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Social Stratification and Plantation Mentality: Reading Milton Murayama*

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Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30.2 (July 2004): 155-72. Social Stratification and Plantation Mentality: Reading Milton Murayama* Joan Chiung-huei Chang Soochow University Abstract Differing from the Marxists’ idea of “social class” which differentiates people on the basis of capital (money and land), social stratification divides people on the basis of other forms of symbolic capital as well, including family background, religious influence, lan- guage, ethnicity, gender, and educational achievement. The result of social stratification is not only differentiation of personalities but also the sharpening of inequality and discrimination. Japanese American writer Milton Murayama has planned a tetralogy for the Oyama saga, with three novels published so far. Each deals with a specific variation of the “plantation mentality,” understood as the mental attitude of people who, subject to a contract-like agreement, maintain a self-deprecatory attitude and toil to the point of self-sacrifice, as they are caught up in the intricacy of social stratification under the colonial surroundings in Hawaii. The present essay will discuss how the protagonists in the novels struggle to fight stratification and climb out of their “plantation mentality.” Keywords Japanese American literature, social stratification, Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, Plantation Boy I. Plantation Mentality Almost twenty years after the appearance of his first and by now classic novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, in 1975, Japanese American writer Milton Murayama publish- ed his second novel, Five Years on a Rock, in 1994, and four years afterwards his third, Plantation Boy. In Plantation Boy, the protagonist, Toshio Oyama, is employed by an * A Chinese version of this paper was delivered at “Class and American Literature” conference, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, on 27 December 2002. 30.2 (july 2004) exploitative architect, Charles Ames, for about fifteen years as a draftsman. Despite all his grudges, Toshio successfully keeps his temper in check until one day he realizes that his labor for three months on an extremely profitable project has gained him no bonus except a shoeshine. Toshio’s penting fury is pushed to the verge of explosion. After collecting earnings from this project, Charles asks Toshio to drive him from his house to the airport for a vacation. When Toshio arrives at Charles’s stylish residence, this is what he hears: “Oh, Chuck [Charles], your boy is here!” a young, skinny haole1 shrieks. “Can I get you a drink?” “No thanks.” Couple more young men come out. Mainland haoles not yet tanned. “So he’s the tiger of Malaya,” one of them says. “He doesn’t look ferocious, he’s more—” “Like a trade number!” they shriek, kicking up knees. I’m boiling. Ames has leis up to his ears. “You ready?” I snarl. The boys follow with the suitcases. I get madder and madder as I drive down the mountain. When I reach the bottom, I let go. “You and your goddamn mahus!2 You all the same! You think we nothing but houseboys! I going show you some day! I going get my license and I’ll show you who needs who more! No draftsman in town working harder! Shit! I work around the clock for three months! I ignore my family! I push myself so hard I almost crack up and all I get is one shoe shine! Without me you nothing! You one parasite! Just like the plantation bosses!” (131-32) Venting his emotion in pidgin, Toshio has finally let out his feelings. In fact, this episode is a convergence of his multi-layered anger at infantilization (calling him a boy), dehumanization (comparing him to a tiger and a trade number), degradation of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, homogenization of different Asian groups (mingling the Japanese with the Malayans), the stereotyping of Asians as servants, the mistreat- 1 Haole: Hawaiian slang, meaning “white person.” 2 Mahus: Hawaiian slang, indicating “homosexual or effeminate.” 156 Chang: Social Stratification and Plantation Mentality ment by different powerless groups of each other, and the exploitation of the Asian by the white. Toshio used to be a laborer toiling on the sugar cane plantation, but now he finds himself still trapped in another devastating system: bureaucratic stratification in the architect’s profession. This scene eventually becomes Toshio’s epiphany, spurring him to emancipate himself from the domination of the haoles and to lay aside his “plantation mentality.” Murayama has planned a tetralogy for the Oyama saga, with three novels publish- ed so far, each with a different narrator. Five Years on a Rock is narrated by Sawa Oyama, the issei3 mother; it begins with her decision to leave Japan for Hawaii as a picture bride4 and ends with her resolution to face a family debt of $5,500 and to relocate her family for a new beginning. In the beginning, Sawa thinks her stay in America will be only