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The Unfold story of War Brides

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THE UNFOLD STORY OF WAR
BRIDES

by

Manar Taha Elshaib

 1

This paper will present an objective, critical, and technical analysis of the first play TEA

which Velina Houston wrote in 1986 and to shed light on the on the identity of Shin-Issei

women. Those women loved American soldiers during the Second World War and decided to

immigrate with them to America starting new life. In fact, those Japanese women have no home

or country. They left their country and their families behind searching for hope and better life in

the enemy's land. They were no longer feel the sense of safe home in Japan after the fall of the

great Japanese empire and they do not truly feel at home in America. They preferred to escape to

America searching for better life instead of living in despair and loss in their homeland.

It will attempt to examine the sense of terror and insecurity which the Japanese

women felt in Japan and forced them to run away searching for hope in America. Also, it will

discuss in details the main motives for immigration believing in the slogan of the American

dream and how this play represents the first stage of acquaintance both in Houston's early life

and the heroines' in America. Houston wrote in her introduction to TEA: A Teacher’s Study

Guide:

My passion for these Japanese international brides of World War II is both

personal and political. An Amerasian born of America’s first war with Asia, I am

the daughter of one such Japanese “war bride” and an American soldier who was

half Native American Indian and half black. Having always been extremely close

to my mother, it was a natural inclination to explore her story. Most writers tend

to turn toward their family history as a resource for their first creative

explorations. I was no different, but my family history certainly was. In fact, it

 2

was of a fabric yet to be documented: the history of Americans who married

Japanese native women at the end of World War II and the forgotten Amerasians

to which these marriages gave birth. Thus, my explorations became not only

poetry and plays, but also documentation of history that otherwise might have

been lost to the mainstream, history that Japan has sidestepped and about which

America either never knew or never cared . (Houston 1)

Of course, the collapse of the great Japanese empire after its defeat by the Americans in

the World War II, especially after America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an unclear

bomb, left the Japanese not only defeated, but also distorted and infected with radiance.

Who are the “War Brides” or the “Shin-Issei women”?

They are Japanese natives married to American soldier who were stationed in Japan

during the U.S. Occupation after World War II. Taking place inJapan roughly between 1946 and

1960, the marriages challenged the U.S. Army’s enemy anti-fraternizationpolicies and survived

the rigorous psychological examinations to which the Army subjectedthe Japanese women

before the marriages were allowed to take place. Moreover, the marriageschallenged the social

systems of both Japan and America because of their interracial-interculturalnature. Such systems

required the women to survive the oppression and ridicule to whichsuch marriages are often

subjected. These women-along with European women who married American soldiers-were

labeled as “war brides” because war was the circumstance that brought them together with their

husbands. The term, though romanticized and acceptable to some, is considered derogatory by

Japanese women, who prefer the term “international brides,” if indeed they must be categorized

and labeled.
 3

Although some women’s groups organized by Japanese women whoimmigrated to the

United States as wives of American husbands hadalready existed since the 1960s in the Pacific

Northwest, they did notactively seek public recognition or claim more accurate representations

oftheir experiences. According to Stout,” the first political gathering of warbrides took place in

1988” (Yasutomi and Stout 2005), which marked thefortieth anniversary of the first instance in

which a Japanese wife of anAmerican G.I. obtained permission to immigrate to the state of

Washington.In her point of view, Stout recollects the moment when theorganizing members

purposefully named the gathering “SensoHanayomeTobei 40 Syu-nenKinenTaikai (War Brides

40th Anniversary Convention)”,instead of replacing the term “war brides” with more neutral

terms such as“sengo-ha (postwar comers)” or “shin-issei(the new first generation)” (Yasutomi

and Stout 2005, 217–18). It was the first time they reconceptualizedand reappropriated this

stigmatized term in order to put their past ina positive light and to speak openly about their

experiences. This ‘movement’seems to have developed further to the global level after the

successof the Convention in 1988. In 1994, the Nikkei, the second generation of interracial

marriages, the International Marriage Society was launched by Stout and others with the aim of

creating a socialspace where Japanese war brides from different regions of the UnitedStates and

other countries could come and meet to share similar experiences.One of the principal objectives

of the Society was to record thewomen’s histories and to correct misperceptions of Japanese war

bridesheld among the Japanese.

Actually, ‘War bride’ is a loaded term when it refers to a Japanese woman whomarried an

American G.I. Both in Japan and in the United States, the termwas used by various types of

popular media in ways that contributed tonation-building, serving to cultivate the ideology of

‘ideal national citizens’.Tamura wrote that the term, “Japanese war bride” refers to, “a Japanese
 4

woman who married a member of the foreign armed forces or a foreign civilian who was in

Japan as a result of the military occupation after World War II and the subsequent military

presence in Japan up to 1960” (Tamura2001, 17). During the American occupation of Japan after

the war, approximately40,000 to 50,000 Japanese women married American servicemenand

immigrated to the United States. Novels and the mainstream media,such as magazines and

newspapers in Japan, began to call them “sensohanayome,” a direct translation of the English

term “war brides,” whichinvoked a negative and dark image associated with Japan’s defeat as

well asa highly gendered image of “brides,” which in combination made them asymbol of the

American (men’s) control over Japan (women) and thus asymbol of national (shame). In addition

to being rejected for marrying themen of “yesterday’s enemy,” they were portrayed by Japanese

mainstreammedia as “women of the night,” “women of the darkness,” and “prostitutes”for

stationed foreign soldiers (Yasutomi and Stout 2005).

