A Postcolonial Reading Of The Buddha In The Attic
Abstract
This study looks at Julie Otsuka’s renowned novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), in the light of its representation of the mental and psychological colonization of Japanese emigrants in America. It draws upon Homi K. Bhabha’s notions of “unhomeliness”, “ambivalence” and “mimicry”. A close scrutinizing of the novel reveals Otsuka’s grave concern ̶ as a Japanese-American herself ̶ for the Japanese emigrants living in America; the troubles they have faced and the mistreats they have suffered in America as an ethnic group. The Japanese-Americans in The Buddha in the Attic do anything to fit into the American society and culture and get their approval. Moreover, as the “picture brides” ̶ who represent the whole Japanese-Americans ̶ emigrate to America with fervent hopes of reaching American Dream and living there happily, it gets revealed that although they expected to finally feel joy and comfort there, they remain poor and dislocated. The situation is even worse for their children; they are caught between two different cultures to neither of them they belong fully ̶ they belong to neither Japan nor America.
Key words: Julie Otsuka; Japanese-American; Homi. K. Bhabha; mimicry; ambivalence; unhomeliness
Introduction
The Buddha in the Attic is Julie Otsuka’s follow-up to the novel When the Emperor was divine (2002) and similar to that, it is a historical fiction work which deals with Japanese-Americans problems. The Buddha in the Attic is the story of a group of “picture brides” who, on a boat, emigrate to America in the early twentieth century in order to get rid of their motherland in which no progress seems to be achieved and in the hope of marrying wealthy handsome husbands and enjoying a bright prosperous future in America. Their American Dream is so big that they leave everything behind assuming that America is the promised land where all dreams come true; no matter what their background is. They were so naïve that they thought “this is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry” (Otsuka 10). But as soon as they arrive to San Francisco, they get disillusioned; they find all their hopes shattered in front of them. Their husbands are not like the pictures given to them; they are neither handsome nor wealthy. As a result, they get forced into working hard despite what they fantasized and they give birth to children who suffer being “others” in America more than their parents. By the incident of Pearl Harbor bombing, their situation gets even more exacerbated as they get forced to leave their homes and are eschewed by the Americans.
Otsuka in an interview by Patrick Ryan claims that “life in America was one deceit after another. Some of them [women] were deceived by their husbands…. And then they were betrayed by America, or the promise of America ̶ they were despised because of their race, suspected of being disloyal and sent away to camps” (Otsuka).
Otsuka is a Japanese-American herself and being asked in another interview how much the events in her novels are close to the actual experiences of her family, she answers: “Well, my grandfather was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and my mother, uncle, and grandmother were sent to an internment camp several months later. What my mother's family went through during the war is typical of what happened to other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast” (Otsuka). So, it can be concluded that the novel is a historical fiction because the incidents narrated in it, more or less, have really happened.
According to Nakamura “The term picture bride refers to a practice in the early twentieth century by immigrant workers who married women on the recommendation of a matchmaker who exchanged photographs between the prospective bride and groom [….] These picture brides, or shashin hanayome, were critical to the establishment of the Japanese community in both Hawai'i and America” (Nakamura).
David Neiwert in the book Strawberry Days (2005) argues that marriage in the form of “picture brides” was “a trend in Japanese immigration” and he adds: “the vast majority of Japanese laborers [in America] were single men, [they were] spurned by whites as “unassimilable” and thus unacceptable marriage partners. [so,] they usually chose to resort to the “picture bride” method of marriage by proxy, perfectly legal under Japanese law” (Neiwert 27).
The present study investigates the “unhomeliness” of the Japanese families who emigrated to America in the early 1900s, the “ambivalences” they experienced and their sense of otherness, and their “mimicry”. Therefore, it draws upon the theories of Homi K. Bhaba, all of which are concerned with the mental dimension of colonization in postcolonial discourse.
