Norma Field nixed the expression “Japanese American” when her editor drafted a publicity blurb for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (Pantheon), her book about contemporary Japan. Field, a professor at the University of Chicago, says in Japan the comparable term is haafu, a label based on the English word “half.”
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“I’ve been described as ‘blue-eyed,’ which is absurd,” says Field, whose eyes are not blue. “That used to be a standard way of referring to white foreigners in Japan.” The daughter of an American father and a Japanese mother, Field attended school on a military base during the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II. She recalls trying “madly to eliminate all traces of Japaneseness from my person and my tongue”–to the point of insisting, unsuccessfully, that her mother speak to her only in English. She was aware of her minority status, both among her American classmates and at home with her mother’s kin. Field credits reading novels with preserving her “precarious sanity” in this bicultural limbo. She laments that fiction may not hold the same promise for today’s youth, including her own American-born children: “Picking up novels is not a natural thing to do–moving the eyeballs across the page is more and more an exotic activity.”
Field, who’s currently teaching a graduate seminar on the history of Japanese feminism, has discovered her angle elicits divergent responses. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor struck American readers as an ideological tract (she added “A Postscript on Japan Bashing” to the paperback edition), while Japanese readers took it as autobiography. “I wish the two readings could have been brought together in the same language,” she says.
