The Politics of Re-narrating History as Gendered War:

The Politics of Re-narrating History as Gendered War:

Asian American Women's Theater

(ジェンダー化された戦争の歴史を語り直すポリティクス:アジア系アメリカ女性演劇)

Eriko Hara*

SUMMARY IN JAPANESE: アメリカ合衆国においては、戦争は白人男性の英雄的な男らしさを強調するイデオロギーと関連してみられ、ジェンダー化された戦争の歴史が語られてきている。しかし、アジア系アメリカ女性演劇は、有色の女性としての視点を投入して、アジアを戦場にしたアメリカ合衆国の戦争を検証し直し、戦争ジェンダーの問題に歴史と記憶との観点から新たな視角を切り拓いている。日系人の強制収容を吟味する日系二世のワカコ・ヤマウチによる『12-1-A』や、日系アメレジアンのヴェリナ・ハス・ヒューストンによる戦争花嫁の三部作――『朝がきました』、『アメリカの夢』、『ティー』――は劇作家個人の体験に基づいて、ジェンダー、人種、エスニシティの差異を強調しつつ、アジア系との女性による戦争の記憶からアメリカの正史において不可視性を帯び、沈黙を余儀なくされた歴史を語り直している。ヤマウチとヒューストンは、ジェンダー化された戦争の歴史による単一のアジア系女性像の表象に抵抗を示し、アジア系アメリカ女性が歴史の主体となるような語りのポリティクスを実践する場として、演劇に有効性を見いだしている。ヤマウチとヒューストンの劇は、国家や文化、人種のボーダーを越境するアジア系女性のサバイバルを洞察することによって、アジアを戦場とするアメリカ合衆国の戦争が押しつけたジェンダー役割を脱構築するアジア系アメリカ女性の歴史的な位置を回復させている。それはまた、ナショナルな歴史を語り直すポリティクスの実践でもあるのだ。

Asian American women playwrights of different ethnic backgrounds, such as Wakako Yamauchi (a second generation of Japanese American), Velina Hasu Houston (a Japanese Amerasian) and Jeannie Barroga (a Filipino American) commonly deal with the experiences of women of color in U.S. wars in Asia. Their texts focus largely on the impact and aftermath of war flowing through their individual lives and sometimes through generations of their families. By examining the experience of East-West relocation through crossing of borders between the United States and Asian nations, these playwrights reclaim untold stories which have long been silenced and often erased within “official” U.S. history.

Yamauchi's play about World War II incarceration experiences entitled 12-1-A, Houston's trilogy about Japanese war brides entitled Asa Ga Kimashita, American Dreams and Tea, and Barroga's Walls about the building of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, including the subplot of an Asian American female designer named Maya Lin, can thus be read as both artistic and social documents. They all explore the absence of Asian-descent American women's perspective in the white male dominated narration of the history of war.

From the perspective of gender and war, Lynn Hanley, in her book entitled Writing War: Fiction, Gender & Memory criticizes the established canon of war fiction that has been exclusively formed by white English and American men. She also argues that an alternative memory of humanized war has been created in the writing of women. She thus attempts to include the views of victims, the enemy, and those who stayed at home, such as women and children.

Moreover, in a special issue of Amerasia Journal entitled “War and Asian Americans," the editors Russell C. Leong and Glenn Omatsu views that:

War, both seen and experienced as a continuation of the ideology of the white macho hero (even with subordinated people of color as helpers on the front line), is supported by a recent study released by Women, Men, and Media, a research and monitoring project dealing with gender issues.[1]

What has been demonstrated in this project is consistent with Lynn Hanley's criticism that war has been narrated from a white male soldier's viewpoint. Admittedly, war has been located in the male province. Hanley clearly states, “Like abortion and childbirth, war is an experience men and women have not shared."[2] However, if we postulate a completely different paradigm based on Joan Wallach Scott's theoretical analysis of gender as a useful category in her book Gender and the Politics of History, we can posit that war is inevitably gendered.

