Thoughts on LA's Nisei Week
It's like going back in time. Or, even more like warping and twisting time and space - where pieces of modern and pre-war Japanese culture mix with American and even Latin American culture to come up with this weird cross-culture cross-time mix. It's like eating ceviche at Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills. Tastes every bit as good, and feels every bit as natural.
Why is it like time travel? Simple. Current immigration figures for Japanese in the U.S. are almost nonexistent. Many who come from Japan today only intend to stay the length of their assignment from Toyota or Sony. Very few of these short timers associate with the Japanese American communities. And so J-towns along the West coast have become populated with primarily third, forth and even fifth generation Americans. Many have never been to Japan, and most have no contact with their Japanese relatives. Many families can trace their American roots back 100 or more years - further even than many Irish American and Italian American groups that immigrated to New York in the early 1900's. As a result the Japan in the collective memory more closely resembles the nation of pre -World War II or the impoverished years immediately following the war. They remember the songs, the dances and the arts that their grandparents remember. The ones handed down to them as pieces of the culture from which they descended.
Same with the people back home, right? Of course, back in Japan all the Japanese kids learned the same songs that their parent and grandparents learned. They did Kendo in
school and dressed in kimono for festivals. So what's the difference? Everything else. Culture constantly changes and mutates. Back home the culture of Japan has undergone drastic changes. As in any culture the great-grandparents hardly recognize the culture of their great grandchildren. Yet it is the same culture adjusted by time. What's missing in immigrant communities is that progression. The grandchildren's culture is not modern Japan - it the U.S. - or Brazil, or Peru, or Mexico. That's their everyday culture. As a result that Japanese culture of the previous generations does not mutate or adjust to the times. It freezes as a collective memory.
Many of the Japanese cultural arts performed in the United States are no longer done of the motivation to hold onto one's culture in a foreign land. Now most cultural Arts are practiced as an attempt o reconnect with a culture of a parent or grandparent. It is a form of identifying oneself through one's heritage. It's not about being Japanese, of course - it is about being Japanese American. It is not about connecting with the Japanese culture of today, it is about connecting to a Japan that no longer exists, but that was real when the family was separated from it. Like Leiderhosen clad dancers at Midwest Oktoberfests, Japanese Americans play Taiko drums and dance Odori not out of an attempt to remember home, but as an attempt to re-identify themselves to a home they have never actually known first hand. (Does anyone wear Leiderhosen in Germany anymore?)
So Nisei week might look a little silly and old fashioned to a Japanese just coming over to the U.S. But, it really it's not intended for them anyway.
Still it's not just about history. Nisei week, is also an attempt to identify the current JA's as well. For me that is the most interesting. It can be fun to look at traditional arts and watch cultural shows. I can appreciate the skill of a good odori dance troop or marvel at a well cared for Bonsai. That is culture in a jar - vacuum packed and preserved - but it's no more day to day than the opera or Shakespeare. The modern culture is where everything gets twisted and warped. Amine, cosplay otaku, gearheads and Nisei week queens who dream of broadcasting careers and changing the world someday. That's Nisei week. That's where the culture is going - farther and farther from Modern Japan and veering off the mainstream American culture. It's picking up a little Latin and PanAsian in the mix. It's something all it's own. You might not see it in the Ikebana galleries or in the tea ceremony demonstrations. You'll see it in the faces of the people standing next to you and looking with you. You might see it in your own face. Ironically you don't even have to be Japanese, American or Japanese-American!
Labels: Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, Nisei Week