Stout added that they were regarded as‘traitors’ to the nation and to Japanese

womanhood. Infact, some of them were disowned by their families after they decided tomarry

foreign G.I.s, and as a result, they had to leave their homeland withlittle hope of return.By the

time the women arrived in theUnited States, these stereotypes had also been passed on to local

Japanese languagemedia targeted at Japanese-speaking immigrants, thus giving anegative

perception of war brides to the local Nikkei community (Yasutomiand Stout 2005, 122–24).

Their lives in the United States were also represented negatively in the public opinion, such as

“few had a happy life”; “many work at barscatering to Japanese customers or become

prostitutes”; and “they areisolated from other local Japanese immigrants” (Yasutomi and Stout

2005, 105–06). These images stigmatized Japanese war brides so profoundly thatsome began to

refuse to use the term “war brides” (Stout 2002, 91).

 5

TEA as a Mirror of Velina Houston’s Personal History:

The story of TEAbegan as an idea for a book. But, Houston have since narrowed the

scope of the bookto include only her mother’s history, however the original idea led her to

interview 50 Japanesewomen living in Kansas. The group consisted of family friends, unknown

complains and womenwho sought her out after hearing about her project. Many of these women

were initially reluctant totalk. They approved only because she was one of them, a member of

their private community. Theirlong-hidden stories quivered from their hearts. The

interviewslasted from two to ten hours. Houston wrote:

I am certain that, for many, it was the first time they hadrevealed so fully and

deeply the heartaches, fears and joys of their decisions to marry Americansand the

lives in which those decisions resulted...TEA, in its artistic soul, is truly my poem

to my mother and to the Japanese women of Kansas who drifted through our

home over the years to take tea and reflect. Such is the “tea ceremony” of

everyday life, especially for Japanese women of the prewar generation who have

had to survive the barren, foreign cultural frontier of Kansas for the last 30 to 40

years.(Houston 16)

First, Houston wrote Morning Has Broken (AsaGaKimashita) (1981), then American

Dream (1983), and finally TEA (1986). All are three plays which form a trilogy based on the real

story of Houston’s family. The trilogy begins with Morning Has Broken, which details

herJapanese mother’s decision to marry an African-Native-American soldier and leave her

ancestral home in Japan despite her father’s opposition. Then it isfollowed by American Dreams,

which tells how the couple-Houston’s mother andfather-confronted by hostility and intolerance
 6

upon meeting Houston’s paternalAfrican-American relatives. TEA concludes the series, reaching

beyond immediate autobiography to encompass a community of Japanese women living in the

States, one member of which is also Houston’s widowed mother. In this way,The three plays

have a clear autobiographical line and very connected to Houston’s mother’s life. In these plays,

Houston investigates crucial identity issues of geographical transportation, interracial marriages,

and, the multi-layered identity and dislocation of interracial and intercultural children.

She also glorifies the courage and strength of such Women who manage to survive in

America, defying all the external and internal pressures that society practice upon them. The

honest autobiographical voice of Houston in these three plays gained her several awards and

honors to add to her record in playwriting. TEA has, in fact, received the lion’s share of these

awards.

As I mentioned above,the play is related to the writer’s personal history. It depicts

America’s destructive racism against Japanese Americans by representing their World War II as

an incarceration experience. It madethose Japanese women live the nightmare of the Americans

who denied their rights, stripped of their citizenship and dignity,assigned to an obligatory prison

camp in Boston and Arizona leaving their fears of uncertain futures.

The play also discusses some gender and sexual issues; it highlights some of the

difficulties these Japanese-American women face, especially the single ones. “Although not as

devastating as the Holocaust or Hiroshima,” wrote Dorothy RitsukoMcDonough and Katharine

Newman, “the ‘Camp Experience’ left a deep wound in the lives of Japanese-Americans and it

was a psychological trauma for all of the 110,000 people incarcerated” (McDonald and Newman

30).
 7

Houston grew up in Junction City, Kansas which is the setting of the play, in a

community of Japanese-American families and Amerasian offspring. Most of her mother’s

friends were also native Japanese women married to American men of various racial extractions

while they were serving there during the U.S. occupation of Japan. TEA, in this way, is an

autobiographical meditation of the lives of Houston’s family-members and the racially mixed

families they knew inJunction City. Right in the Dramatist’s Notes that preceded the Prelude to

TEA, Houston makes her readers and spectators well aware of this important autobiographical

and historical documentation of the play. She mentions:

This play is based on the virtually undocumented historical

fact of communities of Japanese “war brides” who have lived

in Kansasover the last twenty to forty years. More than

100,000 nativeJapanese women married American servicemen

during the American Occupation of Japan. These families returned

tothe Unite States between the years of 1946 and 1960. Depending on

the time of their return, any American servicemen married to

“Oriental” women were required under that army’s resettlement

policies to be stationed at remote forts, such as Fort Riley, Kansas.

