A sincere apology, if overdue. A real offense, although unintended. There was
a time when I said something that injured the feelings of a certain group of
people that happened to be at the scene. I was wrong, and I am deeply sorry.
Something happened long ago, and I’ve been ashamed about
it ever since. I said something out loud in a voice full of venom, something
that could be understood in two different ways. One way was offensive to Jews,
although my working-class Jewish friends used the term in the same manner. The
other way has always been offensive to the Japanese, all of them. A family,
unbeknownst to me, was close by when I said it. They heard what I said, and
they were mortified and embarrassed.
What I said was, “she’s such a fucking JAP!” The family
were Japanese. It was one of those times when the facts speak for themselves,
even though the facts lie. Please allow me to explain.
I spell the term “JAP” in the above quote advisedly. There
was a phenomenon in the New York Jewish community at the time that was known as
“the Jewish-American Princess.” I was working at the time in a store selling
records and tapes, in the Borough of Queens in New York City. The year was
1974. It was getting late on a weeknight, and there were no customers at the
time. Three or four of us employees, all in our early twenties, were standing
around the front of the store waiting for something to do. The manager was
behind the counter reading a newspaper. One of us was Jewish, in fact, and we
all knew many young Jews. The manager, whom we all liked and respected, was
Jewish. We certainly did not find anything objectionable about Jews, especially
Jewish young women. We were discussing one such young woman at the time.
These girls came from very prosperous families, and they
were often very beautiful. Their families expected them to marry a Jewish boy
from a prosperous family, one who had spectacular earnings potential. The girls
were fine with this plan. They would not consider even going out with any young
man who was not all of these things: 1) Jewish; 2) from a rich family; and 3)
demonstrably on his way to a high-income career (i.e., currently attending an
Ivy League law school). They could be very rough in their dealings with boys
who did not make the cut, or girls who came from less advantaged backgrounds,
Jewish or not. Many could be friendly about it; many could not. Most of them
were disagreeable. We called them JAPS. That was the only way that we ever used
the word. One such girl was the topic of conversation just as the family
cleared the door to the store. We all knew her. She had recently rudely turned
down one of us who had asked her for a date. At that moment, I made my comment.
I will admit that the boys in my milieu in Queens at the
time were a pretty rough bunch, borderline hooligans actually. Racial prejudice
was common, but it was directed at groups that were part of the population of northern
Queens. We hardly saw any Asians, and certainly no Japanese people, until the
mid-1970s. Only a few Chinese, and a sprinkling of Filipinos. There had been no
Japanese around yet to express an opinion about. (The Filipinos were an odd
case study. There was a lot of discrimination and hostility against the blacks
and Puerto Ricans, even though they had been born in New York and were American
citizens. The Flips, however, were treated like family, even though they had
probably been born overseas and had strong accents. Discrimination can be a
strange thing.)
None of this makes me any less responsible for my hurtful
remark. I have thought about that night many times over the decades, and my
face always flushes red with the memory of it. Later on, I realized that the
remark, even directed against a conceited Jewish girl who was not very nice,
was wrong. If a family of Jews had heard me say something in the same tone of
voice about anything Jewish, they would have felt just as bad as the Japanese
family had felt.
In the law there is a concept called, “transferred
intent.” Let’s say that I am very angry at person A, and I aim my pistol at him.
I fire the pistol, fully intending to kill person A, but the shot misses him,
takes a ricochet, and hits person B, killing him. I am guilty of murdering
person B. I don’t even know person B, but the intent necessary for murder is
transferred from person A to person B by the force of the bullet. It’s the same with my awful comment. The
intent was bad enough directed against a Jewish girl; I am just as guilty if
the actual victim was the unintended Japanese family. That makes the incident
more than an unintended consequence. It must be viewed as an actual offense.
It does seem excessive for me to be worrying about this
incident forty-five years after it took place. It’s not like this is the only
blemish on an otherwise spotless record of love for my fellow man. This one
bothers me in a way that is unique in my experience, and there are several
reasons for that.
One is the accidental nature of it. The store was near
the end of the IRT’s number 7 line, the Flushing train. There were many nice
apartment buildings close by, and also many nice little parks. It was close to
transportation and shopping. The area had recently been chosen by big Japanese
corporations as a good neighborhood to place executives and their families for
a year or so. It suddenly became common to see young Japanese moms with their
babies in the parks, often several at a time. Ten years earlier, even five
years earlier, you would never see a Japanese person there, much less a family.
Flushing had recently become the first home
to a small Japanese community, the first one that I was aware of in all of
Queens. A Japanese restaurant had just opened up the block.
Another reason was that there was nothing to be done
about it at the time. There was no way to explain that it had all been a
misunderstanding. Even if the entire family spoke perfect English, there is no
way to explain the cultural context of such a thing right there, on the spot. I
could only wait it out, soaked in shame like someone who had just fallen into
an ocean of the stuff.
The biggest reason that I feel the shame of it so
strongly is because I had already been, for many years, a big fan of Japanese
art and culture. Although I had never actually met a Japanese person, I had
discovered Japanese art at the many fine museums in New York, and Japanese
cinema at a small theater on 47th Street close to Broadway that was
dedicated to Japanese movies of all kinds. The movies especially appealed to
me. I was a big movie fan already. French New Wave, Italian Neorealists, Ingmar
Bergman, New York offered many opportunities to see serious movies of all kinds.
When I discovered that theater, by walking past, Japanese cinema was all new to
me, and I loved everything. Not just the sword flicks, but also movies by Ozu,
Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, and others. Tokyo Story; The Burmese Harp;
Harakiri; Kwaidan; and yes, Seven Samurai and everything else by Kurosawa, including
the early contemporary material, I loved it all. I was there every week for
years, even if the show that week was low-brow material like Samurai Sheriff or
a low-budget gangster movie. And then, all of a sudden, my first actual
interaction with a Japanese family went spectacularly wrong! My humiliation was
magnified one thousand-fold. Even now, at the age of seventy-one, I can hardly
stand the memory of it.
I’ve never lost my interest in Japanese culture, and I’ve
never forgiven myself for making that wayward remark at exactly the wrong time.
I can still see the looks on their faces, mom and dad, a boy about ten, and a
girl about eight. I have wished for the chance to apologize, to put my forehead
on the floor and beg, please forgive a poor fool! I was wrong, it was terrible,
but making amends is hard to arrange in the real world. It is also hard to judge
what course of action is best after such things have happened and have had a
chance to settle down. It might be better just to shut up about it.
No, I’ll launch this apology off into the cosmos. I don’t
feel any better for having written this, but at least it acknowledges the
fault.
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