■

"When he had been in Japan as a child of twelve, it had seemed the most wonderful and beautiful country he had ever seen. Everything was so small; it was a country built for the size of a twelve-year-old. [...] All the land had been manicured for a thousand years. [...] It was all like that. No matter where you went, Japan was always beautiful, with an unreal finite beauty, like a miniature landscaped panorama constructed for a showroom or a fair. [...] Behind the beauty it was all bare, with nothing in their lives but toil and abnegation. They were abstract people, who had elaborated an abstract art, and thought in abstractions and spoke in them, devised involuted ceremonies for saying nothing at all, and lived in the most intense fear of their superiors that any people had ever had." *1

There can be several reasons for Wakara's denial of his Japanese heritage. One is that he does not want to be part of the culture that brought about war to the country he now calls his home. He blames Japan for his own struggle for place in a society that has been suspicious of him from the very beginning and has become even more so ever since Pearl Harbor. What fragile rapport he had been able to build in the past, was now "all shattered by the war".367 Wakara also blames Japan for the situation he currently finds himself in. Just as his American fellow-soldiers suffer from the frustration of being deprived of the comforts of home in the hostile environment of the jungle, Wakara's sense of uneasiness and non-belongingness is deepened. "In limbo" for him both means not knowing if the troops' fate will meet a happy ending and it stands for his torn identity. The beauty of Japan which Wakara describes appears false to him. He perceives the Japanese as a people who fool themselves by putting up quasi-meaningful facades to mask the aimlessness of their monotonous doings. For him it is art for show, an "unreal finite beauty" not going beyond its restrictions to create a true purpose. The coldness with which Wakara makes his judgments about Japan can be understood as a mirror of the frustration he experiences in his struggle for identity. He himself does not feel connected to the Japanese, while because of his facial features his American fellowmen see him as part of the other culture. Proving himself to be just as American as they are, Wakara has to invest comparatively more effort in creating his sense of self. He needs to put a distinctive distance between him and a people "with nothing in their lives but toil and abnegation" to secure his own standing. The Japanese culture as he perceives it fails to provide his being with meaning. The very denial of it already constitutes a building block of his identity. However, from Wakara's demeanor we can detect that he has not been successful in achieving and maintaining a solid foundation that would give him satisfactory self-assurance.

Towards the end of Wakara's inner monologue we find an interesting attempt at explaining the hatred between the United States and Japan. It refers to Conn's above quoted saying.

"Oh, he understood, Wakara thought, why the Americans who had been in Japan hated the Japanese worst of all. Before the war they had been so wistful, so charming; the Americans had picked them up like pets, and were feeling the fury now of having a pet bite them."368

There seems to be a feeling of betrayal behind the hatred. This is especially true if we remember how the Japanese were the constant target of belittlement. The comic people who were said to have bad eyesight, lack of coordination in their motoric action, and insufficient intellectual capacities during war proved to be not only far better equipped than expected. They also showed little appreciation and gratefulness towards the American nation who praised itself to have brought all the wonders of modernity to a country still stuck in feudal custom.

*1:
366 Mailer, p.252-53