. . . This background and my family history catalyzes this play, in

 8

addition to extensive interviews with fifty Japanese women residing

in Kansas who were international brides. ( TEA 1987, 162)

Houston named the play TEA referring to a very important and sacred ceremony in Japan

in which tea is drunk. The art of the Tea Ceremony is related to the ideas of Zen Buddhism

which an important aspect of this belief is the idea of transcending traditional waysof thinking

about existence. Every part of the ceremony is organized to moveone toward contemplation.

There are rituals for entering and leaving the room,making and serving the tea and appreciating

the choice of flowers.The room where the ceremony takes place is supposed to beof the utmost

simplicity and is called a “Cha-shitu”.

TEAtells the story of five Japanese women; Teruko, Sestuko, Himiko, Atsuko, and

Chizuye. All are "War Brides”, who immigrated to the United States with their American

Soldiers husbands during Post-World War II occupation of that country. As a part of the U.S

military's resettlement policies, soldiers who are married to Asian women were stationed in

remote bases. The play opens with the suicide of Himiko who created a terrible event by

shooting her husband and the other four gathered at home to clean house and drink tea. The

suicide of their friend forces them to reflect all what they have endured to live in America. In

these five characters, Houston invokes various stereotypical constructions of Asian American

female identity.

The play is set in Kansas. The central figure is Himiko Hamilton, appears as a ghost not

seen by the other four women, whose fatal shooting of her abusive husband and the death of her

daughter pushed her to the edge of madness. Two years later Himiko kills herself, setting her
 9

spirit on a journey toward peace and resolution; a journey that is meant to be shared by four other

Japanese brides - the accommodating optimistic Setsuko Banks; the judgmental Atsuko

Yamamoto ; the rational Teruko Machelli, and the thoroughly assimilated and cynical Chizuye

Juarez -who come to Himiko’s house to share tea.

The five Japanese war brides brought by their American husbands to live in ‘promising’

America, but only to be broken on the seashore rocks of despair and disappointment in the

troubled community of that country and all its ethnic and racial prejudices. Much of the women’s

feelings and struggles are revealed through the course of the play. The women of TEA, Houston

declares, “like my mother and my sister and myself, are caught between two worlds and there

simply is no resolution” ( The Politics 210).

They gathered recalling everything about their marriage andpersonal life. Houston

managed magnificently to depict the scenes of their lives without using other actors or actresses.

They remember the first meeting scenes of their husbands, marrying them, their swear to be loyal

and Americans when they first reached to America leaving their families behind, learning to

adapt, and even the death scenes of Chizuye’s husband and and Himiko’s daughter. They act

their husbands’ roles and even mimic their daughters ‘voices.

In the prelude of the play, it opens with Himiko’s calling in a tragic way her dead

husband and daughter. Then the other four war brides appear and they all say turning one after

another that:

Tea is not quiet, but turbulent. We Japanese women drink a lot of it. Become it.

Swallow the tempest. And nobody knows the storm inside. We remain…peaceful,
 10

contained, the eye of the hurricane. But if you can taste the TEA, if it can roll over

your tongue in one swallow, then the rest will come to you. When the TEA leaves

are left behind in the bottom of a cup. When we are long gone and forgotten.

(TEA 2007, 6)

Chizuye’s husband is Mexican American and he died, but she still loves him; Atsuko’s

husband is Japanese American; Setsuko’s husband is Afro-American and he died but also she

still loves him; Teruko’s husband is Texan and Himiko’s husband is Oklohaman. A soon as

these four war brides came to America with their G.I American husbands like other thousands,

they swear according to the American law to be loyal citizens and demolish their Japanese

identities. Himiko says:

I hereby declare, an oath, that I absolutely renounce all allegiance to any foreign

state or sovereignty of which I have heretofore been a citizen; that I will

defend laws of United States of America against all enemies; that I will

bear arms on behalf of United States; and that I take this obligation freely

without any mental reservation. So help me God. (TEA 2007, 23)

Also, they were forced to sing the national anthem and wear pants, socks and shoes not

kimonos and sandals like Japanese. Houston clarified that such act was not only a crime against

the Japanese boasting the American victory over them, but alsoracism. Himiko says,” It was

more than racism. It was the gloating of victor over enemy. It was curiosity about our yellow

skin, about why in the hell their red-blooded American boys would want to bring home an

‘Oriental’”(TEA2007, 25).
 11

The five characters in the play strived to adapt with the American culture by all ways.

They challenged their country and families marrying their enemy, the American soldiers, seeking

for love and new, rich, and clean life in America. They left behind them the destructed Japan

where no more peace and power after its defeat in World war II by America. Houston points out

that these women were not traitors or prostitutes, but victims of society and war. InHouston

wrote:

Teruko: And so the country watches as thousands of us leave Japan behind.

Atsuko: And it aches. And it cries.

Teruko: Leave Japan and their war-ragged lives behind.

Atsuko: Because the mess finally seems too much to clean.

Himiko: And Japan finally looks as small as it really is.(

Chizuye: The war makes them see Japan is not the strongest or best.(TEA2007, 22).