Dislocation or Unhomeliness
According to Anindyo Roy in Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora (1995), “Homi Bhabha’s approach to the issue of home and displacement is an example of the attempt to make literature the site on which the violence of the ‘unhomely’ is enacted” (Roy 108). Otsuka whose family and nation were the victim of physical and psychological dislocation, uses literature as a site to share the facts and her feelings towards the “unhomeliness” that the Japanese-American suffered in America after their emigration.
Ashcroft declares that “diasporic communities formed by forced or voluntary migration may all be affected by this process of dislocation, too” (Ashcroft et al. 66). The type of dislocation which is going to be discussed here is way beyond the mere physical movement of the Japanese to America; it has to do with the mental and psychological dimensions of dislocation ̶ it is what Ashcroft calls “psychological or metaphorical dislocation” (66). These metaphorically displaced people in a colonial context, are “placed into a hierarchy that sets their culture aside and ignores its institutions and values in favor of the values and practices of the colonizing culture” (66).
This is exactly what the reader witnesses in The Buddha in the Attic. The metaphorically displaced Japanese, are under the pressure of abandoning their own culture and heritage in order to adapt themselves to the American culture and get their approval. In the first chapter of the novel there is a scene where the narrator tells about the picture brides’ dreams when they sleep. It goes like this: “We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares” (Otsuka 2). The rice paddy can be considered as a sign of Japanese culture which, reminding the Japanese women of the hardships of living in Japan, has turned into a nightmare for them. But this was what they thought when they were on the boat and later it changes.
The narrator in the second chapter of the book reveals that “Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan” (Otsuka 16) and continues talking about their dreams when they sleep after their marriage: “Sometimes we dreamed we were back in the village …. Other times we were playing hide-and-seek in the reeds down by the river. And every once in a while we’d see something float by. A red silk ribbon we’d lost years before. A speckled blue egg. Our mother’s wooden pillow” (17).
They miss and crave their motherland so much, they feel so displaced and dislocated, that they put their homesickness into words like this: “and at night if we stood in the doorway and looked out toward the west we could see a faint, flickering light in the distance. That, our husband had told us, was where people were. And we knew we never should have left home. But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us (my Italic)” (Otsuka 19). These scenes clearly demonstrate the extent to which the Japanese experience “unhomeliness” in America and wish they could go back to Japan; where everything was better.
Ambivalence
The term ‘ambivalence’ which is adapted into postcolonial discourse by Homi K. Bhabha, describes “the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized” (Ashcroft et al. 10). In The Buddha in the Attic, the characters are in constant ambivalence, they miss their Japanese heritage and eschew from American culture one time, and leave their Japanese background behind and embrace American way of living the other time.
An example of this simultaneous attraction and repulsion is when on the boat they think to themselves: “What would become of us, we wondered, in such an alien land (my Italic)? We imagined ourselves—an unusually small people armed only with our guidebooks—entering a country of giants (my Italic). Would we be laughed at? Spat on? Or, worse yet, would we not be taken seriously at all?” (Otsuka 3) and soon the narrator claims that “in America the women did not have to work in the fields and there was plenty of rice and firewood for all. And wherever you went the men held open the doors and tipped their hats and called out, ‘Ladies first’ and ‘After you’” (3). The Japanese women are later disillusioned because they get forced into working so hard on the fields that even two of them die on the very first days from the back-breaking labor, and because their husbands do not treat them well; they are abused by both their bosses and their husbands.
Another instance of ambivalence is when they ask Charles ̶ a white man who is “a professor of foreign languages at the university in Osaka” ̶ questions about America. The Japanese girls on the boat ask him: “Was it true that Americans had a strong animal odor? .…Was it true that the women in America did not have to kneel down before their husbands or cover their mouths when they laughed?” (Otsuka 7). Here again the reader spots another simultaneous amalgamation of appeal and distaste in the colonized subject ̶ the Japanese.
