COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS NO. 2.3 JUL ‘13
QUARTERLY OF TRAVELOGY ISSN 2278-9650
kung fu. I was also asked about Bruce Lee and whether Japan was different from Hong Kong, or whether I speak Chinese. Explaining about my country to the people who asked me these questions, I felt that Japan, which had been uncomfortably powerful in my mind, began to shrink until it was no more than a small colony of China. Indeed, geographically and historically speaking, the smallness of Japan actually makes one wonder why it did not become so. It is interesting how unsettled I became at the change of racial and cultural identity imposed on me by other people. For the first time in my life abroad, I wished I could have run into a package tour of Japanese tourists (which my snobbishness had always previously prevented me from associating with) just to confirm what I was. My new murungu or “Chinese” identity (I really should have welcomed this Chinese identity since I had always wished to be categorized as an Asian) deprived me of my previous “uncomfortable” Japanese identity, which I had thought firm enough to stand upon wherever I went. I finally came to almost physically feel this supposedly enabling, yet actually extremely unsettling notion that there is no universality in the ideas of nation or race – which are all “imagined,” (as Benedict Anderson would say) yet – contradictory as it seems – I still cannot escape from other people’s imaginings.
Lessing, Banket and Cowra Sitting in the rattling local bus to Banket, the farming community which Lessing imbued with such mysterious significance, I had great anxiety about asking the white people in Banket about Lessing, for she had always been a misfit there. Someone assured me that the people up there would not mind since they must have previously had visitors with similar inquiries. Indeed, I myself knew a Japanese scholar who had asked about Lessing there (at first pretending to be a tobacco dealer) when this country was still Southern Rhodesia and Lessing was a “prohibited immigrant.” He managed to talk to a lady who used to play with Lessing in her childhood, yet he was not reported to the police and came back to Japan safe and sound! So, it must be alright. But how could I go around just knocking on doors and asking people about her?
A Japanese Glimpse of Zimbabwe (1993)| AKIKO MIZOGUCHI | PG. 83 FIRST PUBLISHED IN WWW.coldnoon.com