“So Dad...This Veteran’s Day we’re raising a glass in belated salute from all of us.
Better late than never. Yup. I agree. It’s really cheeky to declare you’d approve.
How can I presume to think I’d know what you’d do without asking you?"
"Well, you know, if I asked you then, you’d have said rather plainly it was not my business.
It’s really still not my business. But this is exactly where and how I take after you!
We only asked if we really cared. How about raising another toast?
To chips and blocks… Nuts and trees?"
******
My family didn’t believe in making a fanfare. A low profile was preferred. Both my mother and my Dad’s sister, Anne Kazuko Aoyama, agreed that one of the important characteristics having Japanese ancestors was that we believed while one should always strive to be accomplished, you must never appear to be proud of them in public.
(So what does this have to do with Veterans Day? Hold on a minute….)
Should anyone be so forward to point or praise your accomplishments, good manners calls for you to publically minimize or even rebuke their significance. This is primarily because in the old Japan of my grandparents time in contrast to America, the group is always more important that the individual.
1. If there is going to be balance and harmony, everyone in the group must know their place and stay there.
2. Boat rockers are not admired. Individuals were frequently reminded by a popular saying “The nail that stands up will be hammered down.”
3. People were encouraged no exhorted to do their best to follow the program by making a special effort to appear and behave like everyone else.
4. Persons of quality should never appear to toot their own horn or encourage anyone to toot it for them.
What happened as a result is that good manners then called for you to basically minimize or even rebuke the significance of your accomplishments. It was also said this would also minimize the discomfort other people might have hearing about the differences between say your accomplishments and their own. We also took pride in our modesty.
(The reason I backed into this article about Veterans Day in such an awkward way, is to sort out in my mind just why as kids our family observations of the holiday and reflections didn’t consciously include him the way people in the mainstream might have done.)
Sure, we knew he was in the Army. We knew other people in the Japanese-American community had been in the military and it was a bigger deal in those families. On the other hand, those men had saw action by getting into combat during World War II. Many of those Nikkei belonged to organizations like the Nisei Veterans and were justifiably proud of their service and as well as sadden by the terrible loss of brothers and colleagues who didn’t come back from the fighting.
On the other hand we thought Dad had been lucky. He was called up towards the end of the war. He was in basic training or just left about the time Japan surrendered to the U.S. on September 2, 1945. He and several fellow Japanese-American soldiers were sent by the Army to Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. Dad braved the cold, not rapid enemy fire. And when he returned home, being part of a veterans organization didn’t seem to be his style.
Dad bought into the family virtue of being very low-key. So it’s hard to figure where one reason left off and the next may have started. Our family was so low-key that you’d never guess from their everyday conversation that any of my uncles who graduated from college with academic honors or in some cases multiple degrees or even had some higher education.
They never talked about their work, their titles and promotions and no one mentioned how they’d gotten a raise or elevated life style. As many of their generation, they were hardworking and frugal. The closest anyone got to bragging at all in my memory was the single time an uncle slipped up and complained about having a completely boring life off the job. Why? Because all his free time was going to constant efforts to keep the grass cut and cared for and clean the swimming pool.
Now that I’ve dug through our family history for a number of years, it turns out the family grandfather left behind in Japan was no different. His older brother was so discreet about his own accomplishments (a) I’m told his own children didn’t know for most of their adulthood about his considerable accomplishments as a civil engineer on the Panama Canal and (b) back in his native land later-on serving for a time within the Ministry of the Interior.
As I have mentioned in previous blogs we were a family of few words, who sprang from a community of relatively speaking few words, descended from ancestors whose native culture valued elegance and economy! My family was good at this. We got so good - that when it came to giving ourselves opportunities to celebrate, to honor and be rightly pleased about family accomplishments, that on some occasions especially this one, we shortchanged ourselves.
******
The fact that Dad and quite a number of fellow internment camp residents served is something to celebrate when taking into account the fact they'd only left the confines of the barbed wire fences guarded by men wearing the same uniform they spruced, and were supplied with guns and ammunition from the same stores only recently used to point at them! These men included Raymond Narimatsu of California, an Army buddy of Dad's who met him at Fort Lewis before they both were shipped to the frozen north.
As explored in a few other blogs I’ve written on this website, a certain amount of self-editing was taking place. Whether or not the family and community experience of World War II is partly to blame or fully to blame cannot be fully concluded at present. Low-key presentation, modesty and minimization may have had a place in the family at one time.
It could still very well reside in the larger tangle in our minds when people such as myself declare we are proud to be Nikkei (Japanese-American). However, my family is going to venture into new territory by taking what looks to be a very small step.
For when we've become so quiet we no longer hear our own voices, low key no longer serves us. Tradition must change and a special effort needs to be made to take necessary time to celebrate what's important, to allow ourselves to include our own in the gratitude, and take pride in what ought to have been enjoyed.
My father sadly, won’t be around to celebrate with me or even scold me. He died twelve years ago at age 67. So no repeated cautions about standing up, popping off, or saying anything remotely critical about the family or community in a public place. Wherever he may be, I'm certain he doesn't have to look over his shoulder anymore.
And the fortunate truth is I haven’t stopped learning more about Dad, just because he's no longer with us. Like so number of my peers, I’m learning a great deal more about my father as the years go by. I'm even willing to venture that were Dad still with us he’d approve!
....What was that? Dad, is that you? Dad?
(Note: This blog was originally posted under the headline "Art Lessons: Veteran's Day - When To Break With A Tradition" at the internet website for The News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tacoma, WA on 11/11/07 at a reader-generated section entitled: "In Your Neighborhood.")
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