Essay 4 Workshop

Alex Robinson

Lauren Servais

English 100

9 December 2010

Picture yourself working as a young child to pay off your parent’s debt.  Giving your all ten hours a day, six days a week, only to give all of your hard earned money away for a reason that you feel is unreasonable.  After struggling for two years to get out of the financial hole that you were born into; realizing that those two years of work hadn’t been to pay off the $6,000 in debt at all, rather it was just to help your family survive.  Family or cultural values should be held high, but an individual’s freedom is always more important.

            In Japanese culture at the time, the oldest boys in the family had a duty of repaying all of his parent’s debt before starting a life of his own.  Mr. Oyama was a very filial son.  That is why he ended up in the situation he was in, with a staggering $6,000 in debt and nothing but work to look forward to for the rest of his life.  Since Mr. Oyama was trapped in this debt, he and his wife had no choice but to expect their sons Toshio and Kiyoshi to do the same he did, be filial, and work for their parent’s until there was enough money to repay the entire debt.

            In the depression era everyone worked for their family’s well being.  For the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, that meant breaking your back on the plantation’s fields for pennies an hour.  The families that were forced to do this barely made enough money to survive; with all of the expenses from the plantation owned store, the rent due to the plantation, and paying for some children to go to high school or college, the families were stuck.  This meant that the older boys in the families were forced to stay on the plantation to work for the family to survive.  Unlike America’s culture though, the Japanese boys were expected to stay with the family, putting their lives on hold until their family’s debt was completely paid off.

            Mr. and Mrs. Oyama’s culture and expectations of the boys made it so they had no choice but to do as they were told.  Toshio didn’t seem to lose any sleep over the fact that he was a rebel and refused to live by all of his parent’s expectations or conform to Japan’s culture.  Unlike his parents, Toshio realized what it meant to be an American, and he was very proud that he was one.  He knew he shouldn’t have been overwhelmed by the debt that his parents accumulated over the years.  Instead of totally disobeying them though, he decides to deal with their debt the best he can and makes the decision to be the first one in the family to change the trend, and have an obligation to his child, instead of putting the obligation on the child. 

            Being born and raised in the United States, Toshio and Kiyoshi learned of freedoms which were not understood by their parents who were raised in Japan.  Freedoms which made Toshio’s mind run wild with thoughts and feelings that made his mother cry when he expressed them.  Toshio understood what it meant to be filial and didn’t like it one bit; he knew that is why his father was in the situation he was in, and felt it was ridiculous that he was expected to repay his parent’s debt just so he could end up in the same situation as his father.

            Toshio and Kiyoshi were both smart young men, capable of making anything of themselves had they been afforded the opportunity to put their brains to work.  This could have been the thing that turned the tides of their family’s fortunes.  Had the family given them four to six years to take a break from repaying the debt that they shouldn’t even have been responsible for, the boys could have spent time in school, earned degrees, and made at least five times more than working on the plantation.  If Mr. and Mrs. Oyama would have ended the brutal cycle, the family would have been pulled from the debt much sooner than the twenty years that Toshio hypothesized that it would take.

            Mrs. Oyama wanted the best for her sons, she wanted them to be educated and successful once their duties to the family had been completed.  What she does not see though is that they are continuing the cycle that has kept their family down since she came to America to marry Mr. Oyama and start the family.  She, like many of the other Japanese-American families in Hawaii at the time thought that living by their culture and its rules is the more important than anything else.   She was a proud Japanese citizen, too proud to realize that she could have been the one to change the direction her family was headed in by not worrying about the debt and sending her sons to college to make a name for the family.

            I try to imagine life in Hawaii as a Japanese-American during the depression.  How horrible it was for those children, knowing nothing except whatever lies between the plantation and the ocean.  The young boys being forced to quickly become men, skip their young adulthood, immediately go to work for their parents in the fields, and not even keep 50% of what they made.  It is understandable that their parents had a huge amount of debt during that period, I doubt if there were many families that didn’t.  But for them to bring their Japanese culture to a totally new country and use that to hold their boys down is very shameful.  What did Mr. and Mrs. Oyama expect when moving to a United States territory?  Freedom is what they found but they were definitely not ready for it.

            All Toshio and Kiyoshi had wanted was their bodies.  To be able to do whatever they wanted with them and not feel as if they had let their family down.  If their parent’s would have opened their minds as Toshio had told them many times they would have realized that they could have been the ones to end the cycle.  They had two intelligent boys who wanted to be educated and worked hard to become professional boxers since an education was out of the picture and almost made it.  Those boys had a lot of will power and could have done great things if it weren’t for the culture that there parent’s loved so much holding them down.

All I Asking for is My Body Part III Dialogue

What do you think about the ending?

The ending to the book seems like it is cut short, and you are left out of the ending of a good story.  But what Part III of the book is about is the struggles that Kiyoshi faced in dealing with the families debt and the ending makes you realize that.  Much of Part III of the book speaks of smaller stories, which all in some way impact the main point of the part; the families debt situation, which worries Kiyoshi, whose mother tells Toshio the debt would be Kiyoshi's to worry about.  Although it is not mentioned much throughout the part, Kiyoshi does worry about the debt, and the fact that he will be living for his parent's debt for 10-15 years.  Kiyoshi doesn't share his worries throughout Part III because he was raised to be a strong man, to always be samurai, and to hold all of his complaints in.
I was disappointed with the ending when I finished the book. what built up to the ending left me wanting to go off to war with Kiyoshi and see what World War II was like from a nisei's perspective.  After considering it though, and realizing what the story was about I feel content with the ending.  Imagine going through that struggle; being robbed of your childhood; forced to work to pay your parent's debt; going off to war only to get off of the plantation that you have called home for years, knowing you'll make the same amount of money either way.  Kiyoshi didn't even speak of nervousness about going to war, or traveling, which he's never done before.  The only thing he worried about was doing what he felt was the right thing, paying off his parent's debt.
The ending shows how noble of a person Kiyoshi is.  He obviously cared about his own life, but knew that if doing what his mother wanted him to do, he wouldn't have a life and would be repaying his parents debt until he's too old to live his life.  Going off to war he knows he will be able to give his parents the same he would give them if he was on the plantation.  He reassures himself that it's the right thing to make everyone happy by ensuring the insurance will pay off his parent's debt if the worst happens and he dies.