From a Town on the Hudson (11 page)

"OF COURSE, the Japanese copied it." One day in a small fabric shop, the female clerk unexpectedly said this to me and pointed to a roll of European cloth on my right. She might have mistaken me as being from another Asian country. I had been fascinated by some fancy cloth imported from Japan, which was similar to the European-made material next to it.

"The show was beautiful but imitative, wasn't it?" a tall young woman said to her friend beside me after a show at Radio City Music Hall by the Japan girls' dancing team.

When my husband and I asked an auto repair shop to exchange regular tires for snow tires, in the office we could hear one elderly customer say to his friends while glancing at us, "Japanese stole the idea. ..."

While I lived in the United States, I saw that not only hostile Congressmen in the media but also ordinary people often showed their annoyance with Japan. Even if the shop clerk had been unaware that Japan had had techniques for making traditional kimono fabrics for hundreds of years, it was not incorrect that Japan had learned many things from the Western world, as the others mentioned. But those Americans' ways of stating their opinions seemed farewell. At the end of July 1990, my family said good-bye to our Pontiac. to tell how much the Japanese irritated Americans. Economic friction between the two countries was increasing.

Around the latter half of 1980s, Japanese investors bought American properties one after another. In the fall of 1989, the fifth year of our family's American life, I heard the news that Japanese companies had purchased properties that were American symbols. Sony acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment and soon Mitsubishi Estate Company agreed to pay for a fifty-one-percent share of the Rockefeller Group, including the famous Rockefeller Center. The news caused a stir.
Newsweek,
on October 9, 1989, carried the headline "Japan Invades Hollywood" on its front cover, and
TIME
, on November 13, 1989, ran an article under the headline of "Sure, We'll Take Manhattan." I didn't think that the Japanese companies' way was the best thing to do. Yet, in the sensational expressions of these two headlines, I saw the implication that Japanese were always vicious, while in fact these magazines just wanted to boost their sales.

Almost every day, TV and radio conveyed Americans' angry reactions to Japanese property investments. On a smaller scale, I couldn't imagine that a shopkeeper's neighbors, relatives, and friends would blame a Japanese customer if he or she bought an American product that was for sale in the shop. Of course, no one would ask the shopkeeper why he had sold the product. It all seemed strange. However, I did understand how Americans felt.
These
purchases were Americans' treasure, pride, and dream.

The Americans' reaction to the news reminded me of my personal experience two years earlier at the newly opened Japanese Gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the spring of 1987. According to a Japanese monthly art magazine, the
Geijutsu Shincho
(July 1987), in 1979 the Japanese government had donated $1 million for the gallery. At the request of the museum in 1982, Japanese companies and citizens donated $3 million of a budget of $5.55 million. Surely the cooperation between Japanese and Americans to open the gallery sounded refreshing at a time when the tension was increasing between the two countries.

I visited the gallery in the summer of 1987 for the first time. When I stepped into the new gallery, the silence in the dimly lit space was overwhelming. A faint smell of wood and incense filled the air. A trickle of clean water could be heard near the center of the gallery. These gentle elements of Japanese culture calmed me at first after my two-year absence from Japan. The gallery was very authentically made and it reminded me of Japan's ancient capital, Kyoto. Many traditional Japanese works of art which had been created a thousand years ago or so were effectively displayed in the gallery. It was apparent that they were different from the European art that expressed passion and strong ego. They didn't look as dynamic as the art from other parts of the world, either. The artifacts from my small island country were simple, precise, elegant, and gorgeous in their own way. In them could be seen the aesthetic sense and responsibility of the ancestral Japanese artists. The opening of the gallery in New York really was a chance to help many people understand Japanese culture. But at that time I was not sure why so many beautiful treasures of Japan were owned by the museum. After my first visit, however, I learned from reading that some Japanese artwork had been taken away to the United States during the postwar era, after the United States had defeated Japan.

On my second visit, I carefully looked at the labels in the display cases and recognized that most of the exhibits in the gallery had been purchased from Americans and also had been donated by American collectors. To my surprise, the labels printed with Westerners' names humiliated and disillusioned me. I, who was born after the war, felt in retrospect the bitter experience of having been a loser. In the gallery I was left feeling as if all of the exhibits such as folding screens, armor, swords, vases, kimonos, lacquered boxes, and scrolls had been brutally carried off by GIs.

