“A Shared Passion”: Baseball as a Generational and Cultural Bridge in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter

Abstract

Monica Sone’s 1953 fictionalized autobiography, Nisei Daughter, in part dramatizes the intergenerational conflict between the Japanese Issei immigrants and their American Nisei children in prewar Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the text Sone catalogues in often comic and tender ways incidents in which cultural and national perspectives, and at times linguistic differences, became wedges between the Issei and the Nisei. However, in one particular incident she dramatizes in a simple way how the supposedly quintessential American game of baseball served as a bridge between two generations often at odds over their cultural identities and national loyalties. Chapter Four, “The Japanese Touch,” describes three annual events in the life of Seattle’s Japanese American community and the impact these have on generational relations. “Tenchosetsu,” or the Emperor’s birthday, for the Issei is a profoundly “sacred” event (67) and “joyous occasion” (69) marked with scrupulously observed ritual and formality, while for their Nisei children it is little more than a “wasteful [way] to spend a beautiful spring afternoon ... sit[ting] numbly through a ritual which never varied one word or gesture from year to year” (66). The New Year celebration, in turn, is “a mixture of pleasure and agony” for the Nisei (80), who delight in the culinary pleasures and simple family games enjoyed together, but who inevitably feel “tight as a drum and emotionally shaken from being too polite for too long” during the requisite visits to the homes of Japanese friends (86). Sandwiched in between is the undo-kai sports festival, an annual community picnic filled with often uniquely Japanese games aimed at fostering traditional Japanese values in the children or reinforcing such skills as recognizing kanji characters, while also offering the Issei “a rare occasion of complete relaxation” among Japanese friends (77). As the elders enjoy sipping sake and singing sentimental naniya bushi ballads, the younger generation gather in the bandstand, saxophones blaring “loud and brassy” tunes and patriotic American songs (77–78). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928591