Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. ix, 253 pp. US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3942-0.
New York City is to aspiring members of Japan’s creative class today what Paris was to foreign artists in the interwar years: a place where dreams of recognition and success can come true. At any given time among the estimated 100,000 Japanese staying legally or otherwise in New York, there is a sizeable minority that left Japan in order to re-invent themselves, hoping to make it as painters, musicians, installation artists, fashion designers, or as practitioners of similar professions that offer opportunities for self-realization.
But just as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein chose Paris and not Lyon, so Japan’s present-day émigrés head for New York and not Los Angeles or San Francisco. For creative Japanese, New York has taken on magic qualities associated with no other urban centre in the world. Among the scores of works to be found on New York City in bookstores in Japan today, several contain the word mahō (magic) in their titles. To Japanese fans of New York, the city is imbued with the capacity to transform.
To say that there is a cult of New York in Japan today might be only a slight exaggeration. More than 600 Japanese-language blogs can be found with subject lines containing the words New York. Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, has been carrying regular weekly TV programming focusing primarily on fashion, the arts, and pop culture exclusively from New York. NHK does this for no other city.
It is the attraction of New York and the motivation of a small but significant group of adventurous and ambitious Japanese who go there to seek self-realization that is the subject of anthropologist Olga Kanzaki Sooudi’s excellent, and highly readable, ethnography of Japanese expatriate bohemian life.
The fabric of Japanese New York consists of an intertwining of several different strands. It is first and foremost an ethnography that examines the goals and values of members of a distinct group defined by language, national origin, and area of professional activity. In choosing to focus on an expatriate community, even though its members insist that they do not constitute an identifiable group, the work ventures into the field of migration studies. By delving into her subjects’ search for an “authentic experience” outside Japan, Sooudi explores identity issues and takes her work into the realm of philosophy, specifically modernity discourse. While Japanese New York is ultimately an academic work, it is also a good read. Sooudi is an accomplished storyteller.
However, Japanese New York is unlike other works on migration because the phenomenon it describes is unique. Sooudi’s Japanese subjects are neither refugees nor immigrants. They do not leave Japan intending never to return. In their preference for Japanese food, their concern for Japanese identity, and in how they relate to other Japanese, they take Japan with them. Moreover, the artists do not seek to make a new life in America in the hopes of earning more money than they might in Japan. Most gladly accept serious financial hardship for years after arrival. Although some choose to leave Japan because opportunities for young artists in Japan—in fact for young people in general—are limited, the majority go for positive reasons: to pursue a dream, to become successful artists, but failing that, to prove to themselves that they can survive living astride boundaries of language and culture.
Although Sooudi locates Japanese New York on the map of Manhattan in a rapidly gentrifying part of the East Village, she explains that the group cannot be defined in physical terms since unlike immigrant communities, members of Japan’s émigré creative class are united not by where they live or even where they work but by their goals and values. While one of its few successful members can be found in her own handbag boutique in a better part of downtown Manhattan, another who is down on his luck as a flamenco guitarist stacks boxes of canned food in the basement of a Japanese grocery store at the south end of Broadway.
What unites these Japanese émigrés is that they came to New York to pursue a dream, or as Sooudi quotes several of them as saying, to succeed on the world stēji (stage). They come in search of the elusive goal of “authenticity,” what one Japanese jazz musician describes as the nama (raw, meaning real or genuine) experience. For this artist hearing jazz in New York was an entirely different experience than in Japan. In the former it was real while in Japan it was mere imitation. Although Sooudi is generally sympathetic to her subjects, she sees an inconsistency in the authenticity argument. She notes that in their search for validation in New York they implicitly locate the authentically modern outside Japan. Though they cling to a Japanese identity, they seek validation outside of Japan. Sooudi’s conclusions would seem to indicate that the perceived tension between what is Japanese and what is modern, a relic of prewar Japanese intellectual discourse, continues to haunt Japanese artists seeking to maintain their identity as Japanese abroad.
Adding greatly to the pleasure of reading Japanese New York is a constant flow of characters and stories. We meet Yuka, a visual artist, who says, “When I think of the city, the painful part comes to mind first.” But she adds that it “has a big heart because no matter where you come from you are welcome.” She is impatient with those who hate the city “because they can’t accept differences”(86). Yuka is a case of successful transformation both from a career and a personal perspective. The majority of Japanese artist émigrés, however, do not do so well. We encounter waitresses at a Japanese restaurant, cashiers at a Japanese grocery who do menial jobs while waiting for breaks in creative careers. Naoko is among these and at first glance she appears to be a failure. An industrial designer who spends five years in the United States, mostly in New York obtaining a second university degree, submitting to an unpaid internship and finally giving it all up to return to Japan where she faces corporate HR staff who attach negative value to the time she spent away from Japan. And yet at the end of the book, Naoko tells Sooudi: “I would do it all over again if I had the option. Because I feel I get more depth in my life … . It’s like a movie. No one wants to see a movie with just happy people. You want complicated … feelings” (210). Japanese New York provides plenty of those.
Andrew Horvat
Josai International University, Chiba, Japan
pp. 444-446