It seems weird to me, now, but I never asked them. I never asked my parents why they chose, from the very beginning, to call us by our Japanese names.

As a Nisei in mid-twentieth century America, my mother was a few years out of mass incarceration when she and my father, the son of Eastern European immigrants, became young parents. Their biracial marriage was illegal in many parts of the country. They were living in New York City which, in the 1950s, did not have an established geographic Japanese or Japanese American community.

My mother, still a teenager when she headed East out of Heart Mountain, would not go back to California or to her family, already in turmoil before the War and decimated as a consequence of it. She was living in a different place, absent the physical proximity to Japanese Americans but socially connected to a loose, multi-ethnic commonwealth of artists, activists, and friends.

My parents were both idealists, believing in the possibility of a socially constructed better world, as well as realists, struggling to overcome the obstacles that make that better world so difficult to achieve.

As idealists, did they perceive of parenthood as a revolutionary act?

As a young, struggling couple was parenthood the next step in a process of prescribed, traditional social momentum?

I never asked them.

When my older sister was born, she was given a “Jewish” name and a Japanese name. It was the same for me when I came along, three years later. Our first names were Jewish European and our middle names Japanese. Growing up, we were never referred to by our European names, at home or in public spaces.

I assume that the use of our Japanese names was, primarily, my mother’s decision. It was the 1950s and she was that “stay-at-home-mom” who was responsible for the upbringing of the family and upkeep of the household during our early years. (She would later break free of that role, in search of her own unique identity.)

Was it an actual decision—a conscious resolution—that the identifier attached to who we are should be a three-syllable audio label unfamiliar to almost everybody we would encounter in a post-war America?

Were they thinking of embedding within us a Japanese American identity that we would carry into a world of Mikes and Marys and Jimmys and Janes?

Were they thinking of the times when we would navigate schools, social aggregations, political institutions, civic and community associations with only our names for identification?

I never asked them.

“I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you’re causing someone pain just by being who you are.” Jhumpa Lahiri

Our family name, by way of my father’s heritage, was European. Not common, but not remarkably unusual. It accessed us into a standardized community until the irregularity of our first names set us apart in every situation.

In every circumstance outside of my home and my family, my first name was mispronounced, completely changing to one harsher in tone and alien to me.

From my earliest entrance to public institutions, schools particularly, I never corrected any adult who mispronounced my name—and that was every adult in a public arena. They were the adults, the authority, the disseminators of information and identity and I, the student, the child, would not challenge them.

And, so it went… year in, year out… we moved to different towns. I graduated from one level of schooling to the next and my name was uniformly mispronounced in every social realm at which I arrived.

The persistent, unending mispronunciation of my name provided cover for me in public spaces. It distanced the public “me” from the “me” I knew at home and around family.

I floated into my teenage years, entering high school as the 1960s transitioned into the 1970s, and the world I knew began to transform from one of postwar determination to socially conscious self-awareness and, finally, countercultural identity.

As I grew older, it seemed that, physically, I appeared less Asian than I had as a youngster. The signs and behaviors of racial distinction and differentiation directed towards me ebbed as overt antipathy and aversion were replaced by a more benign curiosity.

An unusual name attached to an indeterminate ethnicity made me a cipher to the society at large that I moved among. I had not yet established an identity in which I would be myself to myself, one that would not have layers and shields between myself and the world around me.

* * * * *

In my last year of high school, a close friend who spent time at my house remarked about the difference between the pronunciation of my name as my parents spoke it and that of the teachers and schoolmates she heard daily.

I told her that the name she heard in public was an incorrect pronunciation of my name.

She was taken aback that, for all the years she knew me, she did not know how to properly pronounce my name. She had no trouble making an immediate adjustment.

“Why don’t you just tell them?” she asked.

I was 16, 17 years old by then. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could just tell people… I could correct them.

I started the mission. Teacher by teacher… elder by elder… In that undertaking, I learned that I could discern between those I wanted to correct and those that didn’t matter. It was one of the earliest experiences I had in defining my own community. I was finally the gatekeeper of my own identity.

This was the early 1970s. As I began to explore who I was, which included the process of claiming my name, I began to consciously identify as a Japanese American man in domains and dominions where few were to be found. I graduated high school, went to college, knocked around the country, and returned to New York as the movement for Japanese American Redress was starting to build.

I was home, in New York City, in regular contact with Japanese Americans, more Niseis—my parents’ generation—than Sanseis—my generation.

In the 1980s, I was in my 30s, socializing with Japanese Americans and Asian Americans in New York City. It was a time of action and identity.

Unlike me, most of my Japanese American friends were not biracial.

I learned that most of them had journeyed to their identity in ways analogous to my own development and evolution, but without the vagaries and detours of biracialism. Their past struggles with identity involved their obvious foreign faces and unpronounceable last names. As adults, I met them with their Japanese American identities almost fully formed, as was mine.

Many of my friends have Western first names linked to their Japanese family names. These are the names they grew up with. But, some of my contemporaries, on their journey, traded their Western first name for a Japanese name—often a middle name given them at birth.

It was a time of change in our community. Judy became Teruko. Joanne became Nobuko. Stephen became Hiroshi.

They chose to use their Japanese names at a time when our community was claiming its identity.

Not all of them. There were still the Davids, the Mikes, the Jennifers, the Sheilas… strong Western names attached to venerable Japanese appellations.

I hadn’t chosen my Japanese name, but without it, would I be a part of this community? Would I be here as a Japanese American adult, without the challenges and responsibilities having a Japanese name compelled me to act upon?

I never asked my parents why they chose to call me by my Japanese name.

Were they thinking, at that time, that my identity would be the one thing that I would carry when they were with me and when they were not?

Did they know that when they ascribed to me a Japanese name they were committing me to a lifetime of obligations to myself?

Were they consciously assuring in me a Japanese American sense of self?

I never asked them.

And, worse than that, I never thanked them.

 

© 2024 Tamio Spiegel