Jinan: A Japanese American Story of Duty, Honor, and Family

By Sadao Kajikawa

In his moving memoir, Sadao Kajikawa tells the story of two generations of second-born sons, or jinans, who rode waves of hope, despair, and success across two rival countries and one world war.

At age eighteen, with only five dollars in his pocket, little formal education, and no command of the English language, Sadao left Hiroshima. He boarded the Tatsuta Maru alone in 1936 and set sail for his birthplace--an otherwise foreign and faraway country he had left when he was three. In Los Angeles, Sadao would join his older brother, Tadashi.

Once reunited in LA, an unstoppable entrepreneurial drive would awaken within the Kajikawa brothers and lead to undreamed-of success. This fraternal force, born from unwavering filial piety and an invincible survival instinct, would sustain them throughout World War II, allow them to thrive once the Allies had declared victory, and withstand the virulently anti-Japanese climate of their native land.

Despite the injustice of Executive Order 9066 and the loss of loved ones when the nuclear bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground, Sadao maintained his determined humility, having sworn his family would never know the hunger and insecurity he experienced as an impoverished child in Japan.

Blurring definitions of homeland, in Jinan, Sadao describes how unbreakable family ties spanning two warring countries separated by the mighty Pacific allowed him to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. Sadao provides one man's intimate, cross-cultural account that breaks the model minority mold and reflects the diverse and quiet-but-indomitable voices of the Greatest Generation. His book is an inspiring and timeless testament to the power, promise, and potential of the immigrant experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Sep 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781456632809

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© 2019 Sadao Kajikawa

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or repro­duced in any manner without written per­mis­sion, except in the case of short quo­ta­tions used for crit­ical art­icles or review. Although the author and pub­lisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and com­plete­ness of the inform­a­tion con­tained in this book, we assume no respons­ib­ility for errors, inac­curacies, omis­sions, or incon­sist­en­cies herein. Any brands, products, com­panies, and trade­marks that appear in this book are stated for illus­trative pur­poses only. Their men­tion in no way expresses explicit or implied endorse­ment or approval of the con­tent in this book.

ISBN-13: 978-0-692-19433-1 (print)

Lib­rary of Con­gress Con­trol Number: 2018913760

To my wife, Sumiye

Through her uncon­di­tional sup­port and ded­ic­a­tion, we have been able to leave a legacy of hap­pi­ness and edu­ca­tion to our chil­dren, grand­chil­dren, and great-grand­chil­dren, one that we hope will stretch to future gen­er­a­tions of the Kajikawa family.

Table of Con­tents

Acknow­ledg­ments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

After­word by Akemi Jean Giov­inazzo

Notes

ITHANK Lawrence Ineno for the count­less hours he poured into this pro­ject. My family and I could not have asked for a more gifted and tal­ented writer than Lawrence to entrust with my story. 

My thanks go also to John Ineno for sac­ri­fi­cing so much of his per­sonal time to embark on this journey with my family and me. He held our hands through the entire pro­cess, trans­lating every step of the way and becoming truly invested in our family his­tory.

Finally, I am most grateful to Tadashi Kajikawa for the courage and forti­tude he exhib­ited leaving the com­forts of home to pursue the Amer­ican Dream and ful­fill his filial oblig­a­tions.

MY FATHER handed me a five-dollar bill. To my teenage self, this was for­eign money; I never ima­gined that one day I would call this the cur­rency of my home­land. When you have spent only the first two years of your life in your birth­place and the rest in another country, your defin­i­tion of home­land becomes as mal­le­able as the quietly shifting value of a dollar and as wide as the expansive sea sep­ar­ating your two worlds, a dis­tance that would take four­teen days to cover, as I’d soon dis­cover.

When I was sev­en­teen, Goichi, my father, accom­panied me from Hiroshima, where we lived, to Yoko­hama harbor. The thir­teen-hour train ride required for south­erners leaving the country rattled me along a domestic land­locked route. Even though this was my second time making this journey, it may as well have been my first. My only memory of my first pas­sage, taken before I had even learned to speak, was formed from my par­ents’ second-hand accounts, stories that spared me from the harsh reality of their many sleep­less nights caring for three chil­dren—two babies and one six-year-old—across a nearly half-month transpa­cific voyage.

