Satoro Tanaka and Mrs. Hitara Importance in David Masumotos and Pico Iyers Texts - Essay Example

Satoro Tanaka and Mrs. Hitara importance in David Masumoto’s and Pico Iyer’s and texts Abstract David Mas Masumoto is organic peach and grape farmer who works in an 80 acre farm outside Del Rey, south of Fresno. He holds a degree in sociology from U.C Berkley and a master’s degree in community development from U.C. Davis. In his Book Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American soil, Masumoto narrates how he learnt to do farm work like pruning vines, driving tractors and such. He visits his native land as a foreigner, and after his visit, he comes back to help his father with work in the farm before finally talking over.He manages to merge to past and the present, despites the pressure of time and change. In Harvest Son Masumoto mentions how his interaction with a buckwheat farmer Satoro Tanaka comes to affect him profoundly, and how he develops a fondness for the farmer. Pico Iyer is a British-born, American-raised eminent writer of Indian descent who decided to settle in Japan. His essay “Our Lady of Lawson” is about his experiences in Japan as a foreigner who refuses to succumb to the pressure to indulge in native Japanese food. He talks about a convenience store he frequently visited and the effect it had on him, especially the interaction between him and the convenience store manager, Mrs. Hirata. The two stories therefore share the common theme of two foreigners analyzing two different characters in Japan. Discussion In Harvest Son, Masumoto forms a close attachment to a local buckwheat farm and its farmer, Satoro Tanaka, while in Eat, Memory: Our Lady of Lawson, Pico Iyer experiences the same emotional attachment to a local convenience store, Lawson’s, and its proprietor, Mrs. Hirata. Several similar themes run through both of these narratives, starting from the similarities between both authors. First and most important, both Masumoto and Iyer can be considered as “wild” children, belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Masumoto is a Japanese-American while Iyer was born in England but has been raised in the United States of America. Masumoto has journeyed back to the land of his ancestors to reconnect with their native heritage while Iyer has chosen Japan as his country of settlement. They are considered, as Masumoto puts it, “strangers”. Iyer writes of the sense of alienation due to something as basic as his entrenched American eating habits and lack of love for Japanese food; “my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation -- me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish -- that I belong to an alien species” (Iyer, pg.1). His love of the convenience store further serves to solidify his characterization as an outsider who refuses to fit in, even though he insists that his love for Japan is real and on a deeper level. Having lived in the country for 12 years, he should still not be typecast as an alien, yet somehow, he still is. This he attributes mostly to his refusal to conform to Japanese food and his standing firmly by convenience-store meals. It can therefore be said of both of them that they are attempting to fit into their homeland’s culture, and understand and identify with their people. Masumoto identifies with Satoro Tanaka’s buckwheat farming while Iyer points out the specific attributes and values he considers “Japanese”: It's no easier to understand Japan in Western terms than it is to eat noodles with a knife and fork. Yet it has been evident to me for some time that the crush of the anonymous world lies out in the temple-filled streets; the heart of the familiarity, the communal sense of neighborhood, the simple kindness that brought me to Japan, lies in the convenience store.(Iyer, pg.2). The convenience store, and specifically, Mrs. Hitara, or Hitara-San, as Iyer refers to her in formal Japanese, comes to embody these values: And yet, in the 12 years I've lived on and off in my mock-California suburb, the one person who has come to embody for me all the care for detail and solicitude I love in Japan is, in fact, the lady at the cash register in Lawson. (Iyer, pg.1) For Masumoto, his visit to Japan does not feel as much of a “triumphant return as he expected it to. The sense of not-belonging to his heritage is overwhelming, a disappointment that is seemingly countered by the farmer Satoro. Masumoto’s love for cultivating the family farm is matched by Satoro’s farming skills. In the common, shared love of farming, Satoro finds a foothold in his Japanese heritage and a reason to feel one with his people, even if in only a single aspect. The clash and convergence of traditional and modern values is another theme that is explored in both stories. In Masumoto’s Harvest Son, he develops a love of the old, organic way of farming while in Japan, and upon his return, struggles to maintain this, going as far as keeping up a spirited fight to ensure the peaches from their vineyard are organic and the use of chemical fertilizers is kept to a minimum, favoring organic fertilizers instead. He recalls the sheer satisfaction of a hard day’s work on the farm in Japan that transforms a Berkeley’s sociology graduate into an impassioned farmer as having been experienced in Japan. A modern, educated man foregoes modern methods of food production in favor of traditional ones acquired from his native country from farmers such as Santoro. Iyer does the very opposite: in his quest to hold on to his Western eating habits, he finds solace in a store franchise imported from the West, and now extinct there, Lawson. The adoption and “Japanisation” of western foods indicates the borrowing of values from West to East, and how the two cultures have managed to synchronize. Lawson, and Mrs. Hitara, by default, aid and abet Iyer’s love for Western, or “modern” food, and refusal to conform to Japanese food, by conveniently supplying it. Mrs. Hitara even sends bags of fries to Iyer through his friends when he is unable to make it to the store. Iyer, however, also manages to find a foothold in this new culture, just like Masumoto, through an individual, Mrs. Hitara. Her demeanor remains steadfastly Japanese, even as she peddles American-style foods to earn a living. Her courteousness, compassion and hard-working nature are a constant reminder to Iyer of old-world Japanese values. Conclusion The constant thread that weaves both of these narratives together can be said to be the need of the two foreigners to feel a sense of belonging to the new land of Japan, and the way the two natives satisfy these foreigners’ needs. Satoro satisfies Masumoto’s need to feel attached by teaching him a love of the land, and gives Masumoto the thread of commonality with his ancestors that he so desperately seeks through his visit to Japan. Mrs. Hitara satisfies Iyer’s need to sense the existence of old-world Japanese values through the haze of modernity that seems to him to have overcome Japan. By exhibiting those values, Mrs. Hitara, and by extension, Mr. Hitara, give Iyer the feeling of cultural stability and attachment to Japan that he also longed for when he moved to Japan. This imbues him with a sense of hope for the culture that he so loves and appreciates, even though him, and the other Japanese characters that he points out as aping the west such as the teenagers, seem to have lost everything of their culture and heritage. In what can be termed a last-ditch effort to maintain a sense of cultural dignity and rootedness by both foreigners, the two native characters may be said to represent who both of the authors wish they were more like. The natives reinforce the notion that the writers can still achieve some cultural traits and eventually belong to their people. The parallels in the two stories are thus made obvious as both writers, though diametrically opposed as one is a food producer while the other is a food consumer; find the heritage they are seeking for through two different food providers. Works Cited Iyer, P. Our Lady of Lawson: Eat Memory. W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 2008. Print. Masumoto, M. D. Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil. W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1998. Print. Read More