like her displacements—are inescapable and inevitable. Also implied, however, is the idea that burying one’s hand in the sand and ignoring a situation, or pretending it does not exist, will not prevent it from happening.

“She [Aiko] was Nisei, like my grandmother, but she was so different from everything I knew about Ernestina. She was rebellious and vocal about her opposition to incarceration. I had grown up thinking that nobody resisted the camps, that the Nikkei cooperated quietly. But Aiko was never quiet.”

When Kiku meets Aiko, the differences between Aiko and Ernestina shock her. Aiko is a foil for Ernestina: Ernestina never speaks on the page; Aiko is “never quiet” (77). More importantly, Aiko’s character stands in opposition to the misrepresentation of all Japanese Americans as quiet and unassuming, willingly submitting to their own unjust imprisonment, which Kiku realizes she has internalized.

“Kiku, we’re Americans. I know Japanese only because I grew up with Issei parents; otherwise it’s useless to me. There’s no reason for you to learn it. You certainly don’t want to go to Japan—it’s even more fascist than America.”

Aiko voices an opinion shared by many other second and third generation Japanese Americans who were born in the US and are citizens. They viewed themselves as fully American and chose to divorce themselves from the language and culture of their parents/grandparents. As Aiko points out, Japan in the 1930s and 40s was in many ways even more authoritarian than the US was. Here the novel engages with the additional loss and betrayal felt by immigrant communities when they are rejected by the society they have chosen.

“I hadn’t expected Aiko to be so opposed to all things Japanese. Because she was so outspoken against the prejudices we were facing for our heritage, I expected her to be more passionate about that heritage. But seeing how she and other Nisei shied away from the Issei’s outdated traditions made me understand a little more just why there was almost no connection to Japan left by the time I was born.”

Kiku is surprised by Aiko’s vehement rejection of Japanese culture and language. However, it helps her as she begins to understand how and why her grandmother had given up her culture so much after the war that Kiku’s mother and the rest of the family could lose the language and any connection to their heritage. This is both a consequence of wanting to assimilate and fear of retaliation following their experiences in the camps.

“‘Do you think the whites hand-picked all the candidates, or are they just going to pick the winners?’

‘It doesn’t matter either way. The council’s not going to have any real power.’

‘It’s all a joke. I’m not even going to vote.’

‘They’re trying to make us prove we’re American enough to participate in a democracy. It’s stupid but I’ll play along. They may not care about real republican freedom, but I do.’”

In this scene of dialogue between Aiko and another (unnamed) man in the camp, several things become clear. First is that the Japanese community in the camps did not trust the intentions or claims of the administration who controlled the camps and their lives—with good reason. Second is that many Japanese Americans knew they were being made to jump through hoops to “prove” themselves, but were determined to do it anyway, to show that they were better Americans than those who had imprisoned them unjustly.

“Each of us fought a daily battle to hold close all that was dear to us.”

This voice-over narration rests over an image of Kiku dancing with May at a school dance. The line encapsulates the general determination and resilience of the Japanese community, and includes Kiku and May’s non-heterosexual identities as part of that community.

“I felt an intense connection to my grandmother in that moment. We were linked through this community, and I held the proof in my hand. It was a closeness I had never felt before. So much of our history had been obscured by silence.”

This is the moment when Kiku received the wooden toy brush from Mr. Matsuzawa and realizes that Ernestina’s toy violin was also a gift from this man, returning to the violin motif. The toy violin connects Kiku to her grandmother more concretely than anything before or after and represents the legacy of memory from the war to the present day.

“I knew I wasn’t going home. This was my only home now.”

At this point, Kiku has lost all hope of returning home to her own time. Like the Japanese Americans of the time, she comes to accept that the camp is now her home and resigns herself to it. This is less a matter of giving up, however, and more a matter of learning to make the most of the situation and fighting to make that situation more bearable: in this, her attitude is similar to those around her.

“Haruko’s husband had been a Japanese language teacher in San Francisco. He was arrested immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They didn’t know where he was now, or if they’d see him again.”

When Kiku is placed with a family of three women in Topaz, she learns that the husband of the family was arrested, along with many other Japanese American teachers, businessmen, and community leaders, directly following the Pearl Harbor bombing. Many of them were labeled troublemakers and dissidents and sent to Tule Lake during the war. They do not know where he is, highlighting the lack of due process and most basic US justice that should apply to all people equally.