In my father’s case, that par­tic­ular journey was far from his first time crossing the Pacific. He traveled from Japan to the United States sev­eral times throughout his life. His first trip landed him in Hawaii in 1913, only thir­teen years after the col­lec­tion of islands had been declared a US ter­ritory through the New­lands Res­ol­u­tion and dec­ades before 1959, when the Aloha State was estab­lished and Dwight D. Eis­en­hower ordered the fiftieth star be added to our nation’s flag. Goichi left his home­land in hopes of escaping the con­sequences of what he could not change: his birthday.

My father was born in 1882, or the fif­teenth year of the Emperor Meiji, according to the Japanese imperial year cal­endar. His mother was Tsuni, and his father was Sad­ishichi. Goichi was the second oldest child among seven brothers. His status as second-born son, or jinan, guar­an­teed him a lowly pos­i­tion com­pared to the respect and right bestowed to his older brother and the first­born son, or chonan.

While modern Japan is one of the world’s wealth­iest and most advanced demo­cra­cies on Earth, the country during my father’s life­time was a dra­mat­ic­ally dif­ferent place. Japan main­tained a rigid, society-wide sib­ling hier­archy char­ac­ter­ized by a winner-take-all men­tality. The chonan would inherit all his father’s assets and assume respons­ib­ility for the entire family. This role included caring for his eld­erly par­ents and the family’s ances­tral tab­lets, which were lim­ited to prom­inent mem­bers of the war­rior and mer­chant classes. At that time, only men had legal status and could own land, and if the father pos­sessed prop­erty or a busi­ness, the eldest son and his wife were expected to take over. Once the chonan reached mar­riage age, any poten­tial bride and her family would under­stand the immense oblig­a­tions and role she would have in her hus­band’s family, which weighed heavily on a parent’s approval of the match. If Japanese fam­ilies were all or nothing when it came to their sib­ling pecking order, my father, only the second son in the roost, would have received bread­crumbs of the family’s fin­an­cial sup­port, if any­thing at all.

In addi­tion, the Japan of his child­hood was under­going massive changes as it transitioned from a feudal society that had isol­ated itself from the rest of the world into a more open nation. The country was steaming toward rapid and chaotic mod­ern­iz­a­tion. In fact, Japan even­tu­ally emerged as the first non-Western nation to suc­cess­fully indus­tri­alize. To fully shift from a small island-nation with lim­ited nat­ural resources and little energy-gen­er­ating options that also wanted to be left alone to an ambi­tious and for­mid­able regional power, the gov­ern­ment needed to raise immense cap­ital. In order to pay for its expan­sion, it heavily taxed the agricu­latral sector and looked toward its work­force. Mean­while, rampant food scarcity res­ulted in wide­spread suf­fering among the nation’s large pop­u­la­tion. By sending its cit­izens abroad as con­tract laborers, the gov­ern­ment anti­cip­ated these men would send for­eign cur­rency home and prop up the nation’s eco­nomy.

So at thirty-one years old, Goichi Kajikawa left Japan. The sub­sist­ence-level living stand­ards of living behind him and the mythic oppor­tunity of the New World before him most likely fueled Goichi to seek a life unfettered by his home­land’s tra­di­tions of birth order. Unsat­is­fied with his lot, he made the eight-day journey to the sugar cane fields of Hawaii.

By then, the island’s sugar cane pro­duc­tion thrived as it worked to sate North America’s growing sweet tooth. Sugar exports soared during Cali­fornia’s Gold Rush and then rose fur­ther in the US Civil War, when Con­fed­erate sugar was blocked from sweet­ening the Yan­kees’ fight for vic­tory. With an indi­genous farming pop­u­la­tion too small to meet growing sugar demand from the island’s massive North Amer­ican trading partner, Hawaiian sugar cane olig­archs, all white males, searched out­side their shores to meet their labor needs. In fact, from 1885 to 1924, over two hun­dred thou­sand Japanese laborers came to work on the islands’ plant­a­tions.

To extract the sweet­ness from the verdant raw mater­ials, it required enormous infra­struc­ture: defor­est­a­tion and set­ting fire to fields of cane to burn off leaf material to facil­itate factory pro­cessing, large-scale pesti­cide use, sugar cane’s insa­ti­able appetite for hydra­tion, and coal, iron, and wood required to fuel mills and the trains that trans­ported the sac­charine sub­stance from field to factory. Plumes of smoke bil­lowed from sug­ar­cane fields, dyeing swaths of the trop­ical sky pitch black. Pol­luted images like these would never appear in travel bro­chures pro­moting this island para­dise.

