Traveling to Japan

Nikkei Voice

By Gil Asakawa
October 7, 2011

Seven months after the earthquake and tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster hit Japan, my wife Erin and I are going to do the one thing that I think will help Japan the most, even more than the hundreds of dollars we’ve donated to various aid efforts. We’re going to visit Japan — with my mother in tow — and spend money there. Since the dollar is hurting against the yen, we’ll be spending even more money than we originally had expected.

We’re heading to Japan on a trip that will unfortunately not include the Tohoku region that was devastated by the quake and tsunami (I really want to see the area and its revival).

Instead, our trip will include a couple of days in Sapporo where my uncle (my mom’s brother) lives, and then several days in Nemuro, a small fishing town on the easternmost tip of Hokkaido, the northern island where my mom was born and raised. Then we’ll take a plane south to Tokyo for several days, then south from there on the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, to Hiroshima where Erin’s family is originally from (and where my family lived for a couple of years before moving to the U.S. when I was a kid). We’ll finish the trip with a couple of rushed days in Kyoto, the cultural heart of Japan, and fly back after two weeks.

There’s a lot to think about whenever you travel out of the country. But for Japanese Americans, there are layers of cultural and emotional complexity that most tourists don’t have to think about when they go to Japan.

I’ve found over the years that many Sansei JAs — that is to say, JAs around my (baby boomer) age — I know aren’t that interested in visiting Japan. Most feel uncomfortable because they identify as American, not Japanese, and can’t speak the language. They don’t want to feel embarrassed when strangers or even family members speak to them and they can’t understand.

Plus, as Americans they’re just as interested in traveling to Europe or Latin America as they might be in traveling to Asia. Or they dream of going to Hong Kong or Beijing more than Tokyo.

Since I was born in Japan and lived there until I was eight, I love traveling back and re-connecting to my childhood memories. It took me decades after our move before I got to fly to Japan again, and the country’s changed so much that it’s exciting for me to see the evolution of everything from cities and cuisine (there were no McDonald’s when I lived there) to language and culture.

But for some JAs, that ever-evolving culture is completely foreign and understandably, distant. Luckily, Erin is as in touch with her roots as I am — which is surprising since she’s Yonsei, fourth-generation, whose great grandmother emigrated to the U.S, in the early part of the 20th century pregnant with Erin’s grandmother. Her great-grandparents, grandparents and parents on both sides were imprisoned in concentration camps during WWII.

That internment experience is what forced the break within many JA families. After the war, many families moved away from Japantown areas to disperse and assimilate into the white suburbs. Many stopped speaking Japanese or even cooking much Japanese food. Some even — gasp — stopped taking off their shoes in the house.