Word: asakawa
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...scholar!" Carl M. Asakawa exclaimed a few weeks ago as he poured himself a drink. Asakawa was explaining that although he had been aided by Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, and Ross Terrill, associate professor of Government, in his efforts to gain access to the stacks, he has spent his time there doing research for his future novel about the experience of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Unlike Garner, what bothers Asakawa about Widener is not the atmosphere but the price paid by a visiting scholar to rent a stall. "There were good books on what happened during General...
...first ten chapters of his novel, already written, Asakawa begins to trace the histories of a Japanese-American family in an urban setting "who tried to escape being Japanese" and a family of farmers who remained tied to the land and tried to perpetuate ancient Japanese traditions. Asakawa said he will show that when the war started both families had "the same intention of sending money home...
...Asakawa's first novel and he says "what stays and what changes and what brought about that change" is a concern emerging from his own experience as a member of an isolated Japanese-American family in Yellow Springs, Ohio. "It was a very intellectual, predominently Jewish community and if you didn't know how to talk, you were pretty much caught dead," Asakawa said. Consequently, his parents, aware of their American "cultural lackings" and eager to assimilate, encouraged their children to perform un-Japanese customs such as holding conversations at the dinner table...
Both his parents are now apologetic about depriving him of his Japanese cultural background, Asakawa said, and his father, a businessman, encouraged a group of his Japanese-American friends to support his son while he writes. "There's an active interest among Asian-Americans to see something written," Asakawa said. "Tradition keeps your identity in a lot of ways. And in recent years it has become popular to encourage separate communities of ethnics to develop." But, he added, "a novel doesn't work just because you are an ethnic, unfortunately...
Because he is impatient and not sure how much longer he can keep the maps of turn-of-the-century San Francisco and Seattle inside his head, Asakawa wants to finish his novel soon. He said he is anxious to write about Brazil, where more Japanese are settled than anywhere else outside of Japan and where many old values are maintained. But after finishing his novel he says he will probably take a routine job for a while for the sake of his "sanity...