“I spent my entire life learning what it means to be Japanese”

Charles Shirō Inouye is a professor at Tufts University, where he has taught Japanese literature and visual culture for more than three decades. 

Before Tufts, Inouye was a third-generation Japanese American growing up in central rural Utah. His parents were survivors of the World War II U.S.-Japanese internment camps. He was sent to Japan as a missionary at the age of 19. These experiences formed his interest in human spirituality, which he has written about in his published books, like “Zion Earth Zen Sky.”

For the fourth and final feature of the Q&A series celebrating the AAPI Heritage Month, LexObserver spoke with Charles Inouye about his identity as a Japanese American, the unusual setting of growing up in Utah,  his connection with Japan, and how he views racism and diversity through the lens of philosophy and literature. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LexObserver: Could you introduce yourself and tell us how you identify with the AAPI community?

Charles Inouye: I was born in Utah. My father’s family was from the Bay Area, and my mother’s family was from Washington State. And when the war broke out, they were sent to the same Japanese internment camp in Wyoming. They met and got married at a place called Heart Mountain. And when the war was over, they left and settled in Utah. They wanted to go somewhere where there weren’t very many people.

I grew up in this farmhouse that was a mile away from our nearest neighbor. Two miles further down the road was a town of 200 people, a very small Latter-day Saint community in Utah. Most of the people in the camp went back to the West Coast, but my parents decided to stick it out.

So I grew up in a kind of unusual setting. My father became a farmer, but he was educated. He was one of the first Japanese Americans to go to Stanford. He had a business before the war, but he lost that business when the evacuation happened. He ended up in Utah and he decided just to stay there and farm. 

I read a lot when I was young. I always wanted to actually be a farmer, and I planned to take over the family farm. But when I got to college and I started reading and writing papers, I discovered that I loved that more than farming. And so I told my father that I would rather do that. And he was good enough to let me go. I was his last chance. I’m the youngest of six. None of my siblings were really interested in farming. So that’s how I ended up being a professor.

LexObserver: What was it like to grow up in a small town in central Utah with few Asians?

Charles Inouye: We were the only Japanese family. My parents were Buddhist, and my grandparents were Buddhist. They wanted us to have some kind of spiritual training, but the only real option was to go to the local Mormon church. There was a temple in Salt Lake, but it was 2 hours away.

So we ended up going there. My parents were a little bit concerned about losing our identity as Japanese if we became too involved with this community. But it turned out that by becoming LDS [Latter-day Saints] me and my siblings actually deepened our connection with Japan because we all became missionaries. We were all sent to Japan. We all learned Japanese, which is very unusual. Most third-generation Japanese, like us, don’t speak Japanese at all, but we all do. 

I didn’t feel any kind of racism from my neighbors, which is really unusual. And that might have been because —I don’t know if you know much about Mormons —but they were persecuted. They organized in New York state, and they moved to Ohio and then to Illinois and Denver, Missouri, but they were finally driven out actually by mobs.

And they did what my family did. They escaped to a place where there weren’t very many people to live alone. And so that background might have made them more sympathetic to what it felt like to be discriminated against.

LexObserver: You said it’s very unusual for a third-generation Japanese American like you to study Japanese and go to Japan to study its culture. What does that journey mean to you?

Charles Inouye: Until I actually went to Japan, I had a very complicated attitude about my identity as an Asian American, because if you’re a minority, growing up, you look around and all the models of good people, talented people, beautiful people are not like you. So you grow up in this kind of warped way.

Fortunately, for me, I got sent to Japan on my mission at the age of 19. I recall their plane landed at Haneda Airport, and I had a couple of hours to make the second flight to Sapporo, Hokkaido. As I was waiting in the airport, I was up on the mezzanine level looking down at this white marble floor. And across this floor, there were these young Japanese women pulling their suitcases across this space. I watched these women dressed in these fitted suits, pulling their luggage across the space. And they just struck me as being really beautiful. It surprised me, really shocked me even.

And then on the plane to Hokkaido, I tried to think about why I would be surprised that Japanese women are beautiful. And I came up with two possible answers. One is that all the women in my life who were Japanese were my relatives: my mother, my sister, my aunts, and my grandmother. Of course, I didn’t think about them as beautiful in that way.

