What struck me most from the beginning of Yamamoto’s second story, is how Miss Sasagawara seems to represent so many well-worn features of the traditional Japanese woman, and Japanese culture as a whole, as imagined by white America at the turn of the century. She seems, in many ways, a direct continuation of characters like Cho-Cho-San and Yuki, and other archetypes of Japanese culture as depicted and understood by white America, which we’ve read about throughout the semester. The opening description of Miss Sasagawara is as “a decorative ingredient of some ballet” (Yamamoto 20). This idea of the ornate, theatrical Japanese woman who is more ornament than human being, is full of referents we should all recognize. This opening reminds me of Edwin Arnold’s notion of Japan as a “large painted and lacquered tea-tray, the figures of which...suddenly jumped up from the dead plane into the living perpendicular” (qtd Ferens 37) which Ferens quotes in her article. It isn’t a far cry from Cho-Cho-San’s lullaby (the idea of which came from Pinkerton), describing her baby as “a picture off of a fan” (Long 42), either.
Miss Sasagawara’s performative quality is deeply entrenched in stereotypes of Japanese women, of course, and brings Yuki strongly to mind. Watanna describes her as “a wild, vivid little figure, clad in scintillating robes that reflected every ray of light thrown on them; and, with her coming, the air was filled with the weird, wholly fascinating music of the koto” (Watanna 86). This sounds like Miss Sasagawara’s “daily costume” of “arrestingly rich colors,” offset by her “shining hair” which is “so long it would twice about her head to form a coronet” (Yamamoto 20). Miss Sasagawara’s alternately silent and hysterical personality (screaming at her neighbors, “fighting” [26] hospital orderlies), sounds more like Cho-Cho-San, silently listening at the “look-at meeting” (Long 53) with Yamadori, and then “viciously” attacking Suzuki (42). This archetype of the Japanese women is at once long-suffering and quiet, or brutal and violent. Miss Sasagawara’s origin is also mysterious—she’s come from an unnamed camp in the north, “some trouble” (20) occurred with her uncle’s family, and her mother is dead of a unknown cause. The exotic and mysterious hangs about Miss Sasagawara, just as it hangs about Japanese women and Japanese culture for white Americans at the turn of the century. There is even confusion about her age, which seems too high (“she looks so young, more like twenty-five [21]), a theme which pops up in Madame Butterfly when Cho-Cho-San claims she is thirty because “a Japanese always adds a few years” (Long 60).
Miss Sasagawara seems like a ghost from America’s past, carrying with her these old, imagined truths about Japan, who somehow turned up in (is haunting?) this ultimate statement of the modern treatment and understanding of Japanese Americans: the internment camp. What is most interesting, in light of this, is the way she is treated and understood by her fellow internees. In many ways, they react as white Americans reacted to their myth of Japan: with a combination of fascination and fear. Like Yuki and her “wholly fascinating” quality, Miss Sasagawara is “distracting” (Yamamoto 20). She is a constant source of discussion, but also plenty of anxiety (“she’s scary” [28] says Kiku’s sister Michi). Ultimately, this story seems to illustrate a dialogue between the model minority and the imagined other. Kiku and her friends actively work inside the system of the camp, enjoying their jobs, attending events, and making friends. They seem to have little to no resistance or even discomfort with their situation. By confronting these model minorities with the specter of the American idea of “Japan,” Yamamoto seems to be challenging her characters to question their situation and their performance of Americanness. Is this practice and image of othering their history, too, as American citizens? Or, as American citizens displaced into camps without cause, should they see Miss Sasagawara as their own reflection, a category invented by white America which they, too, fall under? In addition, this dialogue brings the idea of dual nationalism to light, but in a perverse way that locates fear as the core of identity. What and why something is feared may reveal an inner truth, the text seems to claim. If Kiku and her friends fear this ghost of embodied Japanese stereotypes, is it their American or Japanese “selves” that feel it? This has been longer than I intended but I feel like there is still more to say. Mostly, I am interested in how this idea might play out in a reading of Miss Sasagawara’s “sane” period as a fellow model minority in the camp, but I’m not quite sure what to do with that.
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