College of Arts and Sciences
Second Trimester (2011-2012)
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in Literary Criticism
“Tanabata’s Wife” by Sinai Hamada
Submitted to: Mr. Azlison G. Bawang
Submitted by: Ms. Heidi Lyn P. Agwaking
Date of Submission: December 19, 2011
I. INTRODUCTION
Japan’s interest toward the Philippines started in the sixteenth century. At that time, the Tokugawa Shogunate prohibited the Japanese from leaving the country. Harada Magoshiro, a Japanese trader who looked towards the Philippines as a potential territory for expansion, suggested to Toyotomi Hideyoshi , the Shogun, that it should be conquered. At that time, this suggestion was set aside. However, it is said that about 3,000 to 4, 000 Japanese people settled in the Philippines during the Spanish regime. When the Americans acquired the Philippines in 1998, there were already sizeable Japanese populations. One American, Major L.W.V. Kennon, had investigated the efficiency of Japanese laborers by studying Japanese immigrant plantation workers in Hawaii and California. He then proposed to the Philippine Commission who opposed this proposal at first, but Kennon was persuasive and the Commission agreed. Kennon then contacted a Japanese agent to recruit laborers, most of who came from Okinawa prefecture. Kennon also hired Japanese workers in Manila and in the provinces to work for the zigzag Benguet Road connecting the mountain resort of Baguio to lowland towns. This was subsequently known also als o called “Kennon Road.” The planning to construct the Benguet road started in early 1900’s. The first 125 workers arrived in the Philippines on October 19, 1903, and were followed by waves of Japanese laborers. During the peak time of the work on the Benguet Road, Kennon hired about 1,500 Japanese laborers (known as “Benguet immigrants”), so that the total number of Japanese laborers was more than 2, 500. However, more than 700 Japanese laborers died before the road was finished in 1905 because of epidemic diseases like malaria and dysentery, and accidents in the construction. In the years after 1905, Japanese workers who migrated to the area around Baguio to look for better opportunities turned to farming, settling mostly in La Trinidad. Many Japanese brought the technique of highland agriculture to cultivate
vegetables, such as tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers from Japan. Most immigrants were men, and many of them intermarried into Filipina women, and assimilated into the Philippine societies. As a result, before the World War II, there were already large numbers of Japanese immigrants in the Philippines, and they increased until 1941, when they numbered about 30, 000. In Manila, and in other towns and villages, they owned small businesses, such as halo-halo parlor, sari-sari stores, shoe repair shops, barber shops, etc.; they also worked as gardeners or travelling salesmen. Large numbers of Japanese immigrants worked as planters for abaca plantations in Davao, Mindanao. In relation to this, I am going to do cloze reading, biographical or historical reading, psychological reading, post structural reading and a little bit of archetypal reading to the most famous work of Sinai Hamada which is entitled “ Tanabata’s Wife”. When I first read this story, some things bothered me. I would like to know why the Japanese husband was portrayed that way. I want to know why they were not married by any kind of ceremony. I want to know why Tanabata hated the man who seduced his wife but not his wife. I want to know why the Bontocs were called Busol when in fact, busol or busor means there is a tribal war. II. LITERARY CRITICISM APPROACHES a. BIOGRAPHICAL THEORY
Sinai (Yoshinai) C. Hamada is a Baguio-born Japanese-Filipino mestizo who writes poetry, essays, feature articles and short stories but is most notable as a short story writer. He is the founding editor of the oldest running local newspaper in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), the Baguio Midland Courier. He is the author of "Tanabata's Wife," described by National Artist for Literature Francisco Arcellana, as the finest Filipino love story ever written. And he is the first lawyer in Baguio City.