The other possibility was that I had grown up in a society where I had developed this negative regard for myself. You could say that people made me feel this way, but I don’t think that was intentional at all. It’s just the way that the minority culture is. If you’re from a minority culture within a majority, you just grow up thinking that all people in television shows, movies, and all people on the radio are different from you. So you discount your value as a person. But I was fortunate enough to go to Japan at that age and discover that all these people look like me. And they were intelligent, they were smart, they were all the things that I wanted to be.

So it made a huge difference. Had I not gone to Japan and seen for myself what Japan is like, I don’t think I would have been very happy as an American. But because I discovered Japan, I could come to America, and I could tell myself this is how it’s done in America. I don’t really care for it, but at least I know that in another part of the world, things are done differently.

And then I decided to become a professor of Japanese literature. I spent my entire life learning what it means to be Japanese and teaching people what it means to be Japanese.

LexObserver: In recent years, there have been increasing anti-Asian hate crimes, particularly during the pandemic. What’s your thought or experience on that?

Charles Inouye: I think that racism is a kind of symptom of ignorance. People who, for whatever reason, lack the sophistication or the knowledge or the understanding to see the complexities. For example, there are a lot of anti-Chinese feelings.

Rep. Seth Moulton, one of MA’s representatives in Washington, put a lot of pressure on top to get rid of our Confucius Institute at Tufts. His argument was that it was infiltration by the Chinese government and damaging to Tufts because it was indoctrinating people to like China, which in his mind meant to not like the United States. I thought his arguments were really weak and based on very little information. 

But again, I think those people are arguing from a position of ignorance and there’s a better way to proceed. My job is to give people enough cultural knowledge that they understand other people well enough to cooperate with them. We’ve had to really work hard to try to make good on our promise as an intellectual community, how to understand cultural differences and to negotiate across cultures. That’s super important.

LexObserver: What is your thought on being a part of this department that connects and helps people understand different cultures?

Charles Inouye: If you go online and you type in diversity and then click on an image, you’ll see people have made these composite images where you get all these different kinds of people — there’s a Chinese person, there’s an Indian person, there’s a European person. 

They’re all smiling. The fact that they’re smiling means that whoever put those images together is treating diversity as an agenda item, that they’re trying to make the world more diverse. And the reason why that’s a weird way to do it is because diversity is not an agenda item, right? Diversity is a reality, and it doesn’t make us happy. If you were to get my picture of diversity, it would be somebody happy there and somebody unhappy there. Because when we encounter cultural diversity or any kind of diversity, that means we are often confronted by values that are different.

So then there is a question of how you react to that truth of different values. America has come a long way and the diversity agenda has been in place for decades. Now people on the right see the point that we are different, but the way they deal with differences is to make those differences impossible to understand, impossible to negotiate, and impossible to bridge. That’s kind of our moment right now.

My most recent book I’m just finishing up now is an attempt to ask the question: if diversity is our reality, if everybody really is different, which is the postmodern view of things, then how does anything get done? What’s the logic of cooperation? 

I think there’s actually one answer to that question. And the answer is, regardless of our differences, there’s one thing that we all share in common: our need to take things from the world. We need to have food, we need to have shelter. So our taking things from the world is what we have in common. And the problem with this answer is that we have a very negative view of things in general. On one hand, we have this very obvious dependence on things. On the other hand, we disregard things. So the things that we depend on have low status. And that’s totally screwed up.

That’s what animism was trying to fix. Animism says that things are not silent, dead, and inert. Things have a life, things have a power, things have a vibrancy. We understand in a new way, what the status of things is and include ourselves as things among other things. There are different ways to refer to it right now. In the academy, they say the new materialism or the post-modernism or the post-humanist or the neo-analyst. That’s where we are now. That’s where things are going. Actually. That’s the cutting edge of humanistic studies today.

LexObserver: What do you want the Lexington community to take away from this month? 

Charles Inouye: I would like people to be curious about Asian culture, and Asian history.  Intellectual curiosity cures most of our problems, right? What causes our problems is the lack of interest and lack of caring.