But I am content that a Japanese man is celebrated for something other than science or hot dog eating. Besides, it's not a zero-sum game.
I know next to nothing about Yoshizawa-san. For my part, it is an opportunity to reflect on the small role origami played on my family.
First, although I am Japanese-American, I never was proficient in origami. Neither was anyone in my family. The few cranes I did fold were lamentably bad; should I marry someday, and desire to engage in this particular bit of tradition, I'm afraid I'll have to outsource the folding of a thousand cranes.
For those who don't know, a thousand paper cranes has, in recent tradition, symbolized good luck. My mother was very fond of the story of Sasaki Sadako and the thousand cranes. Sadako was a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, and developed leukemia when she was about twelve. She began folding the cranes while in the hospital. It is said that she finished only 644 before she died. Her friends completed the remainder, and buried her with the thousand cranes. To this day, she remains a symbol in Japan of innocent victims of war in general, and nuclear war in particular. The Children's Peace Memorial in Hiroshima shows her carrying an origami crane.
My grandfather's family was from Hiroshima. I have heard he lost a sister in the bombing. My aunt was some miles removed from ground zero, but remembers the window glass shattering in her classroom.
But the real connection to origami comes from my grandfather's haiku gatherings. As I wrote previously, my grandfather was a gifted haiku poet; in another time, and given different circumstances, he might have been a literature professor and a professional poet in Japan.
My grandfather hosted haiku gatherings monthly at his house. I remember them fondly. I soon learned that Mrs. Okada made traditional, strange-tasting Japanese food, and that she spoke almost no English. Meiko (May) and George Sakoda, on the other hand, spoke fluent English. May, in particular, would always bake delicious cakes. Being a child, I naturally favored May and her cakes over the odd seaweed concoctions of Okada-san. Mr. Yamashita spoke no English, but always smiled, showing off his handful of teeth and looking older than Moses. At his funeral, I later learned he was an original "wetback"; he jumped ship in a California harbor to illegally immigrate to the United States during the period of strict Anti-Asian immigration laws. Mrs. Yamashita was a contralto who reminded me a bit of a dowager queen in the old-time movies.
I don't know if George actually wrote haiku; if he did, he was definitely nowhere near as prolific or accomplished as his wife. But he did manufacture origami. Over the course of many years, he ended up filling up the kitchen cabinet with cranes, buckeyballs, boxes - anything that one could conceivably make out of paper. Naturally, he gave some of these to me - I still have a couple somewhere, stored deep in a closet.
Many years later, while at the Sakoda house, I saw his garage; it was filled with origami. I also saw a diploma from UC Berkeley in Chemistry. My grandfather hadn't even gone to high school; my grandmother may have left school after fourth grade. I had assumed that his friends were in similar situations.
As it turns out, George had worked for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which researched the effects of the atomic bombs in Japan. He was fluent in Japanese and a trained scientist, and was a natural choice for the job. He didn't talk much about those days. In fact, I don't even know if his family was in an internment camp; it's possible he had relocated to the Midwest or the East Coast voluntarily, and avoided that. Still, in retrospect, I would have been interested to hear about his thoughts and feelings working with radiation survivors after the war. George was, no doubt, a loyal American, and his identity was American - still, how could one not feel some conflicted identity when faced with those circumstances?
I don't know if he folded origami for any reason other than he enjoyed it. But maybe it also served as a reminder... of what, I cannot say for certain.
George died a few years ago; May died last year. My grandparents died over ten years ago. Mrs. Okada, surprisingly, is still alive and healthy at the age of 98.
Those times were important to me - more than I knew at the time.
And so, I hang on to these memories, and these bits of origami. They are what remains.
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