Racial subalternity of the Issei in select Japanese North American fiction

Abstract

After Imperial Japan attacked the Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the resultant internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, as per former US President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 90661 and former Canadian Prime Minister King's cabinet-approved Order-in-Council P.C. 14862 respectively, can be seen as the culmination of racial discrimination and prejudice in North America against Japanese North Americans. The war hysteria aggravated the negative sentiments and prompted the respective governments to translate long held racial bias into harsh wartime measures (Robinson n.p.). This paper examines two literary works based on the internment to understand the dynamics of racial domination and subordination in this context. It aims at analyzing the Issei, in particular, and the community, in general, as the racial subalterns in the social hierarchy during the internment. The texts selected for analysis are Joy Kogawa's Obasan, first published in 1981, and Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine (2002). The cultural values inherent to the upbringing of the Issei make it possible for them to sustain through the prevalent status quo. The Issei held on to their core Japanese values and cultural codes such as restraint, family obligations, reticence or protective silence, conflict-avoidance, endurance and resignation even during a catastrophic disruption like the internment. The restrained response of the Issei and their withdrawal into protective silence make them racial subalterns of the society depicted in the respective texts.