Cultural Sensibility of the Japanese

This study will examine three books in order to understand how the cultural sensibility of the Japanese affects their emotional reality and their behavior. The books to be studied are two works by Milton Murayama, Five Years on a Rock and All I Asking for Is My Body, and Sucheng Chan's Asian Americans. A quote from each of Murayama's books will form the basis of the study, and the data in Chan's book will be used to support the conclusions drawn with respect to those quotes.

The first quote will focus on how the cultural sensibility of Japanese in Hawaii are dissimilar to that of the Chinese, and the other quote will focus on how the cultural sensibility of the Japanese in Hawaii are dissimilar to that of the Japanese on the mainland.

The first quote, from All I Asking For Is My Body, is from Snooky, and it will be used to focus on the difference between the perceptions of the Japanese and Chinese in Hawaii with respect to the plantation experience:

Ray Stannard Baker called this the last surviving vestige of feudalism in the United States. . . . The plantation divides and rules, and you the exploited are perfectly happy to be divided and ruled. . . . The Filipinos strike, and you are all too happy to break that strike. . . . Don't you feel you're cutting off your own nose? (Murayama All 33).

The second quote, from Five Years On A Rock, will be used to focus on the major reason the perception of Japanese in Hawaii with respect to American society differed from those

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the Chinese as portrayed by Chan. The Chinese did not have the support of a family system which predominated later when the Japanese were contracted in Japan to work on the Hawaiian plantations: "Family groupings were kept intact, and . . . people from the same villages ended up in the same plantations." In addition, unlike the Chinese, the Japanese were prohibited from remigrating to the mainland (Chan 35). Therefore, the Japanese felt more able and willing than the Chinese to stay in the plantation milieu in Hawaii, had less opportunity to go to the mainland, and did not want to go back to Japan, from which they had fled for a better life in Hawaii in the first place. This meant they were more willing than the Chinese to put up with the hard living and working conditions on the plantations, including being exploited by the owners, as Snooky's quote points out. Snooky, being a new immigrant, has not yet had his cultural sensibility altered to accept such a life, in contrast with the older immigrants to Hawaii. Snooky is bewildered at the passivity of the Japanese in the face of the oppressive plantation life, and the narrator focuses on the role of the tightly knit Japanese family in encouraging such passivity, in contrast

Category: Foreign - C