Whereas I recognize the importance of Hanley's work, it is also essential for us to critically reexamine gendered war in the writing of women of color as well. Drama by Asian American women expressly delivers on its promise of freshness on these issues about war and gender in connection with the issues of representing history and memory. By creating a stage from women's memories and by making issues of gendered war central to their stage, the plays by Yamauchi, Houston and Barroga become “not just an attempt to correct or supplement an incomplete record of the past but a way of critically understanding how history operates as a site of the production of gender knowledge."[3]

This paper mainly examines the work of Yamauchi, that is, the telling of the truth about Japanese American women in the wartime internment camp and the work of Houston; that is, the inarticulated yet inherited past of Japanese war brides. The purpose of this paper is to explore how these playwrights re-narrate history as gendered war by using theater to make evident the connections between racism/sexism and U.S. wars in Asia.

Asian soil had been a battlefield for the United States in the Pacific War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. For that reason, as Lisa Lowe points out, “Asian American and Asian immigrant women represent a linked group emerging out of colonialism and war in Asia as well as immigrant displacement to the United States."[4] In fact, we can still see the continuing impact of U.S. wars in Asia on the marginalization of Asians/Asian Americans in American society. Moreover, these experiences and memories of war have transformed Asians/Asian Americans' cultural locations. U.S. wars in Asia are not irrelevant to the stereotypical representations of Asians as just only “exotic" or “mysterious" Oriental in American literature, theater, film and television.

For instance, as a woman of color in the American theater, Kathy A. Perkins states, “All Asians were exotic and because of World War II and Vietnam, they were the enemy and not to be trusted."[5] It is reasonable to suppose that “A stereotype can be understood as the product of a historical relation of power,”[6] in other words, the conflict between nations that mobilize power in the pursuit of their interests within the arena of global politics. Lisa Lowe argues that Asian immigrant women particularly “are at once determined by the histories of Western expansionism in Asia ...”[7]

This is demonstrated in the work of one Asian American female playwright, Velina Hasu Houston. In her anthology entitled The Politics of Life, Houston claims that “I am a child of war, as are most Amerasians. Without war, my existence may have been an impossibility.”[8] The interracial marriages between Asians and Americans are byproducts of U.S. wars in Asia and the existence of Amerasians is indeed an unexpected outcome of “America's legacy of global expansion and war." In commemoration of the fifty year anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, in 1995 when Houston's play about Japanese war brides entitled Tea was performed in Tokyo, the playwright gave a speech and described herself as “a daughter of American imperialism." She defined “American imperialism" as meaning not only possessing Asian soil but also as meaning the suppression of the significance and impact of racism/sexism in American society.

This is dramatized in Wakako Yamauchi's play entitled 12-1-A, which is based on her own internment camp in Poston, Arizona in 1942-1943. The title is named after the tar-paper barrack where the uprooted Tanaka family is assigned. The numerical title symbolizes the “dehumanizing" camp life. It is through theatrical effects such as the sound of blowing dusty wind throughout the play, and the silhouette of a guard tower in the background that grows more prominent as the play progresses that Yamauchi constitutes a history of wartime interment.

12-1-A deals with such war-oriented issues as the racial discrimination and gender oppression inside/outside the camp as well as the generational and individual dilemmas concerning ethnic and national identity. The playwright's intention is not to write a play that is a didactic diatribe against war. Rather, by focusing on the female characters, Yamauchi makes a political statement about the senselessness and injustice of America's concentration camps that forced Japanese Americans to be in a setting isolated from the rest of American society. Yamauchi chronicles the lives of the broad range of people who might have been her own family or friends trapped in sudden dislocation by history.

Given the fact that the men cannot face “the whole crazy situation" of incarceration and thus escape it through death or alcohol in the play, the independence and self-reliance of women is slowly represented leaving the possibility for them to be historical narrators. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's provocative analyses on history as “knowledge and narrative" helps us to understand how a character performed by an actor can at the same time become a historical narrator. Presupposing that “Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators,”[9] he argues that “History is always produced in a specific historical context. Historical actors are also narrators, and vice versa.”[10] In this light, the plays by Yamauchi and Houston dealing with the historically specific climate of war, have the potential to re-narrate history as gendered war.

