Decades ago, in the early 1950s, on the outskirts of Hiroshima in Otake, Japan, a young woman named Setsuko Nishimoto lived with her family in a building connected to a restaurant they owned called The Star.
She was my grandmother.
Whenever I talk about my grandmother, I speak as if I am telling a story of the life of a stranger. Which, in a sense, is true; Setsuko practically is a stranger to me because I never got to meet her. She passed away before I was born and her legacy lives through the memories of her children and the stories they’ve told. From what I hear, she was quite the lady and had some one-of-kind, don’t-see-that-everyday life experiences.
Setsuko was born in 1934 to Sakutaro and Misu Nishimoto. The most remarkable distinction between Setsuko and every other child ever is that she was born into a family of Yakuza, specifically the Kyosei-kai 5 clan. The Yakuza is a criminal organization that is basically the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia. So we’re talking actual gangsters that murdered people and the like. And Sakutaro was well-integrated into this regime, sporting the traditional ‘crouching tiger’ tattoo on his back- a symbol of the predator ready to pounce on their prey. He was an Oyabun, “big boss”, and a scary one at that. Setsuko’s brother Nobuo told my father that Sakutaro had a giant katana that “had blood on it”. So Setsuko’s life was already extremely interesting before she was even born.
And unfortunately for Setsuko, she was a bit of a troublemaker in her youth (in Japan meaning that she was more flirty with guys that she ‘ought to be’), so she was branded an outsider of sorts by her clan and even her own family. Think that one person that enters a room and everyone turns their heads to one another and whispers about this girl who just wouldn’t do it right. It couldn’t have been easy. I know she found solace with her older brother “Ani” Nobuo, who also eventually became a full-fledged member of the Yakuza, although he was on the business side of things, meaning he had no crouching tiger tattoo and didn’t pull off people’s’ thumbs in dark alleyways. However, it wasn’t until the early 1950s when things really got worse for Setsuko’s relationship with her family.
She became pregnant.
I know. The absolute worst thing a young, unmarried woman could possibly do, right? Well, to the Japanese, and to the 1950s, and to the Yakuza, yes, it absolutely was.
And the fact that she was only 19 and not married wasn’t the most disgusting part.
It’s that the father was from the slums, and a black man.
The shame.
The utter and horrid shame of it all.
Setsuko was outcasted even more from her community and her father took away her birthright and virtually exiled her from her family.
And you know what she did? She had the baby, put it up for adoption, found my grandfather and left for America with him so she could get the hell away from her father.
Setsuko’s story is rather harrowing (she and Nobuo also survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945), and it would be quite tremendous if I could say that after she came to America her life was a lot better, but I honestly can’t say if it was. I know she lived most of the rest of her life in the States, and raised three children with Raymond Wyman Sr. (her husband). But I also know that parenthood isn’t easy, and that being a 4’10” woman of color in the 1950s in America wasn’t easy, and also, that Raymond Wyman Sr. was a batterer and sexual abuser. There are many grimy details and stories I could go into about all this, particularly the latter, but I’ve reached the point in my story where I come in.
It’s such a strange experience- to ethnically identify as something (in my case Japanese), but also know that your family on that side had some batshit crazy relationships and dynamics. For years after my father told me these stories of Setsuko’s life as a young adult, I believed that all the fault was to be placed on her father and community who ostracized her so cruelly, but now I think that the injustices of Setsuko’s story go much deeper than that. There were some very specific prejudices and strict laws of propriety, both of the time period and the region, that governed those people’s actions and beliefs.
Unfortunately, not all of these rigid and antiquated social beliefs are gone, and some still remain today and that makes me angry, because I don’t want any of Setsuko’s experiences or anything similar to befall anyone else.
When my family visited Japan last summer, we met this girl named Ko-Huang Ya-Nan in a hotel we stayed at called the Toba Grand Hotel. She was Chinese, and knew some Japanese and English and acted as a translator between us and the Japanese staff. As she translated for us between two languages that were not her first, and the older Japanese woman working there was subtly heckling her to do I don’t even know what, I had an almost out-of-body experience and tried to picture this girl’s life up until that point. She was born and raised in China? Where? A big city? Or a small town? What was her education like? What is education like in China? Did she learn important things in school that they don’t teach you in America like how to file taxes and what to do if someone catcalls you? We knew she was around my age and already traveling and living and working internationally on her own. What was her relationship with her family? Were they good to her? Have they supported her? Does she know she always has an ally back home? How has her experience been in Japan? Is she liking her new life here? Is she happy? Does she have good friends? Is she safe? What are her career aspirations? Where is she going from here?
Have you ever met someone and had a sudden and powerful urge to protect them from all the pain and evil and hatred in this world?
Well, I would liken my meeting Ko-Huang Ya-Nan in precisely that way.
The sucky thing is, is that I can’t. But not quite in the same way that I can’t protect my little brother from the possibility of an unsuccessful career in the entertainment industry.
There is something different about society in Japan. Different about being a woman in Japan. The society promotes the idea that women are highly valued and hold an important place among them. And this is true, yes, but it’s also true that young women in Japan face the daily trauma of being subject to gropers on their commutes to work. It’s also true that Japanese society still sees household duties and childcare to be the job of a woman. In 2017, a woman named Shiori Ito became the first woman in Japan to publicly speak out about the sexual violence she experienced at the hands of a prominent TV journalist and she received so many death threats that she had to move to the U.K. The Japanese Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare said publicly in 2007 that “women are child-bearing machines”. A 2018 survey showed that many female doctors were told by their colleagues to not have children because it would increase the burden for others in their workplace. The same year, the Tokyo Medical University was found to have rigged exam results to favor male applicants. And the cherry on top is that the Japanese monarchy still practices agnatic primogeniture, which precludes that the throne will fall to the oldest and closest male descendant and completely pass over all females in the bloodline.
There are so many deep-rooted and antiqued gender roles of a bygone era that are still quite pervasive and active in Japanese society, including in their economic and political stratospheres. I used to think that, as someone who, while only fractionally, is Japanese, I had a duty to the people of Japan who have been and are still being oppressed, to help them and help fight for them and to do my best to ensure there are no more stories like my grandmother’s. And I still believe this, but I’ve also come to know that these prejudices are still operating in every country in the world, and that it is the duty of all of us to fight these backward beliefs that keep minority demographics down in the dirt. I have decided to dedicate myself to fighting this worldwide pandemic, and I am fueled by the stories I hear on the news and the testimonies of my neighbors and the story of my grandmother, all ringing in my head and my heart, never to cease until all is well.
“We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.” -Maxine Hong Kingston
From the Fish in the Fishbowl 