Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and Irish-American father and raised in Massachusetts. He received a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University, was professor at Tokyo University, and is consulting professor at Stanford University and Fielding Graduate University. He is the author of Multicultural Encounters and Amerasian Children.

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and Irish-American father and raised in Massachusetts. He received a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University, was professor at Tokyo University, and is consulting professor at Stanford University and Fielding Graduate University. He is the author of Multicultural Encounters and Amerasian Children.

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When Half Is Whole

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Prologue...............................................................11. Flowers Amidst the Ashes............................................72. We Must Go On.......................................................253. For the Community...................................................434. English, I Don't Know!..............................................615. Bi Bi Girl..........................................................816. I Am Your Illusion, Your Reality, Your Future.......................977. Grits and Sushi.....................................................1178. I Cut across Borders as If They Have No Meaning.....................1359. Victims No More.....................................................15510. American Girl in Asia..............................................17511. Found in Translation...............................................193Epilogue...............................................................211Notes..................................................................221Recommended Readings...................................................229About the Author.......................................................235

Chapter One

The end of the war liberated my mother. Like many other Japanese, for the first time she was able to imagine how she might make a life free from the oppression of the military state. It was a time when everything was in flux, presenting the opportunity to do things that had never been possible. Claiming she knew some English, my mother boldly sought a job at the U.S. General Headquarters, and when an American she met there asked her to date, she took a chance and went out with him. When he later asked her to marry, she decided that she was willing to take on that challenge too and accepted his proposal. My grandparents must have been moved too by the new space that existed in society, because they allowed the American to move into their Tokyo home. The American, who became my father, was also crossing boundaries and stepping into the unknown when he decided to marry a Japanese, have children with her, and live with her family in Japan. We, the children of postwar unions, were simply the products of our parents' revolutionary actions. Some of us were born unwelcomed into the world, while others were seen as flowers amidst the ashes—new life springing forth with hope and promise from the devastated land.

Parents like ours came together in a natural way as man and woman in an unnatural environment created by the forces of war and military occupation. Authorities on both sides tried to keep them apart, or at least keep them from marrying, but they came together anyway and offered each other what they could. For some the encounters were brief and utilitarian, but others endured and forged relationships that pressured the authorities to enable them to marry and travel freely to the United States as husband and wife and as families.

Norma Field's mother became one of these "war brides," marrying a man from Los Angeles in 1946 at the American consulate in Yokohama when such marriages were rare. A woman I met in San Francisco, Kazue Katz, told me that she was the first of these war brides in Occupied Japan. Her marriage would not have been allowed in California, one of many states that prohibited marriages between whites and "Mongolians" at that time. Kazue described her husband, Frederick H. Katz, as a persistent man who gathered twenty-nine supporting letters, including one from General MacArthur, to persuade the authorities to permit him to marry her. They had to overcome not only family opposition but also social disapproval and a legal system designed to prevent such marriages.

Recognizing that American men wanted to marry women they met during the war, the U.S. Congress passed the War Brides Act in 1945 to enable them to bring their brides home. But this applied only to European brides, not to Asians. Not until 1952 did it became legal for most Americans to marry and take Japanese brides to America. By then, the opposition had forced many couples apart and contributed to thousands of children being abandoned by their fathers, some also by their mothers. Exactly how many is unknown. Japanese officials wanted to publicize the children as a social problem created by the Occupation, but U.S. officials succeeded in crushing such unwanted publicity that would negate the image of a kind and gentle Occupation.

Unlike Kazue's and Norma's parents, my mother and civilian father were more like many others who tried to marry, encountering numerous legal hurdles and hassles and failed attempts at both the ward office in Tokyo and at the U.S. embassy. My parents' experiences were like those of the couple in the Sayonara story of the Michener novel and Brando film, in which the Japanese and American lovers have to run the gauntlet to get married. One couple decides a love suicide is better than the forced separation they are faced with, and in the book the Brando character, deciding that maybe the general was right in opposing his marriage, abandons his Japanese sweetheart to find an American girl back home. But by the time the movie was made in 1957, three years after the book was published, Hollywood, like much of the U.S. government and some of the American public, had decided it was all right for an American like Brando to marry a Japanese woman, though we don't know whether they live happily ever after.

My parents stayed together, though it took until 1951 for their marriage to be legalized. By that time my father had been living in my mother's family home in Tokyo for three years and two children had been born. Nationality laws that made Norma an American because her parents were married made my two older sisters Japanese because my parents were not married. My sisters were registered in my mother's family register as Shigematsus. Since my parents were married at the time of my birth I received an American birth certificate with the name Murphy.

Marriage with an American meant new privileges, such as the use of St. Luke's Hospital in Tsukiji where I was born. I was the third child, and the extra mouth to feed increased my mother's secret journeys across Tokyo. My dad had military purchasing power as a civilian employee of the U.S. Armed Forces. Mom would buy goods at the PX and sell them at Ueno on the black market. She had to do this because food and supplies were scarce and because my father had trouble arriving home on Friday evening with his week's wages. On the way home he encountered not only bars but also people he thought were deserving souls with greater need. My obaachan (grandmother) called him obakasan, a "wonderful fool." He did manage to arrive home with some of his pay, some of the time, and with my grandfather's income as a Tokyo policeman we were a lot better off than the kids whose fathers abandoned them. Such children were scattered throughout Japan wherever there were Americans, and little is known of their lives except for the few who became famous athletes, musicians, and entertainers.

Tomoko, a girl born the same year as me, had been a baby bearing the looks of the father, whom the child was never to meet. He left before she was born and from her...