Besides pointing out that all the characters in 12-1-A are imprisoned by their incarceration experiences, Yamauchi particularly explores gendered imprisonment. For instance, a second generation Japanese American woman Yo, who is separated from her father who is in another detention center, complains about the barracks for single women;“ You should see us at night--all line up in a row on these narrow beds--like whores in a whorehouse...”[11] She then compares this barrack to a prison or an orphanage. This imprisonment is most apparent because she is a woman, single and Japanese.

The character of the widow Mrs. Tanaka has spent her life as a female immigrant,“Alone. Going to work in restaurant every night; every night come home, soak feet, count tip money...”[12] to support her family. Now, for the first time since arriving in the U.S., she does not need to worry about food, clothing and shelter, and working ten hours a day. Nonetheless, Mrs.Tanaka hopes that her teenage daughter, Koko who is an all-American bobby soxer, will adopt her ideas of happiness as being a good wife and mother in the Japanese American patriarchal community. However, against her mother's expectations of traditional gender roles, Koko longs to be a feminist like Yo. For instance, in the matter of gender inequality concerning applying for work outside the camp, Yo says in anger, “Balls! Always only men. Who said it's a free country?”[13] Yo analyzes war with issues of politics and power: “In a war, Obasan, one country wins; the other loses.”[14]

Accordingly, Yamauchi's female characters attempt to have both their own voices to express “the truth" about the silenced past and their own self-empowerment. In his book entitled Margins and Mainstreams, Gary K. Okihiro argues the significance of historical actors in refiguring “woman-centered Asian American history," because“Women constitute a forgotten factor in Asian American history"[15]; inclusion of women within the gender/race/class-free historical community finally means remembering women's names, recalling their lives and hearing their voices.[16]

Without downplaying the importance of familial solidarity to survive in “a barren, windy ‘prison' to those incarcerated", the play presents the alternative memories of a humanized war and a vision of women's subjectification by breaking up the values of gender role and the views of gendered victimization which has been socially and culturally imposed on their sexed body by war. This is suggested in Mrs. Tanaka and her daughter's decision to answer “no, no" to the loyalty statements and being sent to Tule Lake with her son Mitch for possible deportation to Japan. Mitch refuses to enlist in the American armed forces even though he advises that his mother and sister should sign the allegiance papers to the U.S., since “they can't take women for combat duty.”[17] Yo, being independent and liberated, believes it is her responsibility to get her father out of the other prison and get a job to take care of him.

As shown in the self-determination of these female characters in fatherless or absent father families, the play deploys the strategies for Asian immigrant women to resist any single version or interpretation of history as gendered war for the purpose of becoming historically active agents by crossing ethnic/gender role-specific boundaries. Yamauchi's 12-1-A significantly functions as a testimony in which we can find a truth that intersects at the link between historical narratives of Asian immigrant women and theatrical narratives of the individuals.

In the same way, in her trilogy, Houston documentarized Japanese war brides’“long-concealed" stories based on her mother's autobiography including her own experiences as a Japanese Amerasian. The first play, Asa Ga Kimashita is set in the Japanese countryside during the U.S. Occupation of Japan in 1945 and 1946. It is a drama about how a young Japanese woman Setsuko, who is torn by her father's pre-war patriarchal values and her love for an African American serviceman Creed Banks. Setsuko's father, the owner of the orchard who regards his daughter as property, opposes her interracial romance, and finally commits suicide after lapsing into alcoholism because of his agony over a defeated nation and the entire downfall of landownership.

The play suggests Setsuko struggles with the power represented by the Japanese landlord patriarchy and the Japanese militarism. Despite her father's objection and people's slanderous attitudes toward her marriage to a “Yankee," Setsuko achieves her dream to go to America with Creed in order to be a historically active agent, liberated from the imprisonment of patriarchy and war. This is also her mother's dream of women's self-achievement that cannot be attained in the Japanese pre-war patriarchal society.

Houston's second play American Dreams is set in 1955 when Creed Banks brings his pregnant Japanese war bride Setsuko to his brother's home in the lower East side of Manhattan. Their American dreams, however, turn out to be a series of nightmares due to racial preconceptions and prejudices in American society. Creed’s brother Manfred confines Setsuko and her cousin into a dark room because they are Japanese war brides. Instead of blaming Creed's family for their racial intolerance, Houston makes it clear that it is the historical event of Pearl Harbor, narrated as a metaphor of World War II, that caused the gendered and racialized objectification.