Sinai was born on February 1912. He was born to Ryukichi Hamada, a Japanese mechanical foreman of Herald Lumber Company, Baguio City, and who died in an accident while Sinai was only an infant; and Josefa Carino, an native Ibaloi woman who belonged to the prominent Carino family of Benguet, although by marriage to a foreigner she risked certain disinheritance (Zenaida Hamada-Pawid, interview, Baguio, 6 March 2002). His mother remarried to Teruji Okubo, also a Japanese national who became a prominent builder in Benguet, as well. His brother is Oseo Hamada, who managed the Baguio Printing and Publishing Company; while his half-sister is Cecile Afable, also a famous journalist in Baguio City. Sinai married Geralda Macli-ing of Bontoc, Mountain Province; who is a teacher in Mainit, Bontoc during the 1930’s. Their children are Stephen Hamada and Zenaida Hamada-Pawid. Hamada-Pawid. According to Sinai, although his mother married another Japanese national, he felt that he belonged more to the Ibaloi rather than the Japanese community which flourished in Baguio at that time. For one and he could not speak Japanese. Also, he was closer to his Ibaloi relations. In fact his Japanese father and step-father were the ones who adjusted to the Ibaloi and Iluko languages and to the culture of his mother (Villarba-Torres 28-29). Just like Tanabata, who adjusted to his new environment. .
In the context of Philippine literary history, Hamada belongs to the third period of
Philippine literature in English, i.e., "The Period of Adaptation and Experimentation" (1925-35). Sinai whose father hailed from Kagoshima and whose mother was a native of Baguio, had attended public schools before the war and subsequently studied law at the prestigious University of the Philippines in Manila. In 1947, he became the founding editor of the Baguio Midland Courier newspaper. Although in conversations with this author in the late 1980s Hamada mentioned experiences with discrimination by Filipinos in Manila, he never considered changing
his surname just like what others did, or leaving the Philippines. He was equally proud of his Japanese and Igorot heritage. In most of his stories and poems, Hamada operates on cross-cultural currents. The literature of Hamada, himself a man of a different cultural background lends itself as significant material for this approach.
1930’s. He chose to remain in the province, He produced He produced much of his notable work in 1930’s. close to his roots. The limelight, then as now, was in the capital. He held public posts during the terms of Presidents Ramon Magsaysay and Diosdado Macapagal as chair of the Mountain Province Development Authority (MPDA). Sinai died in September 1991 in Baguio of a heart ailment at the age of 77. At the time of his death and he was finishing his long-delayed project and his autobiographical novel titled O Benguet Land . Sinai's short stories give us a glimpse of old Baguio.
Hamada' s Tanabata' s Wife (1932) is the most widely anthologized Filipino work in English. This story brings to life the historic construction of Kennon Road in 1903, linking Baguio to the lowlands. This also marked the arrival of the Japanese and other foreigners to Baguio and at first to help in the road project and later to become permanent settlers in the city. With regard to the Japanese presence in Benguet, Hamada notes the existence of "a different kind of interaction." Seemingly, the natives took easily to cordial relations with the Japanese. Hamada credits thisto the fact the Japanese were also Orientals, and for the Ibaloi women in particular, "their native culture seems to be akin to the Japanese culture." In both cultures, the women carry their children on their back with a blanket strap. The Ibaloi women also have "an acknowledged inferiority to the men.” According to Hamada, "Tanabata's Wife" is factual,
except for the surprise ending. The native woman was patterned after Maria Fasang, a native of Sabangan, Mountain Province. Her Japanese husband, a truck gardener in Kisad Valley was cousin to Hamada's father. As the real story goes, Maria Fas-ang was seduced by a Bontoc native who abandoned her in the ili (village) after they ran off together. Fas-ang does not return. They had a daughter and not a son as told by the story. Fas-ang sends her child to live with her father who by then was already married to a Japanese picture bride. According to Hamada the story, aside from being a love story, is "a contrived portrayal of any Japa nese man's love for children”.
Perhaps this is where the rising tension in using Western literary conventions to describe indigenous themes is felt. Possibly, Hamada was conscious of the Western paradigm of unity and wholeness. The story has a defined climax (the growing despondency of Tanabata), that requires a denouement (the hesitance of mother and child to enter the gate) and leads to a conclusion (Tanabata' s lighting of the long unused lamp).
