Japan

Japan is both a destination and a failed answer to Jim Shimada’s sense of dislocation. After prison, he took his daughter Jenny to the land of his parents; later he rejected Japan as well and returned penniless. In Jim’s recollections, the move stands against an unrealized dream of raising Jenny in New York City as a citizen of the world, free of the ethnic divisions he associated with American life.

Japan and Jim’s imagined East

Jim had imagined New York City as a place where Jenny might become neither American nor Japanese but a citizen of the world. The idea was romantic, as he recognized, yet it carried a promise he did not find in California, which he associated with old disappointments. Born with his back to the Pacific, he had attached the journey eastward to an ideal of American belonging beyond ethnicity.

The family never made that journey to New York City. Instead, Jim took Jenny to Japan—a move the narrative describes as going east in the wrong direction. The contrast makes Japan more than a geographic destination: it is where Jim’s attempt to escape his past led, even as his own account suggests that he was acting out his anger rather than considering Jenny’s needs. He later acknowledged that, through her childhood, he had thought more about himself than about her.

The journey from San Francisco

Jim and Jenny flew on a new DC-8, traveling from San Francisco to Honolulu for passengers and fuel, then onward to Tokyo. Jim spent most of their savings on two one-way tickets. At the airport, the prospect of the journey seemed to exhaust both his money and his confidence: when the pair lost their seats together and were told they would have to sit apart, he suspected that others were taking advantage of his inexperience with air travel.

The dispute ended with Jim and Jenny reseated in First Class, but the upgrade did not make the episode a triumph in Jenny’s memory. She recalled Jim’s shrillness during the argument and his defiant manner. The small airport crisis thus gives the larger departure a personal scale: the costly journey began not with assurance, but with apprehension and a conflict that stayed with his daughter.

Rejection and return

The move to Japan followed Jim’s release from prison and his return to a postwar world that, in his recollection, had welcomed men who left the camps to serve in the war while treating resisters such as himself as reminders of an unwanted history. He was left raising Jenny alone. The account places his decision to take her to Japan within that sequence of disappointments, while also making clear that the move affected her life as well as his.

Jim eventually renounced Japan and moved back, penniless and defeated. His successive rejections—first of his country, then of the country of his parents—leave no stable home as the outcome of the journey. Japan’s significance lies in this reversal: it was an attempted departure from one painful history, but not a lasting refuge, and Jim’s later reflections connect the choice to the distance between his ideals and the life he gave his daughter.