Robert Uno thinks that the stereotypes which Houston critically depicts are familiar. He

says, "They are generally depicted as the exotic prostitute or Geisha, the quiet, submissive

servant or peasant, the treacherous dragon lady or villain, the comic buffoon, or the industrious

model minority"(Uno 122). It is very clear that Houston recites these norms in her plays, but

from her point of view and personal experiences.

Teruko appears to be the stereotypical, submissive Oriental woman who cares for her

white husband/master's every need. Sestuko, similarly, tells the story of having to be taught by
 12

her husband how to use a western style toilet. Atsuko is in many ways the model minority

citizen, disapproving of what she perceives as remarkable behavior such as the dead Himiko's

mixed and sexualized tastes in clothing and refuses to adapt with the American culture. Chizuye

appears to comically represent the undefeatable power to assimilate to American culture.They

refuse being called war-brides falling in the trap of suffering between two identities. In the

second scene Houston wrote:

Chizuye: Do you think I have any respect for Japanese Americans?

Atsuko: (Quickly, adamant) they are our people. My husband’s parents died in

a concentration camp in the California desert, just because they were Japanese.

Chizuye: They are not “our” people. They hate us more than Americans because we remind them

of what they don’t want to be any more. They made a choice; most of us haven’t. They don’t like

you either, Ats because you’re a “war bride”.

Atsuko: (Indignant) I’m not a war bride. I didn’t marry the war.

Setsuko: May be we did. (TEA 2007, 25)

Robert Uno continues describing Houstons' representation of the Shin-Issei woman

saying, "Most Prevalent is the Asian woman as ornament. From airline ads to panty hose and

beauty cream commercials, the Asian woman is smiling, nameless, decorative accessory" (Uno

50). Ornaments and accessories have significance as they function the relation of the central

object to be decorated. Houston removes the central object, which is the dominant culture, the

women's American husbands, and the American setting, leaving the "ornaments" to be mutually

defined to each other. Houston points out in the second scene how the death of their husbands’

and the absence of the Japanese lifestyle which is the central object left them bare ornaments:

Atsuko: He never told me there would be no Japanese food.

 13

Setsuko: He never told me about “we reserve the right”

Chizuye: I never thought he would die and leave me here to be an American without him.

Teruko: I never thought they would be scared of us, too.(TEA2007, 33)

Hybridity in TEA:

Velina H. Houston is trans-cultural, because she exceeds all racial, ethnic, national,

cultural, and other monolithic limitations. She insists that her traditions, though inclusive of the

European-American tradition because that heritage is a part of the American context in which

she was reared, are born of a culturally hybrid aesthetic and sociopolitical vision. Her dramatic

work, thus, is engaged in revealing a new, unexpected experience of a woman of color of diverse

origins.

In more than one of her plays and critical essays, Houston reveals another type of racism,

a non-Euro-centric one. It is racism within minority sub-cultures in the United States. Both in her

personal life and dramatic career, Houston experienced this ‘color against color oppression’. Her

father’s African-American family refused to acknowledge her mother’s interracial marriage and

children. In her experience as a binational and multiracial playwright, Houston also encountered

ethnic theaters that hesitate to embrace her work because of her refusal to choose a single aspect

of her heritage over another, “Too often I have heard the artistic director of an Asian American

or an African American theater tell me that one of my plays is either ‘too Japanese’ or ‘not

Japanese enough’ or ‘not African American enough’ for their theater” ( Uno 159).

As a woman, Houston wrote with a feminine sensibility, reflecting honestly her own

experience, her mother’s, and other women’s she knew, hybrids and non-hybrids. She defines
 14

herself to be feminist in the sense that she is naturally concerned about women’s spirit, intellect,

and lives. She warns, however, against “simplistic” feminism, which create “dichotomies” and

barriers between men and women, generating more stereotypes instead of offering practical

solutions to women and humanity. Houston’s feminism is, thus, “not a party-line feminism,” as

Shirley Geok-lin Lim notes and Houston agrees. It is “self empowerment,” “self-definition,” and

“self-determination” for women as they try to bring the scale of economic, professional,

domestic, and educational justice into balance. Feminism for Houston is teaching women

patience, resilience, fortitude, and survival as compassionate and sensitive human beings of

certain“emotional and physiological complexities” and teaching men about those specific

feminine sensibilities for a better and mutual understanding between the two genders, all as

human beings ( Uno 12).

Also, her being multicultural ,not restricted to any specific hegemonic category,

monolithic or multilithic, Houston refuses to be labeled under any specific racial or ethnic

boundary, she wrote in her anthology But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, “My life defies placement in

any singular category” (Houston 58). As a hybrid, Houston thinks that she simultaneously

belongs to and still different from her three cultures of origin, “I am Amerasian, which means

multi-layered identity of the American hybrid, especially the female one” (Houston 59).

