Japan, ever-present

Reflections on memory, history, culture, and hybridity in the wake of Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami, by Mari L’Esperance

“The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.” —Thich Nhat Hanh (in a letter posted on the web in response to the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan)

When a writer must contend with what lies beyond her control (and that is, of course, much of what she experiences in life), what is left for her to do? Certainly she can deny it or choose to accept it. Often she must also write about it—must make meaning, through language, of events and her internal responses to those events that elude meaning, refuse to be explained or adhere to logic. For this post I’d initially thought to write about my mixed heritage (Japanese, French Canadian-American, Abenaki Missisquoi Indian) and how this racial and cultural “hybridity” inevitably influences me and informs my poetry in ways that are often impossible to name. Although compelling in theory, it was a soupy, unformed idea, at best. Over the ensuing weeks I played with it some more.

Then, on March 11 an 8.9 earthquake and devastating tsunami struck the northern Pacific coast of Japan, irrevocably changing so much for so many. As news and images of the destruction streamed through and across the Internet, I became aware on a felt level that more than the earth’s axis and an entire coastline and its inhabitants had been violently transformed. Physically, psychically, and emotionally, something in me had also shifted, broken open (like the earth herself?), and begun to rearrange and reform itself, and continues to do so days later. Such shifting and reorganizing occurs all the time for any one of us, mostly beyond our conscious awareness, and speaks to the hybridity inherent in all experience—across time, locations, identities, relationships, and cultures—as our individual and collective psyches rearrange and reshape themselves in response to a myriad influences, both internal and external, chosen and imposed.

As it was for many others, my initial response to the events in Japan was one of horror and disbelief; then a gnawing, obsessive panic (Was my family safe? Were my beloved temples and shrines unharmed?) was followed by deep sorrow and a pervading sense of hopelessness that threatened to overwhelm me. For me, Japan is mother, literally and symbolically; place and parent are one and the same, indistinguishable, interchangeable. Japan is the place of my birth and my late mother’s homeland and holds tremendous meaning for me—culturally, spiritually, aesthetically, and emotionally. My motherland had suffered a tremendous rupture and, on a psychic level, so had I. Immediately after the quake and in the hours and days following, I found myself feeling queasy, light-headed, destabilized, disembodied, and otherworldly. In my own way I, too, felt like I’d taken a full body blow from a giant, internal wave and had been sent reeling, tossed about in the wake churned up by my rattled psyche.

Since the earthquake, I’ve communicated with family and friends in Tokyo, Kamakura, and Yokohama, mostly via Skype and Facebook (which I will never complain about again). With phone service down and electricity out or only intermittently available in many areas, the Internet was a critical lifeline after the quake. Thankfully, my loved ones are well and safe and I’ve been reminded of what an interconnected world we now live in—how we perceive and metabolize one another’s lives and experiences in ways we could not have dreamed of before the arrival of the Internet. A crisis of this proportion also reminds us immediately of how interdependent and interconnected we are and how we take so much for granted under “normal” circumstances: fully stocked grocery shelves; ample water, electricity, and gas; smoothly operating transportation and communication systems. A disruption in any of these exposes us to our vulnerability and helplessness.

The quake and tsunami shook me awake and got me thinking about hybridity in a different way than I’d initially considered. It stimulated my thinking about hybridity of experience and psychological phenomena across history, generations, and cultures. I thought about trans-generationally transmitted trauma and how such trauma is re-experienced by successive generations in different and similar ways and also affects the world at large (Hurricane Katrina comes to mind as an example). In recent days I’ve considered how the earthquake and its aftermath have not only affected me personally, but are affecting a generation that survived World War II (such as my 73-year-old uncle in Kamakura, who vividly remembers the traumas he endured as a boy in that war), as well as subsequent generations who did not directly suffer war trauma, but have experienced flavors of it through their parents and grandparents and in the days since the quake. During World War II the constant air raids, disease and food shortages, the massive firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities that killed tens of thousands and destroyed entire communities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with their deadly legacy currently playing itself out at the stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, and widespread devastation and deprivation seared the psyches of the Japanese people for decades to come. (To get a sense of this experience, I encourage you to watch the gorgeous, poetic animated film “Grave of the Fireflies” or “火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka” [1988], pictured at left, which film critic Robert Ebert has called one of the “greatest war films ever made”; it will break your heart.) When I see images in the news of entire communities and miles of coastland wiped out by the tsunami, leaving a sea of rubble in its wake, or of bewildered, displaced seniors warming their hands around a kerosene stove, I’m reminded of the war and how these experiences are all connected in our psyches, in our very cells.

After the earthquake my mind made an intuitive sweep of Japan’s rich and turbulent history. I thought of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” (in Japanese, 黒船, kurofune—so called for their menacing black hulls and smokestacks belching clouds of thick, black coal smoke) on July 14, 1853 at Uraga Harbor (part of present-day Yokosuka) in Kanagawa Prefecture. Watching post-quake news and seeing black smoke rising from burning boats, buildings, and damaged oil refineries naturally reminded me of these early assaults, like a series of great waves, from the west on Japan’s cultural and psychic integrity. Although I was not alive when Perry’s ships dropped anchor off Japan’s coast over 150 years ago, the psychic memory lives in me on a cellular level, as it does in every person of Japanese descent. The same can be said for post-tsunami images of raging fires left to burn themselves to ash—images which took me back to the firebombings of World War II: sweeping, out-of-control flames raging red and orange against total blackness. I recalled my mother’s life during the war; at the time a school girl in Kamakura (located on the coast a 50-minute train ride southwest of Tokyo), she’d recount for me having nothing to eat for weeks on end but rotting sweet potatoes, walking to school in winter with her feet wrapped in rags, and terrifying air raids at all hours of the day and night. After the earthquake my uncle in Kamakura told me he was in Tokyo (where he’d traveled to pay his respects at the family cemetery plot) when the quake struck. As trains were stopped for a time, he couldn’t get home until early the next day, then had to walk a good part of the distance because his local train line was still out of commission. He said the journey reminded him of walking with his father (my grandfather) from Tokyo to Kamakura during the war when trains had been derailed by air raids and power outages.

Hybridity is not simply an intellectual, academic construct; it is real, ever-present, and permeates all of us on many levels, no matter who we are, no matter our experience. As a Hapa poet, I find these ever shifting layers and dynamics provide infinite richness and depth for my imagination and my poems. The Japanese hold interdependence and interconnectedness as core cultural values, just as Americans value self-sufficiency, independence, and individualism. Despite all that their small island nation has endured over the centuries, it is these values and the cultural and social integrity of the Japanese people that will carry them through one of the greatest natural disasters in human history. And, by virtue of our shared humanity and natural impulse to reach out, connect, and comfort, we will help them as well as continue to hold them in our minds and hearts.

 

About Mari L'Esperance:

Born in Kobe, Japan, Mari L’Esperance is a Hapa poet whose first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. Jane Mead has written of it: “… L’Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history, the traumatic disintegration of that self, and its subsequent painful rebuilding: by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song.” An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. L'Esperance's poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Whale Sound, and elsewhere and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Times, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L'Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

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