Of course, one must wonder why it is the foreigner, the stranger, the remote other who becomes the paragon. In terms of artistic genesis, the answer must lie in the fact that Sinai Hamada’ Hamada’s father was Japanese. And even though Sinai was a month-old infant when his father died, the Japanese community in Benguet kept in touch (Hamada-Pawid, interview). In fact, No doubt, Sinai must have felt like a foreigner, even in the land of his Ibaloi ancestors. But true to his creative gifts, he turned this familiarity with the foreigner into a bridge of understanding, leading to the realization that there really is no foreigner, there really is no other. There is only the human being which is what we all are.
Sinai’s fictions are Cordilleran folktales and community events Highly influential to Sinai’s narrated by his mother and his grandmother. Hamada displayed great talent as a short-story
writer and poet, frequently drawing upon childhood memories of Baguio's Filipino-Japanese community. Hamada’s Hamada ’s aim aim or obsession in writing his works, consciously or unconsciously, was to prove that the Cordilleran natives, far from being tradition-bound, was entirely human, human as any other, his humanity shining through exactly at the point where tradition has been broken.
The choice of names in this story is interesting. Tanabata is the Japanese festival celebrating love held in the seventh month of the lunar calendar. According to the Tanabata myth, two stars, Cowherd (Altin) and Weaver (Vega) were lovers but were separated by the Milky Way. However, they were able to meet once a year, on July 7, if it did not rain. The Tanabata festival is the Japanese counterpart of Valentine's Day. The festival begins at around seven in the evening and lasts until midnight. The highlight of the festival is the display of fireworks to light up the path of the two young lovers, sama
Orihine-sama
(female star) and
Orihito-
(male star). Hamada, however, admits that he was unaware of this when he picked the
name Tanabata.
b. FORMALISTIC APPROACH (CLOZE READING)
“Tanabata’s Wife” is the story of Fas-ang, the native Bontoc woman in the story finds work in the vegetable garden garden of a Japanese named Tanabata. Bontoc is the center of another Cordillera province called Mountain Province. Tanabata is later attracted to Fas-ang' s youth and industrious nature. He woos the young maiden and they are wed “without ceremony and without the law”. law”. When Fas-ang bears a son, Tanabata is extremely pleased. But Fas-ang becomes drawn to the cinema where she meets a young man from her ili (village) who convinces her to leave her Japanese husband. The dejected Japanese leaves his garden to rot. When Fas-ang
hears of this (by now her Bontoc lover had left her), she decides to return and mother and child are reunited with Tanabata.
This is the linear type of plot where the story starts at the beginning, then goes to the middle of the story and then to its ending. It has a definite start and a closure to the story, a definite timeline.
The story was set in the La Trinidad Valley during the 1930s. This was the time when most of the land area in the Trinidad Valley was lined with rows and rows of vegetables, like cabbages. The setting gives us a glimpse of the old Trinidad Valley and of the old Baguio. It gives us a picture of how difficult it was to travel before, most especially with long distances. The setting painted a picture of how industrious, hard working and how patient people in this time were.
The story is in the third person point of view.
There were only a few major characters in the story. The direct method of characterization was used to characterize the story’s characters. The name Fas-ang means mean s “to cross over a boundary.” Literally, Fas-ang crosses two boundaries in the story. First, from her native Bontoc, through the Mountain Trail to Trinidad Valley and to Baguio, her destination. Her plan is to work as a road builder, as numerous roads are being built in the city. But she lands a job in Kisad Valley, in Tanabata's vegetable patch. This second boundary is now a boundary of cultures. Ironically, Fas-ang in the story was unable to cross the cultural boundaries, although her fingers grew adept at using chopsticks, her feet was now used to wearing wooden clogs and her taste buds are now used to soy sauce, she still could not get through the more serious facets of
Japanese culture such as the language (which her husband used when he had Japanese guests), and the practice of staying indoors after giving birth. The cinema became her flanerie or idealized space (Wilson 90), where she could be herself completely as she mingled with her village mates and the epitome of her native culture. Critic Epifanio San Juan and Jr. points to the binary opposition between the two cultures and the material conditions of society. Tanabata represents the patriarchal order, while Fas-ang is the native woman and effective entrepreneur in a capitalist environment. Further, Fas-ang becomes addicted to the cinema which is the symbol of capitalism in the city (San Juan and Jr. in Villarba-Torres 102). This observation notwithstanding and the conscious equal distribution of labor between two individuals of different cultural backgrounds is likewise evident. Work in the garden the household is shared by the couple. Tanabata attempts to understand Fas-ang. He takes in her cousin from Bontoc and buys him new clothes. He allows his wife to frequent the movie house without knowing what drew her to it. In other words, he was able to fas-ang or cross over to his wife’s culture. Tanabata’s kind of love is not only sacred and profane but it is also also as a charity. According to Arcellana (1975), Tanabata’s love is so pure that is actually becomes charity.