The term ‘Amerasian’ Houston insists, was significant to her because more than being

multiracial, multicultural, and binational, she is a human being. She has always found it difficult,

therefore, to decide whether she is more Japanese or more American. About her feelings

concerning this matter, she writes:

Because of that the term Amerasian was appealing to me because

 15

it meant an amalgam of the American and the Asian which is

invisible. . . . Someone’s always saying she’s Japanese and

Native American Indian, and African American . . . like a recipe

. . .and you’re always feeling like you’re made up of two or

three pieces, that you’re a fragmented human being. But I’m a

whole being. The term Amerasian is a reflection of my biological

and cultural truth. (Uno 156)

Houston’s metaphor for her own multiracial, multicultural, and bi-national identity,

Roberta Uno writes in her “Forward” to But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, is that of “double”, “a

concept that at once subverts and obliterates historical notions of fragmentation, impurity, and

displacement”( Houston 4).So, she is able to occupy more than one cultural space. Uno asserts

Houston seems to have “an added lens which sharpens, expands, and deepens vision” (Uno xi).

This sense of ‘doubleness’,Uno argues, serves best as an academicresource that is able to

challenge and redefine the dramatic literary canon based on hegemonic norms and neither on

multiplicity of themes nor on aesthetic sensibilities.

In fact, most of Houston’s plays explore a multiethnic or a hybrid landscape, which

isoriginally the same landscape she lives in. They are involved in a sophisticated discussion of

the complicated hybrid experience of the multiracial identity,especially the Amerasian one, being

herself one. Her plays, in this sense, carryan honest autobiographical tone, through which
 16

Houston prospectively criticizesand celebrates her multicultural origins, both Japanese and

American, in a braveattempt to depict the truth about herself and others.She celebratesmany

Japanese and American traditions, and she also familiarizes herreaders/spectators with Japanese

and American songs, customs, food,furniture, etc. She criticizes, however, the narrow-

mindedness of both Americanand Japanese racisms against the “other,” who happens to be a

little bit different. In the selected playsof my thesis, TEA, Koroko, and Calling Aphrodite,

Houston enables her readersand/or spectators to understand dramatically and/or theatrically how

such anarrow-mindedness prevents people from understanding each other, and worse than that, it

obliges them to deny, even deprives others from their basic humanneeds. Through the suffering

of those Japanesewomen in her plays, she clarifies how racism causeshumanity to bleed,

destroying all bridges of love and understanding amongpeople. Houston successfully did that by

drawing an empathic line betweenher characters and her readers/spectators.

TEA is culturally hybrid; as the elements of both Japanese and American cultures are

soon tangible to its reader or spectator .Each woman in TEArevealsto the audience her own

traumatic story of racism. Setsuko and her husband, forexample, were denied service in some

American hotels when arriving at the USAfor being an interracial couple; Houston wrote, “You

reserve the right to refuse service? Butwhat did we do wrong? My husband works for your

government. We just need aplace to stay for the night. I am speaking English” (TEA 2007, 35).

Teruko had hard timesbeing always stared at because she is of a different race than most

Americans; she says, “Please, stop staring at me like I am an animal. I just want to buy

groceries”(TEA 2007, 36). Chizuye also experienced similar racist situations, “Listen, lady, you

give mehard time about opening a checking account just because I’m Japanese, and I’llgive you

more hell than you bargained for. I’m an American citizen” (TEA 2007, 36).
 17

Even the Japanese relatives of the multiracial children of the five women consider them

outsiders and strangers. Setsuko’s father, for example, thinks that Setsuko’s multiracial daughter

is ugly. Atsuko, who is a racist when it comes to non-pure-Japanese, also declares that Setsuko’s

multiracial daughter is a shame because she looks more Indonesian than Japanese. It is very clear

that Houston does not save any of her efforts to avoid criticizing both Japanese and American

narrow-minded racisms in the play. On the contrary, the whole play revolves on the axis of the

rigidity and dangers of monolithic racism against multiracial people and even mono-racial people

who committed themselves to multiracialmarriages.

Exactly like Setsuko Banks’ daughter in TEA, Houston is culturally, ethnically, and

racially of hybrid origins. Born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1957, Houston immigrated to the United

States at the age of two with her American father, LemoHouston (Creed Banks in TEA), and

Japanese mother, Setsuko Takechi. LikeCreed Banks in the play, Houston’s father is also

multiracial. He is African-Native-American. Like Setsuko Banks,Houston’s mother is a native

Japanese who has also developed a rich hybrid experience, living in America and raising her

children a lone after the early death of her husband and the failure of her Japanese relatives and

herhusband’s African-American relatives to accept her interracial marriage and children.

The Masculinity in TEA: A source of oppression and support:

Both these women’s American husbands and their Amerasian children meet the same

tragic fate. Husbands, most of them are Americans of color, had also suffer in their own

American homeland. The economic, ethnic, racial, and other boundaries, in addition to

contemporary man’s and woman’s increasinganxiety and the increasing sense of fear and

insecurity in a fighting world of raged wars affected the lives of these husbands. As indicated in
 18

Houston’s notes that precede TEA's Prelude, these returned American servicemen who married

“Oriental” women were required under that army’s resettlement policies to be stationed only at

remote forts, such as Fort Riley, Kansas. Despite working hard and serving their family and

country as soldiers in audacious war positions, these men achieved no security. Ironically

enough, they all except for Atsuko’s husband lived unsatisfying short lives, leaving the burden of

running their families to their lonely wives, who had never felt welcomed in America.

