Impatience
-Born into it
Masako was born on November 27, 1956, a Tuesday. She was impatient from the start. By the time the midwife arrived, she had already emerged. “You didn’t need my help, did you?” the midwife reportedly said, a quip that was directed more toward Masako than to her mother, Yoshiko Sunaga.
As a matter of fact, Masako arrived about a month before the expected due date. It was a sunny day, so Yoshiko was outside their small house hanging laundry. Masako’s father, a traveling salesman, was on the road, so Yoshiko was alone. While draping wet clothes on the laundry pole Yoshiko felt a stirring in her abdomen and sat down on the engawa that ran along the side of the house. She almost immediately started going into labor and called for help. A neighbor who was passing by went to fetch the midwife. Yoshiko later told Masako that the delivery was painless. She just “popped out.” This circumstance would come to characterize Yoshiko, who, as it turned out, could become pregnant rather easily, giving birth to three more children much later, the last one when she was 46, all of them at home and with little if no assistance. In the meantime she would also undergo abortions, suffer several miscarriages, and survive one ectopic pregnancy.
She and Masako’s father lived in the town of Ota, Gunma Prefecture, in a house that used to be owned by the town’s biggest employer, Nakajima Hikoki, which would eventually morph into the automobile maker Subaru Motors. The house was originally used as a kind of family residence for Nakajima workers during the war. Masako never found out how it came into the possession of her father, but it did, a year after she was born according to a deed of sale she dug up years later. She suspects he was once a Nakajima employee himself. The house had three rooms and a kitchen in the back, as well as a toilet room and a nook where the round wooden bath tub was located. The house was one of four similar family units that shared a well located at the intersection of the alleys separating the houses. Later, plumbing was installed in the neighborhood, giving the houses access to city waterworks. Until she left the house eight years later, Masako would sleep in the same room as her parents. Her half-brothers would sleep in another room by themselves.
Nakajima’s claim to fame was the Zero fighter plane that dominated the skies during the Pacific War, at least in the beginning. Consequently, Ota became a frequent target of American B-29s near the end of the war. The first of a series of seven bombing raids happened on February 10, 1945, 11-and-a-half years before Masako was born, a fact she always found mysterious and weird. Growing up in 1960s Japan, she felt that the war, rarely discussed by older people she knew but ever-present in the background of their lives, was far away, but as she got older it loomed closer and closer, like a mirage coming into focus. At the time she was born the country was just starting to escape the devastation brought on by the war. The Japanese people almost willed into being the so-called postwar miracle economy and rushed into the widening middle class with arms open wide.
That miracle was something Masako observed rather then experienced, like a child outside a candy store looking through the window. For her father, it was very different as well, but not for the same reason. He was often on the road, but his relationship to Masako was not distant when he was home. He was very affectionate, even if he wasn’t always around for meals and other family activities. Part of the reason may have been his age. Yoshiko was 21 when Masako was born, her father 53. His first and only wife had died a year before, leaving him with two sons, the younger one born in 1948. Yoshiko was informally hired to care for the sons as a kind of live-in housekeeper, and soon she became pregnant, only three months after the death of her employer’s wife.
His name was Masao Akimoto, and Yoshiko didn’t really know much about him until she tried to report Masako’s birth at city hall. Masao was still away and Yoshiko had no means of contacting him so she went by herself. She had the idea in her head—or maybe it was just wishful thinking—that Masao had somehow registered her as his wife, since it was perfectly legal to do so without both spouses being physically present; or, she imagined, she could register them as husband-and-wife herself. The one thing she did know was that she needed to put both her name and Masako’s name in Masao’s family register, but when she asked about it at the window she was told that it was impossible, and not just because she was not married to Masao. When Yoshiko told the officer her address, he checked it and found Masao’s name. He told her that Masao didn’t have a family register because he was Korean.
That was the moment Yoshiko found out that Masako’s father was not Japanese. At the time she didn’t really ponder the possibility that Masao Akiyama was not his birth name because she didn’t know anything about Koreans or their situation in Japan. She left city hall and waited for him to come back from his business trip so that they could register Masako’s birth together, but he didn’t. Finally, she brought the birth report, still blank, back to city hall by herself again. For some reason, Yoshiko, or perhaps it was the officer, filled out Masako’s birth date as November 30 rather than November 27, probably because she was required to report the birth no more than 14 days after the fact, and that deadline had passed; but years later when Masako asked her about this she couldn’t quite remember. In any case, the officer simply did his job and entered Masako’s name in Yoshiko’s own single-person family register, thus making Masako officially illegitimate. She would be permanently stigmatized as hichakushutsushi—a child born out of wedlock—in the eyes of the authorities and, by extension, society. In a sense, it was a blessing in disguise, since at the time nationality in Japan was determined by paternity. Had she been registered as Masao’s offspring, Masako would not have been Japanese, but rather Korean, and thus for all intents and purposes stateless.
Yoshiko herself was incapable of making such a leap in logic because she always had other, more pressing things to think about, like surviving to the next day. It was the story of her life.