When writing
my review of a cultural activity in L.A. on the Japanese American Cultural
Museum, I felt a little frustrated because I felt I wasn’t telling the
important part of the story. What stuck with me and bothered me was the in
between stuff.
Little Tokyo's Kinokuiya |
First of
all, I love bookstores, and since I was in Little Tokyo, Kinokuniya was an
absolute must. After the Japanese American Cultural Museum closed, I headed
over. Throughout, I was in analytical American-Studies mode, and in particular,
I was acutely interested in examining which elements of a Japan-themed
bookstore were authentically Japanese, and which were meant to appeal to a
Western clientele. Was the merchandise equivalent to what you would find at a
real Japanese store? How much of the merchandise was meant for customers with a
genuine interest in Japanese culture, and how much of it panders to a new
Orientalism? Were we like the visitors of the Padua Hills Theatre, participants
in an imagined, fake history for Japan?
Certainly,
in the section of books in English, I found many about courtesans and samurais
from ages ago. I was especially suspicious of names that sound exceedingly
white on the covers of historical fiction. It reminded me of Arthur Golden who
wrote “Memoirs of a Geisha.” This whole genre of books from Japan’s exotic past
strikes me as possibly misleading, perhaps exaggerated, and fixated on the
differences between Japanese and American experience rather than its universality.
A quick search on Wikipedia demonstrated something similar: the main
interviewee Golden used to write his novel later sued him and wrote her own
version of geisha life. On the other hand, Japanese interest, from what I
gathered, at least in samurais, might be as great as American interest. Many of
their classics are about feudal lords, and many Japanese-name histories of
samurais were on the shelves. Still, I feel Japanese American interest arises
from inquiry into their personal heritage, while Western interest simply seeks
to gawk.
Many of the
publishers of the more sophisticated literature, and definitely of the
histories, were universities: Duke, Columbia, Yale…if I remember correctly. (The
other publishers, with the exception of Puffin and Vintage International, I had
never heard of before, so I assumed that they were independent.) This, to me,
was significant in that not much literature is available from Japan. Colleges
are currently in the processes of expanding the translated availability in the
U.S. Also, since almost no big book sellers were represented, Japanese literature
in general must not be considered very marketable. What was most interesting
was that any book about early immigrants from Japan was invariably published by
the University of Hawaii. As I found in the Japanese American museum, Hawaii
was guilty of a plantation system somewhere between slavery in the South and
the one described by Matt Garcia. Its investment in recording that past is
commendable.
(University of Hawaii Press, books about Japan: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/c-22-japan.aspx)
Finally, the
two bookshelves on Japanese literature and culture merged abruptly into a
section on Asian literature in general. This I found very indicative of the way
all Asian cultures get clumped together, even in a Japanese bookstore. The
marketing assumption is that readers are looking for something Oriental and it
doesn’t matter what sort of specific Orientalism it is. In fact, I gravitated
toward a novel about an immigrant from Korea, but I would’ve felt guilty
placing that single book in front of the very Japanese bookstore clerks.
(I ran out
of room and my post is too long again (L),
but I took the Metrolink train on the way there and back, and I became painfully
aware of the difference between my socioeconomic status and that of the crowd
around me. I could’ve spent the whole post talking about what some strangers
said to me, but I started out with the bookstore first and there you have it...)
No comments:
Post a Comment