Creed, Setsuko’s husband, died from a heart attack, because the “nightmares of war had

chased his heart away” ( TEA 2007,37). Billy, Himiko’shusband, was murdered by his own wife,

because he severely abused her.Gustavo, Chizuye’s husband, slid into the other world when he

was driving home on icy streets the very first winter he wanted to spend with his bride in his

homeland. Curtis, Teruko’s husband, also died early, leaving his wife a lone. Kazuhiro, Atsuko’s

husband, is the only survivor of the five men.When living with their wives, the five husbands

were caught between inharmonious war memories of killing Japanese people and their love of

their wives. These men were also caught in their wives’ and children’s failure to pass in

American society due to their skin color. They definitely shared their families’ awareness of

these racial and ethnic boundaries, the inconsistencybetween imagined life and reality, between

American mottos of melting-potequality and real discrimination. They suffered enough to find

out that they could do nothing to stop others from hurting their most beloved ones, their wives

and children.

In addition, such husbands were themselves rejected for their interracial marriages and

forced, therefore, to live with their families in remote areas, such as Junction City and a few

other places, far away from the places they were brought up in. Most of these husbands are also
 19

Americans of color whothemselves suffered from Euro-American racism. There are Billy

Hamilton from rural Oklahoma and the white Curtis Mackenzie from Texas, the other husbands

are politically colored; Creed Banks is an African Native American, Gustavo Juarez is a Mexican

American, and Kazuhiro Yamamoto is a Californian Japanese American.

The interracial children of these Japanese women are also objects of tragedy for being

marked as ‘others’. They have always been the subject of uncomfortable racial scrutiny, usually

accompanied by refusal of acceptance, from both cultures, Native Japanese and American. “They

are between two worlds. We put them there,” Himiko pessimistically blames herself ( TEA

2007,29).Houstonasserts more than once that children born of such interracialunions are not

allowed free passages anywhere, simply because their bodies are always marked from both sides

with indeterminacy. Each interracial child in the paly, for example, is inevitably turned into an

object under annoying visual scrutiny, especially when others try to mark him/her. Atsuko, for

example, remarks, “Teruko, I saw your daughter last week. She looks Japanese (acompliment).

That’s nice. Too bad she isn’t friends with my girl. My girl’s always with Setsuko-san’s

daughter. Have you seen her? Looks Indonesian, not Japanese at all.Shame, ne” (TEA 2007, 22).

Atsuko, who is the only one who married a man of her race, though of different nationality

because he is a Californian Japanese American, is very proud for keeping her ‘Japanese-ness’

and feudalistic spirits unspotted. Worse than that, she is always disdained to people of any other

race or class. She couldn’t save herracist comments against almost everybody, including her best

Japanese girlfriends, their American husbands, and their multiracial children.Setsuko’s story-

version of her daughter’s physical appearance and hybrid identity, however, is completely

different. Her interracial daughter, she believes, is beautiful and unique: “Back home, country

papa-san says to me when my first is born, ‘Bring it me for me to see.’ He wants to see how ugly
 20

she is. But she is pretty, and the Japanese crowd and stare. She doesn’t look Japanese, they say,

and she doesn’t look Negro. And I am glad because I have created something new, something

that will look new and think new” (TEA 2007, 26). Though Setsuko is very proud of her

daughter, still she is aware of her own people’s discrimination to her multiracial daughter.

In addition to their uniquely beautiful appearance, the hybrid Japanese children of this

play are also distinguished for their intelligence: “Teachers say they’ve never seen anything like

it” (TEA 2007, 25). In spite of their positive outlook and high level of intelligence, however,

these Amerasians are always exposed toserious racist threats. Also, Houston reflects one of these

frightening tragedies theseAmerasians are subject to due to their racially and sexually marked

bodies. Mieko-Himiko’s daughter, the “Beautiful half-Japanese girl”, for example, was violently

raped and murdered by an American male. This tragic death is tied not only to men’s violence

but also to “the confusion of . . . her Amerasian skin” (TEA 2007, 34).

Sexuality:

Also, the play tackles clearly different angles of sexual prejudice on the narrative level,

both social and familial, discussing how these women have been considered and treated in the

United States for their gender. One example is the shrewd questioning of these women by

American Army officers before being allowed to enter the United States in the company of their

American husbands, like “Why do you want to marry this man instead of one of your own native

Japanese? . . . Are you an imbecile or idiot? . . .Are you now--or have you ever been—a

prostitute?” (TEA 2007, 22).Houston presents anothergood example of sexual prejudice is

Himiko’s mistreatment by her abusive husband, who “never let her out of home and hardly let
 21

her have guests,” and who confessed that he married this Japanese woman simply because “he

wanted a good maid, for free” (TEA 2007, 9).