For instance, her African American sister-in-law Freddie asks Setsuko whether she has the same kind of womb even though her race is different. She also suggests that Setsuko should wait to have a baby “Until people can't remember the war no more.”[18] These examples provide some insight into the gender differentiation being intersected with racial hierarchy in the United States hidden in the war system. Freddie's most prejudiced and insulted words exemplify this; “Men whistle at your little rice-paddy? How many soldiers, colored and white, wanted to marry you? I heard about all you Japs waitin' in the streets for our boys to give you the American dream.”[19] Houston's third play Tea re-narrates the history of war brides who do not just wait for the American dream in the street but achieve it by themselves in order to modify their prevailed perceptions and stereotypes.

As another example, nightmares of combat killing Japanese soldiers erode Creed's spirit and resulted in his alcoholism. He is also extremely displaced because any American servicemen who married “Oriental" women were required under the army's resettlement policies to be stationed at remote forts. Houston again claims that there is the hidden war system inextricably connected to the gendered racialization of people of color, in particular, the systematic gendered objectification that has been reproduced as “part of orientalist discourse that defines Asian as ‘foreign' in times when the United States has constructed itself as ideologically at war with Asia.”[20]

In American Dreams, however, an African American street kid Lawrence asks the white policeman who calls Setsuko a “Jap" to correctly address her as “Japanese." In addition, at the end when Setsuko is asked,“ who are you talking to?" by Creed, she answers, “An Amerikan.”[21] This indicates Houston's dream to be truly an American with her “multiracial, multicultural heritage" by intentionally crossing the differentiation of national/cultural and racial borders.

Houston, therefore, creates a “multiracial, multicultural" site for multiple historical narratives of five Japanese war brides in the play Tea. While Setsuko defines war brides as “a casualty the Japanese do not care to count,”[22] another war bride Chiz responds by defining it as “Excess baggage Amerika does not want to carry.”[23] In order not to be dismissed or absorbed by both Japanese or American “official" versions of national history, Houston evokes these ethnic women's internalized memories to prove their vital contributions as a new first generation of Japanese women living in the United States. The play suggests that they are distinctively different from Japanese American female immigrants and American-born Japanese women.

Tea especially provides insight into one of war brides, Himiko who “never asked for anything. Except soy sauce and good rice. And dreams...”[24] for her Amerasian daughter, Mieko. Because of anti-Japanese hostility and oppressive circumstances caused by her marriage to an American serviceman named Billy Hamilton, Himiko confesses, “ I killed my husband because he laughed at my soy sauce just one time too many.”[25] Her Japanese Amerasian daughter who was “the only gift" that Himiko ever had and also the source of her happiness was raped and killed. Himiko is driven to commit suicide. On the stage, beautiful, yet beaten, Himiko with “an aura of sultry mystery" joins other women who evoke their own memories of the past and share both traumatic and joyous experiences while drinking tea.

The label “war bride" itself represents a gendered war. When Atsuko, who marries a Japanese American serviceman, charges,“I'm not a war bride. I didn't marry the war,”[26] Setsuko counters with; “Maybe we did." War brides were evidently conquered by “red-blooded Amerikan boys" in the same way as America's occupation of Japan, and are requested to act out the image of quiet and obedient “Oriental" woman. Houston's female characters apparently “carried the weight of war on their frail kimono shoulders.”[27]

In fact, Himiko was beaten up by her husband who just “wanted a good maid" for free. Suffering from his violence, Himiko complains, “There is only unrest. It is like the war never ended.”[28] Himiko also compares her victimized position in an oppressive patriarchal system and ideology to war: “I wish I would have died in World War II. It was an easier war than this one.”[29] As Lisa Lowe points out, “The ‘blood-will-tell' anti-Japanese racial discourse during World War II, propaganda about the traitorous Asian as subhuman and the extensive conflation of Asian women with accessible foreign territories to be conquered and subdued are all parts of midcentury U.S. orientalism tailored to homogenize and subordinate both internal external Asian populations.”[30]

As dramatized in Yamauchi's 12-1-A and Houston's American Dreams, this kind of imprisonment is demonstrated by as the time when Himiko was locked in the house until she starved to death by her husband. This physical imprisonment is accordingly equated to the societal system that rules over women by enclosing them to the economic dependence, violence, and family. Drawing from Betty Readon's analysis in Sexism and the War System, it can be argued that gendered war is fundamentally originated from a system of male initiative, control and power, i.e., patriarchy. Himiko recalls her father shouting, “Look at your big belly, carrying Yankee-gaijin baby. Shame. Shame.”[31] These gendered experiences of the war brides in both Japan and the United States clearly prove that the war system and patriarchy are mutually dependent; they are two sides of the same coin.

