<Begin Segment 29>

AI: Well, then we come to some of your own personal recollections in addition to the ones that you've already provided, of your own experience --

FM: Yes.

AI: -- in this cannery situation.

FM: It's curious, when I... the fact that you called on me to talk about canneries. I was trying to remember things about my personal experiences with respect to the cannery. And it's very interesting; the things I remember are of a certain type. One, they are the bad conditions which I met. That is to say, they were so bad that they struck me as, what a horrible thing I'm getting into, that was one side. And then the other thing I clearly remember, are the great relationships I established with Nisei friends. Now, this latter point I think is interesting because Nisei society, or for that matter Japanese American society, is remarkable in the, in with respect to the strength of the relationships which exist in the Japanese American community. If you go into other immigrant populations, let's say the Italian immigrant population, for example, which came to the United States about the same time. I don't think that there are these kinds of lasting relationships that seem to exist in the Japanese American population in the same sense that we have it in the Nisei-Sansei community. Now you might say this is, well, possibly due to the fact that we have a racial element involved here. And that may be, but, the Chinese, for instance, who came here earlier than the Japanese, and who are racially, of course, distinct as the Japanese are. It's interesting that the Chinese have always wondered about and in a sense envied the Japanese Americans for their capacity to establish something like the Japanese American Citizens League. It's very difficult, or almost impossible, for the Chinese Americans over this, many generations that they've been here to establish a national organization of Chinese, at least their capacity for doing so is very much more restricted. And this is true of their, their other organizations. Japanese have, you know, manifold organizational arrangements ranging from the Protestant churches, as well as the Catholic, their veterans organization, organizations of this and that and so on all over the place, so to speak, surviving into an era when you would think that now that the Issei are gone, why might we expect an ethnic association to persist? In a way this is a bad sign, a bad sign in the sense that you might say, you might say, well, the Japanese Americans simply are a cliquish population set apart, away from themselves and they don't join the American, larger American society. But as a matter of fact, I think these organizational connections which the Japanese Nisei have are a means, serve as a means of their stepping into the larger society and becoming a part of it, in the sense, for example, of JACL is... JACL has been a background for the rise of some political leaders on the American scene, or in the sense that, for example, Lori Matsukawa, who was well-fitted into the larger society, nevertheless retains connection with the Japanese American organizations. There's a connection which Nisei, Sansei maintain with their own group but which doesn't prevent them from getting up into, involving themselves in the larger society. And this does not happen always in ethnic populations. This is a point, in fact, which your leader, Steve Fugita, bears upon in his book.

Getting back then to the point you were asking about, the question was, what do I remember about cannery life. The point I was trying to make was that one of the things I clearly remember are these great relationships which I established. Now, these great relationships that I refer to of Nisei with whom I started working way back in 1927, '30 are not relationships which persisted over a period of time, but there's a curious fact. There was one year, sometime around 1933, '34 when I knew and respected a Nisei who was working in the cannery, that's what, seventy years ago, almost. And recently I saw this man's name at Keiro on a list of people who were residing there. And I had an immediate sense of identity with him although I haven't seen him for seventy years. And this is what I mean by the relationships which get established among Nisei and Sansei in that kind of setting. The reason why the Nisei have a sense of relationship of this kind, again, draws upon their Japanese heritage, peculiarly.

You may know the concept ninjo. Ninjo was a characteristic of the Japanese people, very distinctive characteristic of the Japanese people. Ninjo means -- as literal translation leads one to say -- means human feelings for the other person. But the human feelings, doesn't make really clear sense as to what it means. Sociologically, I think it means something, ninjo really means something like this: that a Japanese person in relating to another Japanese person doesn't simply start talking and engaging in interchange of the kind that Americans will. Japanese people, in order to relate to another person, has to consider the other person's possible inner feelings and so on, kind of look inside, so to speak. And we call this sympathetic interaction, sympathetic in the sense that sympathy means feeling as the other person feels, within myself. I have to feel the way the other person feels and then relate. Now everyone, all humans relate in that fashion, especially in the family, they relate in that fashion. But in impersonal relationships you try, you may minimize that kind of activity because you really can't understand the other person very well anyway. But Japanese are curious in this regard. For example, in order to carry on a Japanese conversation you've gotta be aware of the honorifics, to be employed, in Japan, and in order to use honorifics correctly, there are all kinds of levels of honorifics that you use, you have to sense what the other person, what his status is, you know, if he's lower than you, that's one set of honorifics, or non-honorifics. If he's way up here, then you've gotta use a different kind. And also, honorifics change. If you are trying to be very courteous to the other person you change the level of honorifics than if you were just exchanging informal conversation, there's all this kind of nonsense that goes on in Japanese in a relationship that is not required in Western communication. So, a Japanese, in order, even to carry on a relatively impersonal conversation, is already engaged in this kind of trying to sense the other person's inner feeling in a degree that is not characteristic of most relationships in other societies.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.