Trans­forming the fibrous, tall, and unwieldy grass into the pristine, sandy-white sweetener was a notori­ously dan­gerous and labor-intensive pro­cess. For farm­workers, the day started at 4:00 a.m., when women pre­pared break­fast and lunch. At 5:00 a.m., the wake-up whistle signaled the start of the day for the men, and from then until 4:30 p.m., men and women worked under the swel­tering Hawaiian sun or in steamy factories powered by raucous smoke-spewing machinery of the indus­trial age.

In the fields, the stalks grew high and dense, far taller than any mal­nour­ished, oppor­tunity-seeking for­eigner. Within the thicket of dense sugar cane, the towering lush stalks fenced laborers off from their scenic sur­round­ings. But suc­cumbing to claus­tro­phobia wasn’t an option in this line of work. Before the onset of gas-powered farm equip­ment, humans cut the plants, stalk by stalk, and car­ried heavy, water-logged bundles of cane them­selves or with the help of farm animals.

These stalks and smoke-clogged facil­ities were a test­amant not only to indus­trial tech­no­lo­gies but also to the chan­ging faces of global human cap­ital: thou­sands of migrant workers from all over the world. While Eng­lish was ostens­ibly the plant­a­tion lingua franca, most workers didn’t speak it. And plant­a­tion bosses (called lunas) had little to no com­mand of their employees’ wide-ran­ging mother tongues. Thus mem­or­izing, let alone pro­noun­cing cor­rectly, the lin­guist­ic­ally diverse range of names of their herd was some­thing most lunas did not attempt. Instead, the per­sonal iden­tity of each worker was replaced by a name­less number, which was also neces­sary for workers to receive pay and make pur­chases.

Each worker was given a metal tag (called bango from the Japan­ese word for number), worn around the neck to identify the person’s country of origin and stamped with a number. The bango’s shape told the lunas the person’s race: Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Por­tuguese, Spanish, and more. Lunas were infamous for mis­treating laborers, playing favor­ites, and enfor­cing their authority through phys­ical and mental abuse. And the iden­ti­fic­a­tion num­bers served to sep­arate the bango class from their priv­ileged super­iors.

Goichi worked in the plant­a­tions along­side Chinese, Japanese, Poly­ne­sian, Por­tuguese, Mex­ican, German, Nor­we­gian, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Rus­sian, Scot­tish, and Filipino immig­rants. Each ethnic group lived in its own housing area. To create lin­guistic order in this trop­ical Tower of Babel, over time, the lunas and workers bor­rowed the for­eign syntax and words they heard from each other. This heavily influ­enced the dis­tinct Hawaiian pidgin Eng­lish widely spoken on the islands today.

By the time my father landed in Hawaii, many well-estab­lished Japanese com­munities occu­pied the islands. Japanese immig­rants first arrived in Hawaii in 1868, fol­lowed by hun­dreds of thou­sands of others, most working under multi-year con­tracts. But once Hawaii became a US ter­ritory on June 14, 1900, con­tract labor law, cre­ated under native Hawaiian rule, was instantly abol­ished. Many Japanese workers took their new­found freedom and fol­lowed the tales they heard of the oppor­tun­ities that existed in the con­tin­ental United States. They were no doubt swayed by the same lore of rivers flowing with gold that had seduced hopeful men and women from around the world to the West Coast, where gold fever had become a global con­ta­gion. Mean­while, the main­land’s higher wages and better working con­di­tions lured the more prag­matic among these dreamers. My father toiled for a year in Hawaii before seeking new oppor­tunity in the main­land: spe­cific­ally, Seattle.

The Chinese were the first Asians to migrate to Wash­ington State. Most had come in the 1860s, ini­tially in search of gold that had been dis­covered in eastern Wash­ington, as well as to work in can­neries and on rail­road con­struc­tion, farming, and log­ging. But the Chinese Exclu­sion Act of 1882 per­man­ently inhib­ited the growth of the Chinese pop­u­la­tion in Wash­ington and res­ulted in a labor shortage, which cre­ated employ­ment oppor­tun­ities for Japanese men.

Upon arriving in Seattle in 1914, Goichi found a job in rail­road con­struc­tion. Sim­ilar to many of his cohorts, he com­bined his rail­road work with farming in the Pacific North­west’s growing agri­cul­tural sector. To his dis­ap­point­ment, the exhausting work required of both jobs was neither luc­rative nor easier than toiling in Hawaii’s hot and humid sugar cane fields. And to fur­ther his dismay with his cur­rent lot in the land of oppor­tunity, the woman from Japan that his par­ents arranged for him to marry never made her prom­ised New World appear­ance.