On the other hand, Houston clarifies that these post-war Japanese female characters as

sexually attracted to the embodied differences of the American men, especially those differences

marked on their skin. This sexual attraction to the ‘other’s’ skin is repeated in more than one

occasion in the play. Teruko, for example, expresses herfascination with the color of her Texan

husband’s complexion for being “white, like a ghost”. There is a symbolic direct connection

between food and men made as an implicit connotation of sexual attraction; Chizuye, who

married a dark Mexican American, for example, says, “I choose my drink like I chose my

husband: strong, dark, and with a lot of sugar” (TEA 2007, 18). Setsuko-who married an African

Native American-prefers to drink “roasted rice tea”. Another time, Setsuko describes her

husband’s eyes as “the color of-soy sauce”. Also, Teruko calls her husband “my sugar pie”.

These are all connotations of these women’s sexual attraction to their men of different race and

ethnicity.

The Technical Analysis:

Houston insists on combining adramatic technique that suggests cultural hybridity,even

in her stage directions to the play. For example, there is a mixture of Western and Eastern

furniture and traditions. The setting of the play is the house of Himiko, which is a combination of

1960s American and Japanese things, including a raised area that abstractly include a Japanese

tatami room bordered by linoleum, an antique, round-hooded trunk overflowing with Japanese

cloth materials, kimono, and so forth, and an oval, red lacquer tea table .The characters of the

play, exceptfor Himiko who is mysteriously dressed, wear American clothes. At times,
 22

theytemporarily change these clothes to colorful Japanese kimonos, falling into thememories of

their youth in Japan.

Also, on the linguistic level of the play, Houston uses a mixture of two languages,

Japanese and American. Japanese vocabularies are accompanied by English translation wherever

necessary, like “a pile of zabuton (flat Japanese sitting cushions)” ( TEA2007,7). Houston

presents to her audience several names of Japanese meals which the characters miss in America

to stress the case of hybridity they live in, She wrote:

Teruko: I miss sashimi!

Chizuye: It would be nice to bite into o-manju.

Setsuko: I can taste the crisp nashi.

Atsuko: Sasa-dando.

Teruko: Kushi-dango.

Chizuye: Hot oden.

Setsuko: There is nothing like Japanese persimmons.(TEA 2007, 26)

Also, there are various traditional Japanese melodies, suggesting different eras of pre-war

and post-war Japan, are also combined with several American songs of different social or

political significance. This experience of hybridity, however, is doomed to be stuck in a “no

passing zone” (Houston and Williams viii). In other words, Amerasians simultaneously belong

and do not belong to their cultures of origin.Though they are products of more than one race and
 23

one culture, they are still not completely welcomed in any.It is the authenticity of the world

Houston creates and the intimacyestablished between her readers/spectators and her characters

witnesses that contribute to the primary power and real distinction of TEA.

After Houston provides the stage directions and the documentary information, combining

historical, personal, and interview-data, she divides the play into a Prelude and five Scenes,

entitled: “PRELUDE: Invitation to Tea,” “SCENE ONE: The Art of Tea,” the title symbolizes

the case the five characters appear in and recognizing the spectators/readers with the tea

ceremony in Japan , “SCENE TWO: Selecting Tea,” symbolizes how they select their husbands

and decided to live in America, “SCENE THREE: Serving Tea,” symbolizes the hybrid lifestyle

they live, “SCENE FOUR: Cold Tea,” symbolizes their clash with the fact that they neither

belong to American nor Japanese identity, and “SCENE FIVE: Perfect Drinking Temperature.”

Symbolizes the optimistic and relief case the five women reached becoming frank with

themselves. Also, this division centers on the traditional Japanese ceremony of drinking tea as a

successful practice to cope with anger and anxiety and to maintain self-restraint and serenity.

Thus, racial, gender, and other socio-political issues, such as class, age, and others are also

discussed.

On the figurative level, however, the play allows transcending these boundaries by using

the dramatic technique of double casting for each actress, suggesting the possibility of

constructing and deconstructing these boundaries, which are definitely invalid for being

thesource of all human tragedy on earth. The actresses flashback the first –meetings of their

husbands on the stage and play at the same time the role of their husbands. It is important,

therefore, for a reader or a spectator of TEA to avoid any naive analysis of the play, entirely and
 24

solely as its narrative; dramatic techniques are extremely significant here.The characters’

geographic transplantation, interracial marriages, and bearing of international children, Josephine

Lee argues, “They are configured both seductively and tragically” (200).

This kind of casting, Josephine Lee argues, adds another layer of meaning to the play,

“complicating the narrative’s identification of passing withtragedy” (203). In other words, what

Houston exactly does in the play is to investigate the tragic dimension of passing boundaries,

suggesting another dimension within the casting of the play. By having the actresses move from

one role to another, the body’s racial and sexual marking is somehow disrupted. According to

Lee, althoughthey ultimately fall into the racial category of Japanese-American women for

whom passing or not passing is a sad experience, these characters are allowed to occupy, for a

moment, the de-centering space of racial and gender trans-passing.

Houston followed a gradual dramatic technique in successiveness of events reaching to

the aimed end. The play opens right after a violent suicide has been committed by one of these

five first-generation Japanese-American women, Himiko. The other four women-Setsuko

(Houston’s mother), Chizuye, Teruko, and Atsuko -come together to clean up the house of the

deceased woman and are forced, in the wake of her death, to explore their own realities and

excavate the secrets that have been buried in their souls for a very long time. The spirit of the

dead woman, stuck in limbo because she left her earthly existence without solving her problems,

such as: her mental health, cultural environment, anddomestic abuse. This spirit finally forces

them to come to terms with their own cultural, sexual, and emotional dislocations and sufferings.

