In Praise of José Watanabe

Abstract

In Praise of José Watanabe Marco Katz Montiel (bio) "… home is where our stories are, and that's not just a question of ethnicity or even country …" —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world's attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and unexpected accension caused the world to notice the vast number of nikkei, immigrants from Japan and their descendants, in the country he now governed. According to the Japanese Peruvian Association in Lima, this group numbered over fifty thousand people and included a disproportionate number of artists, musicians, and writers who, along with large populations of nikkei in Brazil and Mexico, employed appealing fusions of Asia and Latin America in their creative activity. Among these was playwright, screenwriter, and poet José Watanabe Varas (1945-2007). By the time of his passing, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars had begun to create interest in Watanabe's works. Volumes of his poetry appeared throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translations began to appear that made his work available to native English speakers and the even larger number of readers who employ English as a second language. When Peruvian cinephiles submitted Watanabe's Alias 'La Gringa' to the Academy Awards, the addition of English subtitles increased the potential audience for that film. Since then, scholarly works on Watanabe's oeuvre have appeared in Peru and as chapters of anthologies dealing generally with Asians in Latin America, in England, and the United States. While all of these provide useful ways of looking at his varied creative production, a comprehensive appreciation of his work remains undone. Reading Watanabe as a Japanese Peruvian author only begins to explain his writing. Although many of his verses do not blatantly announce a paternal heritage, there are moments in which his poetry [End Page 240] shows an immigrant father fusing elements from his home country with those of his adopted land. A subtle example appears in "This Scent, Its Other" from a 1994 collection translated as Natural History in 2022 by Michelle Har Kim (Georgia Review Books). The scene opens with the narrator's older sister chopping parsley with the seemingly "congenital" ability of someone born in Peru, where that condiment predominates. "Parsley would announce that my father, Don Harumi," continues the poem, "awaited his frugal soup. Thanks to this country:a Japanese man who would never forgivethe local secret's absence at the table!I think you folded that secret into another one greaterto compose the beauty of your ordered home that blendedfamily and savvy and knacks of this land. Up to this point suggestive of the ways in which the issei (Japanese immigrant) brings his customs together with practices from his adopted land, the verses turn to what has been lost along the way: Children of your old environs we are lone diners todaydivided as tithesand we eat dinner on Day of the Dead scatteringparsley in our soup. The herbs are but seasoning now, aroma without powerOur houses, Don Harumi, are fallen. Like the father, the son narrating this scene feels othered, but in different ways. This contextualization forestalls any temptation to reify by demonstrating the process through which children from all backgrounds, especially those mindful of how they fit into their surroundings, never stop coming into being. Looking at the way in which the father's identity, Japanese as well as Peruvian, continually comes into being provides insight into the son, who becomes a poet. Unlike many of his compatriots, who fled [End Page 241] their homeland out of economic desperation, Harumi Watanabe abandoned art studies at a university and his parents' stable home in Okayama to escape the traditional arranged marriage they had prepared for him. His emigration took place twenty years after the 1899 arrival of 790 issei men who sailed on the Sakura Maru as replacements for nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants previously engaged in hard labor on the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean. Harumi differed in other ways from the thousands of expectant laborers who followed that first boatload of economic refugees. Many of...