At the time, many Japanese men of mar­riage­able age living in the United States couldn’t afford to pay for travel back to Japan and thus counted on arranged nup­tials, which ori­gin­ated in their home­land. The rules dic­tating ethnic purity on both sides of the Pacific made it vir­tu­ally impossible for Asians to marry out­side their country of origin. Anti-mis­ce­gen­a­tion laws in many states, com­bined with Japan’s insular mindset, which often even frowned upon mar­rying out­side of one’s vil­lage let alone the country, and the dearth of eli­gible Japanese women living in Wash­ington meant if Goichi were to find a wife, it would have to be through a proxy arrange­ment.

Under this match­making model, a go-between (nakodo in Japanese), worked on behalf of my father’s family to find him a wife. Typ­ic­ally, nakodo knew the family of the man or woman they were rep­res­enting. The match­makers would con­sult their list of eli­gible unmar­ried indi­viduals to determine who would be the best fit, not only for the spouse-in-waiting but also and per­haps most import­antly for that person’s family. The nakodo would make their selec­tion based on the socio-eco­nomic status of the fam­ilies, their back­grounds, and the indi­viduals’ health and ages. The nakodo would also carry the suitor’s photo, which gave rise to the prac­tice’s pic­ture bride nick­name.

In Goichi’s case, he came from a small vil­lage, and the nakodo no doubt had iden­ti­fied the young women in town who were of mar­riage age. For him, I some­times wonder if the pic­ture bride pro­cess was sans image, con­sid­ering his cash-strapped con­di­tions would have made it fin­an­cially tough to raise funds for a photo shoot set in the rugged West.

If a match was made, the nakodo worked with the couple’s par­ents to arrange the mar­riage. Once the wife-to-be’s name was entered in the hus­band’s offi­cial family registry, the mar­riage was leg­ally recog­nized in Japan. At this stage, Goichi’s wife would ostens­ibly pack her bags and head to the United States. I’ll never know where in the transpa­cific travel tra­jectory she called off the deal. What I do know is she didn’t show up at the dock, and thus Goichi mar­ried and divorced his first wife without ever meeting her. While he never described in detail any des­pond­ency, I can only ima­gine the degree of dis­tress he must have felt, being spurned in such a sig­ni­ficant way while living alone in a for­eign country.

Eco­nomic oppor­tunity in Seattle waned; in 1914, Goichi fol­lowed many of his Japanese peers and headed to Los Angeles. Japanese immig­rants often traveled in waves at the time, fol­lowing one another based on rumors of new oppor­tun­ities and relying on one or two men who could speak broken Eng­lish to nav­igate the group to their next des­tin­a­tion. Hawaii to Seattle to Los Angeles was in fact a common itin­erary for immig­rants craving more pos­sib­il­ities, and Goichi felt the hunger pangs. The City of Angels, with its warm weather and booming agri­cul­tural industry and Japanese com­munity, was an attractive next step. In fact, between 1910 to around 1955, Los Angeles was the nation’s top agri­cul­tural county. In addi­tion, LA’s growing Japanese pop­u­la­tion, which became even larger after San Fran­cisco’s dev­ast­ating 1906 earth­quake, evolved into Japanese enclaves in down­town, as well as in the East­side’s Boyle Heights.

Los Angeles imme­di­ately delivered Goichi better for­tune than Seattle; at thirty-three years old, his second nup­tial attempt suc­ceeded. His par­ents arranged another mar­riage between their second oldest and Kinuyo Kunishi, who was born and raised in Hiroshima. When she arrived in Los Angeles, she might have been sur­prised, as many pic­ture brides were, that her hus­band was older than her twenty-one-year-old self. Then again, their gap of twelve years paled in com­par­ison to what other unfor­tu­nate women exper­i­enced.

What’s old is new, and while the pic­ture bride prac­tice lost its luster dec­ades ago, the dilemma these Japanese women faced posed prob­lems sim­ilar to those of modern-day digital dating: Will the man I’m about to meet look the same as his online photo—or was his pic­ture taken years ago? Does he really own the fancy car he’s sit­ting in and the beau­tiful house he’s standing in front of? Is that even him in the pic­ture? Per­haps Japan, and its knack for innov­a­tion, was an early adopter in the uni­versal prac­tice of suitors visu­ally mis­rep­res­enting them­selves in the courting pro­cess. Sadly, many of these young