Therefore, in re-examining the context of war in which the monolithic vision of gendered/racilized war brides has been reproduced as a result of being directed by American imperialism, Houston finally finds a very effective way in order to emphasize gender and racial differentiation. She presents their American husband of different ethnic background, their different birthplaces and family backgrounds, their different reasons for coming to America. Moreover, by employing a theatrical technique such as a transformation whereby the actresses play their husbands, and later their Amerasian daughters, Houston poses the question of critical subjectivity. She creates a space that Lisa Lowe has termed “disidentification” which “allows for the exploration of alternative political and cultural subjectivity that emerge within the continuing effects of displacement"[32] from the experiences of crossing national/ racial borders.

Throughout the play, Himiko, is crossing the borders between the land of the dead and the real world, Setsuko, and other war brides are crossing cultural and social boundaries between Japan and America. All look back on the past in their lives and share both traumatic and joyous experiences while drinking tea. Himiko suggests that “they must drink for hope.”[33] I argue that East-West relocation through the experience of crossing these borders and boundaries for Japanese war brides, implies a sense of re-birth for that generation--in particular, a sense of re-narrating for the benefit of their Amerasian daughters, the border-crossing costs of which may be left unspoken in personal recollection.

At the end of the play, just after finishing the performative articulation of history, Himiko talks to her dead mother, “The war is over…”[34] and asks other war brides to let her go. In the final scene, four other war brides begins to consider Himiko not as exemplifying a victim of war, but rather as a historically active actor/narrator /agent. This is because she intently looks for peace and liberty, positively freed from imprisoned body and mind and cannot be converged to the single category of Japanese war bride.

Accordingly, in the same way as suggested in Yamauchi's 12-1-A, Houston’s trilogy assures us that war results in making the borders between nations and the boundaries between gender and race visible. No matter how war crystallizes the gender issues, their female characters explore the women's alternative historical narratives that contradict the traditional gendered representation of war. By developing insight into the reciprocal nature of gender and war to rectify history, Yamauchi and Houston find a way to re-narrate “in dialogue with already existing views of American history”[35] in order to deconstruct Asian American women's marginalization.

In the plays, World War II is dealt with as a military conflict between Japanese and American patriarchal societies. For the purpose of critical intervention in “patriarchal attitudes which regard women as property and military victory as necessary to the successful male self-image,”[36] the plays place the objectification and disempowerment of Asian immigrant women in the foreground, at the same time suggesting the destructive effect of militarism and racism on both genders. Although World War II has been considered as a “good" war for the racial equality and democracy to maintain white male ideology, the plays reveal different aspects of the essentially gendered U.S. wars in Asia from the viewpoint of women of color, and illustrates how “American imperialism" works. That is, using Rey Chow's phrase, “how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best" with “physical coercion," with “actually capturing the body and the land.”[37]

Yamauchi's 12-1-A and Houston's trilogy, in a sense, functions as an indictment. The mechanism of gender and racial oppression/discrimination/exclusion in conspiracy with the structured war system has clearly prevented Asian American women from becoming historically active agents. Yamauchi and Houston, therefore, challenge the deconstruction of traditional gender-roles in the white male representation of war. They engage in the same strategies (such as, constructing a site for the re-narrating history as gendered war in theatrical presentation) to remake the nation's narrative and to retrieve the location of Asian American women as historically active agents.

In conclusion, Yamauchi's 12-1-A and Houston's trilogy provide an excellent example of historical subjectivity within the politics of “war and gender" by offering insight into the means of survival in crossing the differentiation of national/cultural and racial borders .

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