Mimicry
Bhabha believes that mimicry is the procedure by which the character of the colonized subject ̶ here Japanese-Americans ̶ is developed as ‘almost the same, but not quite’” (Bhabha 89). Evelyn Nakano Glenn in her book Issei, Nisei, War Bride (1986) argues that the Japanese women who did “labor migration” to the America in the early 1900s, “As keepers of the home and socializers of children, they struggled to maintain their cultural traditions, often under harsh conditions” (Glenn 3). It is true as in the very first chapter of the book the narrator informs us that:
On the boat we carried with us in our trunks all the things we would need for our new lives: white silk kimonos for our wedding night, colorful cotton kimonos for everyday wear, plain cotton kimonos for when we grew old, calligraphy brushes, thick black sticks of ink, thin sheets of rice paper on which to write long letters home, tiny brass Buddhas, ivory statues of the fox god, …. flowered silk sashes, smooth black stones from the river that ran behind our house (Otsuka 4).
Glenn elaborates on her idea declaring that:
In a racist society where members were exploited as individual units of labor, the family was a necessary counterforce. It was the one institution that Japanese Americans could turn to for comfort, affection, and an affirmation of their individuality and self-worth. It was also in the family that ethnic culture was preserved and transmitted on a day-to-day basis: Japanese was spoken at home, ethnic foods were cooked and eaten, Shintoism and Buddhism were practiced, and folk wisdom passed on (Glenn 199).
Furthermore, later the narrator tells the reader: “On the boat we sometimes crept into each other’s berths late at night and lay quietly side by side, talking about all the things we remembered from home: the smell of roasted sweet potatoes in early autumn, picnics in the bamboo grove, playing shadows and demons in the crumbling temple courtyard (my Italic)” (Otsuka 9). From this excerpt of the novel also, it can be implied that this first generation of Japanese emigrants (Issei) were highly concerned for keeping their Japanese heritage, as Neiwert asserts that “most of the lasting popular conceptions about the nature of the Japanese immigrants came from workers in this first wave—that is, that they were clannish and disinclined to take up ‘American ways’” (Neiwert 15).
Neiwert states that “Faced with open rejection by white American society, the Japanese [the first generation emigrants (Issei)] relied heavily on the culture that most brought with them from their homeland, and in turn became insular and fairly self-contained” (Neiwert 43).
Some of the first generation emigrant (Issei) do not even learn English, as in the novel the narrator mentions few English words and continues: “And after fifty years in America these would be the only words of English some of us could still remember by heart” (Otsuka 15).
Neiwert continues his claims arguing that:
Japanese culture was ancient and thoroughly ingrained in their [Issei] sensibilities. American culture, in contrast, was strange to them as well as openly hostile. The English language was exceptionally difficult for them to learn, and many were only marginally educated to begin with. As such, most of the first-generation Issei immigrants tended to stick to themselves, forming pockets of Japanese culture wherever they farmed. They continued to speak Japanese and taught the language to their children (Neiwert 43).
But, in the novel their children did not continue to be like their first-generation emigrant parents; they tried to learn English and gradually forgot Japanese. Glenn argues that “Settlement in the United States for these groups [Japanese-American women] meant not assimilation, but transition to the status of a racial-ethnic minority” (5).
The excerpts above from the novel were about the first generation of Japanese who emigrated to America in the early 1900s ̶ those known as Issei. They were those who resisted mimicry and saved their culture. But what was their children's attitudes towards Japanese culture? Did they struggle to maintain their heritage like their parents or abandoned it completely?
In the chapter titled “THE CHILDREN” in The Buddha in the Attic there are many instances of how these children rejected their Japanese culture and language. Their parents order them “Don’t be loud like Americans” (Otsuka 38), but all their manners gradually get completely similar to Americans. The narrator tells us:
Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner, and moved with undignified haste. They wore their garments too loose. They swayed their hips like mares. They chattered away like coolies the moment they came home from school and said whatever popped into their minds…. They insisted on eating bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast instead of bean-paste soup. They refused to use chopsticks. They drank gallons of milk. They poured ketchup all over their rice. They spoke perfect English just like on the radio and whenever they caught us bowing before the kitchen god in the kitchen and clapping our hands they rolled their eyes and said, ‘Mama, please’ (Otsuka 41-2).
