Milton Murayama, in Five Years On A Rock and All I Asking For Is My Body explores the cultural sensibility of Japanese in Hawaii working on sugar plantations. Two quotes from these books will be used in this report to examine this sensibility in comparison with the Japanese on the mainland and with the Chinese. The information provided by Sucheng Chan, in Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, will be used to support the positions taken in this report.
The first quote, from All I Asking For Is My Body, brings up a point which shows how the Japanese in Hawaii were similar to the Japanese on the mainland. The quote refers to the narrator's mother and her determination to maintain her family's identity and unity. An argument is taking place between the mother and her son Tosh as the son expresses his individualism and his disrespect for his thieving grandfather. The narrator says that his mother's "only worry . . . was keeping the family together."
The second quote, from Five Years On A Rock, shows how the Japanese in Hawaii were dissimilar to the Chinese in terms of family connections. This quote shows how the Japanese in Hawaii had close family unity, a fact which will be compared to the relative lack of such connections among the Chinese, at least at a particular period of Chinese immigration, in order to show the different responses of the Japanese and Chinese to life in Hawaii. In the quote, Sawa shows the reader her dedication to her family and her determination to make a life for them, however difficult that life might be:
I felt as rundown as I did in 1921. Except now my body was twelve years older and my teeth ached and stank. I'd get up to sew and the sky would darken and I'd crawl back to the futon in the bedroom. But I have to get up, I kept telling myself. Toshio needed street shoes for high school.
This family connection will be shown to stand in stark contrast to the Chinese situation. The differenc...