Excerpted from "PEACE PLAZA" from The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda A woman with a red scarf came up to me in the Peace Plaza in Japantown, San Francisco. I was standing at the entrance to the mall, reading a timeline mounted on the wall: "1948-1960: About ½ of Japantown is razed for one of the first major federally-funded 'urban renewal' projects in the United States. Nearly 1,500 Japanese Americans and over 60 businesses are displaced." Three years after the war, two years after the last of the concentration camps (Tule Lake) closed, and shortly after returning to the cities and towns from which they had been forcibly removed, the Japanese Americans were, once again, being displaced. Before the war, there were 43 Japantowns in California alone. Three remain: in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco. It was a cold afternoon in August. I heard a voice. "Thank you for reading the timeline." I turned around to see a woman in a red scarf. The way she said "Thank you" made me think that she had written the timeline, had at least been involved in its making. The most conspicuous feature of the Peace Plaza is the five-story pagoda. It was designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, and was a gift, twenty years after the war, from Japan. Of Taniguchi's famous works, most of which are in Tokyo, many of which are in Kanazawa, the pagoda is the only one outside of Japan. It was modeled, in form, after the Hyakumanto Darani, miniature pagodas, each containing a Buddhist text, that were commissioned by Empress Koken in the eighth century. (She commissioned one million.) On windy days, the pagoda becomes a wind instrument. The Asian American High School Students Alliance had, that afternoon, set up three taiko drums adorned with purple dragons beneath the pagoda, but the students were nowhere to be found. A short distance away, much less conspicuous, is a slender three-sided bronze sculpture. It stands on the sidewalk on Post Street, like a pedestrian waiting to cross. It was made by Louis Quaintance and Eugene Daub, white men, and consists of three bas-relief panels, each depicting a scene of Japanese American life: a family--man with cabbage, woman with broom, girl with doll; women dancing at a festival; people being driven out of their communities. Quaintance's website refers to the scenes as "dramas" that illustrate "the very real sacrifices, sturggles [misspelled], and eventual survival, and celebration, of Japanese Americans." [1] The same sculpture stands in Japantown in Los Angeles and San Jose. It was funded by the Civil Liberties Public Education Program, created by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. "The artists task," Quaintance's website continues, "was to succinctly, expressively, and honestly communicate this story," but why was the task entrusted to two white men, and what, exactly, is the story? The woman with the red scarf was sansei, maybe twenty years older than me. Her name was Marianne, which she pronounced, "Mary-AHN." Her grandfather immigrated to the United States through Seattle. He eventually immigrated to Beijing, where he died. Her accent kept changing: Japanese, Chinese, British, Southern. When I told her my name, she said it back to me, exaggeratedly, "BRAHN-DAHN." And when I told her that I was writing a book about Japanese American incarceration, she shook her head and said: "We're beyond that." What does it mean for people--a community, a culture--to survive a trauma, and how can anyone, including the people, be sure that it has survived, rather than, more simply, not died? If a community or a culture has transformed beyond who and how it was before the threat became real and started moving through it, what can be said to have survived, on the far side of that transformation? And what does it mean to celebrate on that far side, when everyone--in the sky, beneath the ground, or at the bottom of the sea--whose death or disappearance might attest to something different, something not deserving of celebration, is no longer present, or has been forced, by the people who have hurried themselves into the celebratory "beyond," to remain in the past? At the bottom of the panel of women dancing is a poem by Janice Mirikitani, one of the first Japanese American poets I read, one of the first, for me, who existed. She was an infant when her family was incarcerated in Rohwer, in the flood plain of the Mississippi. The poem is called "Footsteps lead to destiny": We dance honoring ancestors / who claim our home, / and freedom to pursue our dreams. / Our voices carve a path for justice: / Equal rights for all. We prevail. / Our future harvested from generations. / From my life / opens countless lives. The Journey continues... Who was Marianne speaking for when she said, "We're beyond that?" Her presence in the Peace Plaza, and her thanking me for me being there, did not suggest that she was beyond at least having an interest in the history of Japantown and playing a role in sharing it. I wished I had the courage or wit or presence of mind, or sympathy, to ask Marianne if she thought it was possible to move beyond an event that has not ended without abandoning all the individuals still mired within it, and without making peace, however uncomfortable, with that abandonment, but I did not say anything. I smiled and felt ashamed--of myself, for the book that I wanted, right then, to put down, and for wanting to put the book down. What I meant to say--but it was too late, the red scarf was flying around the corner--was a book about the ongoing afterlife of... [1] Last I checked, the majority of Quaintance's website was devoted to a memorial he and Daub made for the USS San Diego, a ship instrumental in the war with Japan. Excerpted from The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