Gradually, the play moves from an extremely violent opening to a peaceful end.

Reconciliation is finally achieved by all these women, including the restless soul of the late
 25

Himiko. This is achieved through the performance of the Japanese tradition of drinking tea

together. The title of the play, thus, carries a symbolic meaning of the whole ceremony of

drinking tea as successful procedure of relaxing and calming down. Tea is “for the soul; tea to

clean the spirit,” says dead Himiko to the audience (TEA 2007, 8). After the suicide of Himiko,

the four other surviving Japanese-American women-best described as semi-schizophrenic for

experiencing similar tragic situations-decide to gather in Himiko’s house for the ceremony of

drinking tea together in honor of her soul. By drinking tea and swallowing their misery together,

they come to terms with their destiny, accepting it courageously.

This reconciliation journey is realized through Houston’s successful use of lyric imagery,

poetry, and a structure that blends naturalism with Japanese theatrical techniques, time travel,

and characterization devices. The tragic tone prevails throughout the whole play, despite some

comicand promising moments. From the very beginning to the end, these postwar Japanese

women are doomed for tragedy. Though they sacrificed living in their homeland within their big

families to follow their American husbands to the dreamland of America-“the Land of Milk and

Honey, the Bible Belt; the land of great, wide plains” (TEA 2007, 20), as Himiko sarcastically

notes-in hope for a safer and more promising future, none of these women achieved her goal.

They all have to suffer from unstable economic, abusive, or even more tragic circumstances, in

addition to racism, which ultimately causes them to end up emotionally and psychologically

depressed leading one of them tocommit suicide. “We are a casualty the Japanese do not care to

count,” as Setsuko declared, and Chizuye added, ” Excess baggage America does not want to

carry” (TEA 2007, 21). They couldn’t go back to Japan, evenafter the death of their American

husbands, because their multiracial childrenare not welcomed there at all. The only way left for

them, therefore, is to accept living in the States and face life bravely, though life there mostly
 26

“aches” and “cries” because of Americans’ racism, “disdain,” and “contempt,” even “private

envy” and “silent jealousy,” which are very clear in their eyes (TEA 2007, 21).

This technique ultimately insists on the instability of race or gender in real life, while at

the same time it acknowledges the importance of race and gender as socio-political constructs.

Such an artistic exploration of passing, “a passing that celebrates rather than punishes the actor’s

body” (Lee 203), seems to indicate a new permeability of the borders of racial and gender

meanings as they are constructed on stage. Cross-racial and cross-gender casting is Houston’s

smart theatrical maneuver, which seems to promise a way out of thefixed correspondence

between body and categorical type.

Assimilation or In-betweeness?

No degree of assimilation or Americanization can hide the Japanese identity of these five

Japanese women, either to others or to themselves. Himiko’s ghost is symbolically employed in

TEA to refer to the tragic situation of these Japanese women who strived to fit in America after

they burned their bridges on the shore of their homeland, Japan. Unfortunately, all their attempts

are unsuccessful and fruitless due to the racial prejudice deeply-rooted in American society.

Although the ghost isa vivid reminder of the death, it is theultimate result of attempts to pass into

American culture and the impossibility oftranscending these rigid racial boundaries. Himiko is

never satisfied, neither in her life nor in her death. Therefore, she is unable to pass easily to the

nextworld. She haunts the women as a reminder that their own bodies are inevitably marked.

Chizuye, the most assimilated character of the group for her Americanized style and accent,

acknowledges that, “underneath my comfortable American clothes, I am, after all, Japanese”

(TEA 2007, 38). These women are caught in an “impossible state of in-betweenness,” first as
 27

they are violently separated from their parents, and then as they make an incomplete transition to

American language and customs. (Lee 202).

The play, however, still has an optimistic message-the possibility of a future trans-

passing of racial, gender, and other boundaries, I believe. Like recent works by Asian-American

playwrights, TEA uses characters in multiple roles to suggest “the possibility of a transformative

passing” of gender and racial prejudice (Lee 203). Houston uses the dramatic technique of

multiple roles figuratively. Though the characters’ bodies are marked by race and sex, as

explained above, the actresses on stage constantly cross the binary divisions that define the

narratives of the play. During the play, they play the roles of their parents, their children, and

even their husbands. The boundaries of age, race, and gender, thus, appear to be more fluid, and

passing exceeds the figurative possibility to become a literal fact.

Also, there is a tangible weight of serenity, wisdom, and endurance that adds much to the

play. One dimension of the play, of course, is celebrating these characters as transcendent,

enduring, understanding of their tragic situations, and survivors. This is echoed in the way in

which the characters reach a final understanding with one another passingclass and racial

prejudices. In the tea ceremony, their individual differences are subsumed into achoreographed

expression of solidarity, reinforcing the play’s concern with a community based on ethnicity and

gender againstthe feeling of loneliness produced by racism. Thus, TEA represents the first chain

in the series of the Japanese woman’s experience through a long journey to forgiveness.
 28

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