The children were embarrassed of being Japanese in an American context; their classmates made fun of them and forced them to be alone because they were different. The narrator says these children at school “never raised their hands. They never smiled. At recess they huddled together in a corner of the school yard and whispered among themselves in their secret, shameful language (my Italic)” (Otsuka 40). They were under such an intolerable pressure that soon they learned English and despite their parents became fluent English speakers that “wherever they went they were able to make their desires known [in English]” (40) and continued adopting “American ways” to the point that: “One by one all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors …. They forgot what to say at the altar to our dead ancestors, who watched over us night and day. They forgot how to count. They forgot how to pray. They spent their days now living in the new language” (Otsuka 40-1).
This part of the story indicates the climax of the disaster of children getting distant from their Japanese culture. Being caught between Japanese culture and American culture ̶ “And even when we sent them to the Buddhist church on Saturdays to study Japanese they did not learn a thing. But whenever we heard them talking out loud in their sleep the words that came out of their mouths came out—we were sure of it—in Japanese” (41) ̶ they choose American culture because they do not want to be neglected and othered by Americans. They change themselves in order to get their approval but “they knew that no matter what they did they would never really fit in” (43).
These children tried so hard to assimilate the Americans that they changed even their names ̶ “They gave themselves new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce. One called herself Doris. One called herself Peggy. Many called themselves George…. Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. “It’s his mother’s name,” she explained. To which we replied, “So is yours.”” (41). They are depicted as so passive and at the same time so inclined to change their names that a teacher easily changes his Japanese student’s name into an American name.
They get so immersed in the American way of living that the parents cannot control them anymore. It is narrated that:
They were ashamed of us [their parents] …. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out…. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor’s birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp (Otsuka 42).
But despite all their struggles to assimilate, finally “they learned that there were certain things that would never be theirs: higher noses, fairer complexions, longer legs that might be noticed from afar…. They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan” (43).
Conclusion
It seems that the women at first, when they were still on the boat, did not miss Japan that much and constantly linked it to hardship and back-breaking labor. But after they arrive in America and realize that the situation is not what they fantasized, they start to yearn for Japan till the end of the novel. They constantly feel physically and mentally dislocated and “unhomed” in America, but they cannot get back to where they came from ̶ Japan.
From the novel it can be implied that the Japanese emigrants' feelings toward America were not steady; they were simultaneously attracted to and disgusted by Americans. In other words, the continuously faced different ambivalences when it came to the Americans.
Discussing mimicry in this novel, it can be concluded that the first generation of the Japanese who emigrated to America (Issei) resisted mimicry, but their children constantly tried to imitate Americans and the result was that they could not succeed in fitting into American society due to their race, their complexion, their appearance and most importantly their Japanese families who were nowhere near being like Americans.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2007.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Temple University Press, 1986.
Nakamura, Kelly A. “Picture brides.” Densho Encyclopedia, 27 May 2014, encyclopedia.densho.org/Picture_brides/.
Neiwert, David. Strawberry days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Otsuka, Julie. “Julie Otsuka Interview.” Interview by Andrew Duncan, Indiebound, American Booksellers Association, indiebound.org/author-interviews/otsukajulie.
Otsuka, Julie. “Julie Otsuka | Interview.” Interview by Patrick Ryan, 14 Oct. 2011, Granta, granta.com/interview-julie-otsuka/.
Otsuka. Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. Alfred A. Knopf publication, 2011.
Roy, Anindyo. “Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora: Figuring ‘Home’, Locating Histories.” Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts, edited by Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 101-15.
