From Desert Dust to City Soot: Environmental Justice and Japanese American Internment in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

Abstract

Environmental justice scholars such as Vandana Shiva and Robert D. Bullard explain that people of color, the poor, and women suffer disproportionately from ecological crises, a reality made dramatically evident by Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997), which charts the interrelated lives of seven racially marginalized characters as they navigate a polluted urban landscape. Yamashita’s intricate narrative draws an important environmental connection between seemingly incongruent social phenomena to reveal that environmental justice is not only a recent urban struggle but also one that is rooted in the past with long-term physical and psychological effects. For example, Julie Sze, in a pioneering essay that calls attention to the “emerging literature of environmental justice,” offers an analysis of Tropic of Orange that illuminates an environmental connection between historical and contemporary issues of colonialism and labor for women of color in its examination of the characters Rafaela and Emi (40). This essay introduces yet another set of historical and contemporary issues that are foundational to an environmental justice reading of Yamashita’s novel: the past trauma of Japanese American internment and the contemporary homelessness of sansei Manzanar Murakami, who is named for one of those internment camps. In addition, this essay argues that crossgenerational effects of environmental injustices are revealed in the character of his granddaughter, Emi, who refuses to acknowledge the painful internment history she has inherited. While this internment history may seem peripheral to the central plots of Tropic of Orange, it is referenced throughout the novel. Most notably, this history is alluded to every time Manzanar’s name appears on the page. Consequently, Japanese American incarceration haunts Yamashita’s characters and readers throughout the book. Internment’s history of land theft and displacement, severe degradation of living and working conditions, and long-term psychological trauma, this essay will show, constitute important environmental justice issues for Manzanar and Emi, issues which, in a Japanese American context, have been and continue to be largely ignored. Yet consideration of these issues for Japanese Americans is crucial not only for