Four Seasons
The Wonderful World of Japanese Writers in English

Basic - Intermediate
Answer Key for "ISSEI, NISEI, SANSEI"

Self-Test 1

The first question is why "Japanese-Americans"? It is not easy to give a satisfactory answer, but the coinage "Japanese-American" is more than just a combination of two words or cultures.... It's something that's happened as a result of integration. From it, we Japanese can perhaps discover through our ancestors' lives what we are capable of becoming.

The history of the Japanese in Hawaii, as in other parts of the USA, really begins at the time of the Meiji Restoration. Until then Japan had isolated itself from the rest of the world and observed a social system that was firmly based on the family unit.

It has long been, and still is, a popular belief that the Japanese prefer isolation to assimilation and tend to form a mono-cultural community wherever they choose to live. But this is not always so. Many of our fathers and grandfathers were very adventurous and enterprising. They had enough courage to violate the national laws against emigration by going to the USA where they put to good use their traditional skills as farmers, gardeners, and lumberjacks.

Self-Test 2
In Mr. Otani's book entitled Anata no Kuni/Jibun no Kuni he gives us a three-generation history of the Osaki family which is testimony to this kind of spirit. Mr. Otani is a professional photographer, and the book is lavishly embellished with photographs and illustrations. He says that he started this project by taking portraits of the Osaki family and that it took him eight years to complete the book. He photographed the entire family in Japan and the USA and eventually compiled a comprehensive biography of Kiyotaro Osaki, who died in 1979 when he was 106 years old in San Diego, California.

Kiyotaro Osaki first arrived in Hawaii in 1899 after leaving the Japanese Imperial Army. He was a contract laborer, following his brother, who had come to Hawaii a few years earlier. In 1906 he moved to the mainland to look for a better job and settled in Colorado as a farmer where he lived for some fifty years, meanwhile raising a family. When he retired he returned to San Diego where Otani met him. He had four sons and three daughters and in time became a grandfather to many Sanseis. Mr. Otani attempts to place the Osakis' history against the social background of the period. The author seems to believe that by relating the Osaki story he can give us in a nutshell the history of the Japanese-Americans. In this respect, I think he is quite successful.

Kiichiro, Kiyotaro's second son, returned to Japan in 1937. He became a professional sumo wrestler as his father had hoped he would, even though his father did not register him as a Japanese national. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Kiyotaro allowed his son to become a naturalized Japanese because it was safer, and in 1944 Kiichiro became an Imperial soldier.

His fourth son, Isoyoshi, who was living in Colorado, enlisted in the US Army and went off to Europe to fight in the war.

At a glance, all this may seem to be very inconsistent, but it is not if you consider that Kiyotaro valued the safety of his family above everything else.