“We didn’t do traditional Japanese New Year’s things, but we celebrated a variation of it that was more meaningful to me now than ever. Though we felt so far from Japanese culture, there were some things we had left. They were altered, but they were ours, and incarceration couldn’t take them away.”

Though Kiku’s family lost their connection to their Japanese heritage, she reflects on the ways they built their own traditions out of a mix of Japanese culture, American culture, and their own family idiosyncrasies, which makes their personal traditions all the more meaningful and important to her. This highlights the way many immigrant families construct new traditions out of pieces of older ones, and how their identities can feel fractured.

“I’d grown up with the idea that the no-no boys were all troublemakers, young and rebellious, irresponsible. But that just wasn’t true. I came to deeply respect their resistance and refusal to jump through the hoops their country was demanding of them.”

Even amongst other Japanese Americans, the “no-no boys” (those who answered no to the two most important questions on the loyalty questionnaire) were labeled troublemakers. They were accused of being rebellious and starting trouble merely out of spite, but Kiku realizes that they were standing up for their own rights, protesting the unjust treatment of the entire community, and pointing to the hypocrisy of the government. This passage is an example of how Kiku learns to challenge her own understanding and assumptions about previous generations of Japanese American people.

“There are lots of people to blame—the government, the stooges who rat on the rest of us—but don’t blame yourself. Most of us are just trying to survive and stay safe here. That’s all you can do.”

Aiko comforts Kiku when she feels guilty for answering yes on the loyalty questionnaire. Kiku admits she did it more out of fear of the possible consequences for resistance rather than any sense of loyalty or duty. Aiko makes it clear that the Japanese community had good reason to be afraid and every right to do their best to survive an awful situation. The novel here engages directly with the impossible dilemma that the Nikkei community were placed in by institutional discrimination.

“Draw what you see, what happens here. It’s important. They can scare us but they can’t make us forget.”

Aiko entreats Kiku, as her art teacher Miné Okubu did, to draw everything she sees in the camps because it is important to have a record of their experiences, and to remember everything. This connects Kiku’s drawings (and by implication, the graphic novel as a whole) to the theme of memory, and its power to either break a community or lead to resistance and justice.

“We’d all known that the punishment for trying to escape could be death. But if Mr. Wakasa really hadn’t been trying to escape at all, we could be killed for anything.”

James Wakasa’s murder by the camp guards ignites renewed fear in the community, about their treatment and their possible fates. This incident shows the community the depth of the injustice they face, such that no amount of good behavior or cooperation with the rules of the camp may be enough to keep them safe.

“But their experiences, their traumas, still shaped me in ways I was only just beginning to understand. The murder of James Wakasa had such an impact on my grandmother that two generations later, it was still haunting our family. Our whole Nikkei community. We were still mourning him.”

Kiku reflects on the far-reaching consequences of James Wakasa’s death. The incident was so traumatizing to the entire community that its impacts have echoed down two generations from Kiku’s grandmother to her, in the form of stories. The story highlights this example to show how experiences in the camps continue to impact the entire Japanese community decades after the fact, and to explore the power of story-telling.

“I think sometimes a community’s experience is so traumatic, it stays rooted in us even generations later. And the later generations continue to rediscover that experience, since it’s still shaping us in ways we might not realize. Like losing the ability to speak Japanese, losing connection to Japanese culture. They’re all lasting impacts of the camps that travel down the generations.”

After Kiku tells her mother about her experiences, Kiku’s mother speculates on why they are able to travel to the past. Here she articulates one of the central themes of the graphic novel—this concept of generational trauma that affects all who come after and connects the entire community in ways they might not even be able to predict.

“Hey lady! Where are you from? Hey, do you speak English? Do! You! Speak! English?”

When Kiku and her mother travel to 1960s New York City, they are harassed by a white man on a subway train who sees they are Asian and purposefully singles them out in an attempt to humiliate them. This episode is indicative of harassment and racial discrimination that all Asian Americans, and other racial minorities, face on a daily basis.

“That’s why I didn’t ask my mother or grandparents about camp either. It’s difficult to bring up, and most Issei and Nisei avoided talking about it to their children. There was a feeling of shame, or just the idea that we had to move on. But it’s important to remember it. It’s important to keep talking about it.”

Kiku’s mother explains to Kiku why she never talked to her mother or grandparents about the camp, just as Kiku did not talk to her for a long time. The book engages with how a sense of shame, or embarrassment, or the fear of dredging up the past and causing more pain, causes a culture of silence that affects inter-generational contact. This passage make explicit that sharing these stories is important to prevent similar injustices from happening in the future, and to engage in inter-generational healing.