But my reaction was one-sided, too. The objects in the exhibits didn't originally belong to me. Besides, they might have been obtained through proper business deals with Japanese sellers who had needed the money to survive. Moreover, in a sense, the works of art had been saved in the confusion of the postwar era and fortunately were first shown openly in 1987, at last. Like many Americans who were angry because Japanese firms had bought America's soul, I could rationally understand why many Japanese works of art had been taken but I wasn't able to accept it emotionally at that time.

When I reflected upon Japan's conduct during the war years, and when I thought of myself being born in China in 1946, I felt guilty. However, Americans' anger toward Japanese and my disappointment with Americans made me keenly aware that nobody liked to have a symbol of their country's culture taken over.

Since I had come to the United States in 1985, there was something that had been worrying me. It was my doubt that Americans knew very much about Japan. In the United States, there was too little information about the real, contemporary Japan. Even if there was some information, it was not always true. In many American movies, the barbaric aspects of Japan were exaggerated. In TV dramas that satirized Japan, actors mostly spoke in strange Japanese. In a social studies textbook used in the 1980s for middle school students, a picture of a Japanese family was mistaken for a family from another Asian country. Once, I saw an American who believed that Japan had had little culture before Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy arrived and anchored his fleet of four men-of-war ships off Uraga at the mouth of Tokyo Bay in 1853.

As long as these mysterious images of Japan reminded Americans of my country being unfair in terms of trading with the United States, Americans might be unwilling to trust Japan. If I were a member of the U.S. Congress who had judged Japan on the basis of this stereotypical information, I wouldn't respect Japan as an independent country at first; I would be sure that I could win more votes in the United States when I put pressure on Japan, and then I would become irritated and complain about Japan's slow response to a reasonable proposal the United States had made. The cause of the current friction between the two countries might have been not only economic policy but also a lack of communication.

Japan was, however, responsible for some Americans ignorance of Japan. Due to the nations inferiority complex, its poverty, and its being absorbed in the task of collecting new information from advanced countries to rebuild itself after the war, Japan had been remiss about sending accurate information to the United States and to other countries. What Japan kept silent about for a long time, in other words, might have meant that it had presented its negative image not only to the United States but to the world. Besides, it might have caused many Western journalists to produce this distorted image of Japan. Many unpleasant images might have been changed if Japan had really communicated with the world.

If I were a member of the U.S. Congress who had a close friend who was a member of the Japanese National Diet, I would respect Japan as an independent country, try to gain popularity by using my political ability without "bashing" Japan, go to Japan and walk its crowded streets with my Japanese friend, checking to see how many American products were on sale. That night, I would stay in a small Japanese-style guest room in my friend's small house—not in a hotel. Lying in the short futon on the tatami, looking at the natural pattern of the wooden ceiling, I would think that the U.S. Congress should remake their proposals after considering the modest Japanese lifestyle I had found unexpectedly.

Probably because when I was growing up I heard that the U.S. Occupation forces unstintingly had helped poor Japanese in the postwar era, and also because I grew up seeing American TV dramas and movies since the 1960s, for me, America had been a place I had admired too much to be able to see its reality.

From 1974 to 1975 and from 1985 to 1990, with my family I had a chance to see the real America. The America I saw was a really big country which had vast land, abundant natural resources, a strong military force, and people who had come from all over the world. Therefore, the problems it seemed to have were more varied than those of other countries. It seemed to have many suffering people in obscure corners of society, as well. Besides that, there seemed to be people who painfully remembered the war against Japan, as a great many people in other countries did too.

The America I saw, moreover, was full of charm. It was an open society, and the people were willing to realize their democratic ideal. America also had kindness and playfulness—so much so that it injected a new spark of life into my daily routine. Especially the ordinary Americans I met were quite friendly. One lady loved
ikebana
the Japanese traditional art of arranging cut flowers, and she used to welcome my family to her home with her beautiful
ikebana.
Others were interested in writing haiku in English and liked the simple Japanese way of expression. Some had learned the Japanese language and understood how people went through hardships using a second language while living abroad. They had been able to see Japan through their own eyes and had never been influenced by any biased information.

While I lived in the United States, there was much unpleasant news between the two countries. At the same time, however, there was much good news at the grass-roots level between Americans and Japanese. My second stay in the United States—five years, three months, and sixteen days—was witness to that.

Yuko Koyano
was born in China in 1946 and grew up in Japan. She studied English at the junior college of Kyoto Women's University. From 1974 to 1975 and from 1985 to 1990, she and her family lived in the United States. She now resides in Funabashi City, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, with her husband and two sons and her mother-in-law.