by YUMI WILSON-SPATTA

They were dressed as everything from Catholic schoolgirls and Japanese cartoon characters, to whores, angelic virgins and demonesses, teetering on three-inch stilettos under the golden haze of Roppongi’s streetlights.

Neon signs – yellow, purple and pink – flashed around them, as impeccably pressed suits bespoke to pimple-faced boys and overweight tourists from brightly lit archways. Some of these suited men were Japanese; they were the club owners, the pimps, or even Yakuza soldiers.

But the other men, laughing and gesturing wildly with their arms, looked out of place in the Japan I could remember from my childhood. Their skin was dark, even darker than mine. Their hair was curly, even curlier than mine. And their lips were full, even fuller than mine. Their eyes, brown and dreamy, reminded me of my father’s eyes.

A few steps ahead, I noticed an attractive man with a smooth, round face and a close Afro cut.

“What are you folks doing tonight?” the man said playfully, his lithe body sidling toward mine. I slowed down; my eyes darting toward the pavement.

Was anyone watching me? Could they tell what I was thinking? My cheeks flushed. The man shifted toward me and held out a flyer. I couldn’t help but grab it. I was drawn toward this man, this stranger, not only because he reminded me of my father, who had spent time in Tokyo, but, I convinced myself, because I was a journalist, traveling in Japan in the fall of 2001 to learn about a culture that was both familiar and foreign to me.

On a three-month Fulbright grant, I was grasping at anything, any bit of information or social detritus that would help me understand my life and all that I didn’t know about my mother’s past.

I wanted to learn how my mother, a modest Japanese woman from Hokkaido, met my father, a young, brash Army soldier, in Tokyo. I wanted to know what her life was like during and after World War II.

She was 10 when Hirohito surrendered. Had she lived in fear as U.S. bombs fell over her home in Hokkaido? Had she felt relief or disappointment at the end of the war? Did it trouble her to marry a man who had once been deemed the enemy? Did it embarrass her to marry a black man, to have his three mop-headed children?

As a child, I had the curliest hair and the darkest skin of all three children in the Wilson family. With my chocolate-pebbled eyes, long egg-shaped face, flattened nose, and flaring round nostrils, I looked most like my father – a fact I was not proud of as a child.

My father, a skinny man, was not the most handsome of fellows, but he could make anyone, even a stranger, laugh with his self-effacing jokes. My mother never seemed as impressed. She didn’t laugh at his jokes and instead hurled racial slurs at him in Japanese, calling him something along the lines of “Columbo” or “Koromboh.” I had no idea what it meant, but I laughed just the same.

As I became more aware of my mother’s deep-seated irritation with my father, I began to wonder whether she had ever loved him – and whether she ever loved me. After all, I looked most like my father.
Just ahead of us were two women walking clumsily in heels. I started to giggle, imagining them crashing to the ground, stretching their perfectly painted nails out to protect their flawless skin. Their heavily-made faces reminded me of my mother.

In her heyday, her painted beauty had turned the heads of many hot-blooded men, my father said, recounting the times he bought her just about anything to get her attention. “She was so darn pretty,” he often said. “I was just so lucky she picked me!”

Unaware of my gaze, the two women skipped up to a dark-skinned man whose southern accent hinted he was from the States. Their arms encircled him. The man returned their affection, plunking his rough hands around their hipless bottoms.

The girls broke into high-pitched laughter. Their arms tightened around the man’s waist. His hands took hold of them, pulled them closer.

I felt a sudden urge to run up to the trio, to wiggle my body deep into the circle, to look up into their faces; to touch them.

But I turned away.

(Note: This is an abbreviated version of Chapter 1 of the tentatively titled memoir Black Nisei.)