Japan n' stuff

Current t-shirt: Skull and cross-bones with hearts
Current music: George Crumb

I have a friend who's half Japanese, Anne Ishii—please check out her excellent blog, http://ill-iterate-anne.blogspot.com/—who writes a great deal about Asian issues, etc. Recently she linked to a piece about the Canadian government asking for an apology from Japan over Japanese comfort women.

I'm in my thirties, and back reading (and reviewing) comics, which means lots of manga. I love the freshness of the medium. And Japanese culture is huge in design and art now. Ok, that's the sort of over-arching statement Anne rails against, so apologies.

While I was home, I got to talking w/Dad about my Uncle Fil, or Fillipus Ishmael Goeltom, an Indonesian nobleman who married Dad's sister, Fontaine. Fil and Fontaine died a few years back, but their son recently went to Indonesia, and returned with pictures of the dozens of Goeltoms and of the Batak Lutheran church Fil's Dad built. I remember Fil and Fontaine explaining to me that, according to Batak rules, I and every other Maury niece, nephew, and cousin was now a Batak relative, and considered family. That's a lot of white Southerners with a lot of acknowledged brown relatives, but when my aunt and uncle said it, it seemed warm and real. When my cousin H went back, they treated him like a cousin, even requiring his very blonde and Western wife to be silent during dinner like a good Batak woman.

Fil spent time in a Japanes concentration camp. They hanged his Dad in front of him. He was nearly nailed into an airplane against his will to be a Kamikaze. We believe he was tortured.

Then he came to America, met a pretty young and very opinionated brunette at an inter-faith social, and married her. Fil was very dear to my Dad and to my Grandpa, and we like to think the Maurys gave him some happiness, or at least a sense of peace. There are a lot of us, and we tend to be bookish and boisterous. But as a teenager, I knew he was sad. Which made me sad. He was one of the gentlest people I've ever known.

So I've got a squicky internal relationship with Japanese culture. I admire many Japanese artists, but then I know a bit about what Japanese soldiers did to the Batak. I know the generation who did those things is dying out, but the silence still knaws at me.

I have no idea how to talk to people about this, especially the Asians who are my friends. (Hell, I'd like to talk about it to any of my friends, but they don't get how moved I am by my uncle, and for many people I know, anything before 1969 might as well be Victorian.) And for all I understand the racial dynamics of the South, I'm still a neophyte to the social dynamics of Asia. But I loved Fil, and I love my cousin H a lot, and need to understand.

I imagine many people feel this way about America.

Love and confusion,

The Red Pooka!