temporary and announces to her family that she will return to Japan with honor in five years. The metaphor in the title describes how her life in Hawaii is an affliction and indicates how Sawa makes a contract with herself which she keeps through numerous labors. All I Asking for Is My Body is narrated by Kiyoshi Oyama, a nisei5 and the third son of the Oyamas in Hawaii; it begins with Kiyoshi as a naïve and filial son at the age of nine and ends with Kiyoshi volunteering for World War II army service. Kiyoshi needs to free himself from the familial contract to gain the right to control his own body and establish his manhood. Plantation Boy is narrated by Toshio Oyama, the number one son and a high school dropout. It begins with Toshio’s resuming his education and ends with his winning an architect’s license after sixteen years of education through correspondence school. He finally declares his determination to leave Charles Ames’s corporation to establish his own contacts and identity as an architect. Toshio says at the very end of this book, “I oughta thank Chuck for kicking me out of my plantation mentality” (181; italics in the original). The life of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii during the second half of the nine- teenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was tantamount to a history of victimization under the sugar cane plantation stratification system. First, the Japanese laborers were treated inhumanely. The planters ordered and imported the Japanese into Hawaii as supplies, and then worked them “like machines.” Occupations were assigned according to race: “whites occupied the skilled and supervisory positions; Asian immi- grants were the unskilled field laborers” (Takaki 253). Then, based on a “divide and 3 First generation Japanese in America. 4 The foreign bride a male Japanese selected in America based on her photograph and other vital data. 5 Second generation Japanese in America. 157 30.2 (july 2004) control” strategy, the Japanese were pitted against the workers of other ethnicities. They were either promoted as model workers to set an example to other laborers, or their job security was constantly threatened by the immigration of more workers from other Asian countries such as Korea and the Philippines. Murayama’s three novels so far all deal with a specific variation of the “plantation mentality,” which the present essay defines as the mental attitude of people who, subject to a contract-like agreement, maintain a self-deprecatory attitude and toil to the point of self-sacrifice, as they are caught up in the intricacy of social stratification under the colonial surroundings in Hawaii. Donald Ellis thus defines “social stratifi- cation”: “Social stratification is the institutionalized social arrangement that determines who gets what and why, and rank and status are associated with these arrangements” (181). Daniel Rossides has commented on “social stratification”: “stratification ine- quality is the condition in which social positions are ranked in terms of importance, rewarded differentially, acquired by individuals (and thus their families), and trans- mitted over generations quite independently of biological or psychological attributes” (12). As Celia Heller observes, social stratification is “a system of structured inequality in the things that count in a given society, that is, both tangible and symbolic goods of the society” (A Reader 5).6 Differing from the Marxists’ idea of “social class” as something which differentiates people on the basis of capital (money and land), social stratification divides people on the basis of other forms of symbolic capital as well, including family background, religious influence, language, skin color, gender, age, sexual inclination, educational achievement, media control, and governmental manage- ment. The result of social stratification is not only differentiation of personalities but also the sharpening of inequality and discrimination. Murayama’s novels have portray- ed different institutions that legitimize social stratification among people. The present essay will discuss how the protagonists in the novels struggle to fight stratification and try to climb out of their “plantation mentality.” 6 As Harold R. Kerbo asserts: Social stratification means that inequality has been hardened or institutionalized, and there is a system of social relationships that determines who gets what, and why. When we say institutionalized we mean that a system of layered hierarchy has been established. People have come to expect that individuals and groups with certain positions will be able to demand more influence and respect and accumulate a greater share of goods and services. (12) In the discussion and analysis of social stratification, some sociologists prefer a different term, “structured inequality,” to indicate that the stratified system is not random but “follows a pattern, dis- plays relative constancy and stability” (Heller, Structured Social Inequality 4). 158 Chang: Social Stratification and Plantation Mentality II.
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