Fas-ang’s Fas-ang’s busol lover is a restless and mobile hunter who just can’t stay put, literally or emotionally. He cannot provide the moral basis for a truly humane existence, a civilized society. As a matter of fact, neither can the wayward ways of the modern industrialized west, fickle as Hollywood, illusory as the movies which had led Tanabata’s wife astray.
Only foreshadowing was used in the story. The true lover husbands the earth, prods it to yield its bounty just like what Tanabata does when he plants. This bonding with the earth
prepares us for his elemental bonding with Fas-ang. Thus, when Fas-ang finally returns home with their child, it is as if the living essence of the long-abandoned earth, too, had returned.
The conflict in the story is external. The conflicts are man vs. man, which is seen between the husband and the lover; and it has man vs. society as seen with the cross-cultural clashes. The cross-cultural clashes started when Tanabata gave a baptismal party and Fas-ang was unable to understand the significance of this event. Another clash happened when another Japanese custom dictates Tanabata to forbid her from going out for a month after childbirth. For Fas-ang, who knows no other life than that of outdoors, this is almost unbearable. At this point, Fas-ang is a victim of culture shock. (PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH ) When an individual finds himself in an unfamiliar cultural environment where his previous learning is inadequate for coping, he may suffer some degree of emotional disturbance. Culture shock or "well of loneliness" affects the cultural stranger who feels the absence of people with sufficiently similar experiences who can understand how he feels. Though acculturated to some extent, extent, Fasang "yearned to learn from her folks back in Besao, Bontoc. Had the kaingins been planted with camote and corn?" "Often," she says, "she [felt] homesick". To overcome this, she turns to the
movies, travelling two miles to the city, sometimes with her child, to see a film. Fas-ang admits that "she often met several of her relatives and townmates in the theater". Anthropologically, culture patterns differ in degrees of consciousness and complexity as well' as in kind. The simplest patterns of behavior are expressed in customs of dress, diet, work, salutation and artifacts. Fas-ang adjusts to these simple patterns without qualms. But to the more complex patterns underlying social, political and economic organization and the systems of religion, language, law, etc. Fas-ang is unable to completely "cross the boundary." With no knowledge of the Japanese language and unaware of the significance of Japanese social behavior, e.g., revelry
in baptismal celebrations and refraining from work after child-birth, Fas-ang retains feelings of being an outsider, the "other." It is the cine, where she meets her own kind, becomes her welcome retreat. Tanabata on the other hand, is more perceptive. To begin with, "he had great respect for [the] sturdy, native woman". He is "most solicitous" toward Fas-ang as she is recovering from childbirth. He brings a pair of short pants and other clothes for her cousin, telling him to "do away with His Gstring". More importantly, he allows her to frequent the cine although "he could not understand what drew her to lit]". He is "too indulgent with Fas-ang. . . . he loved her too much to deny her any pleasure she desired". It is this same love that leads him to take back mother and son after their sudden and painful leave taking. Fas-ang's return and Tanabata's acceptance are positive acts which help bridge the two different cultures.
c. POST STRUCTURALISM
Tanabata and Fas-ang are not all gentle souls; they love and hate, suffer and inflict pain, or love so selflessly their love becomes like the purest, most intense flame. At times the intensity culminates in acts of violence (though never in the manner of self-indulgent social realism). These are ordinary folks, mostly, and portrayed simply, but they are never flat, never run-of-themill. In truth they are mostly non-conformists, law-breakers, romantic rebels against tradition. Fas-ang breaks tradition by agreeing to be the common-law-wife of Tanabata, a Japanese national. Tanabata, for his part, crosses lines of ethnicity and nationality by this tacit marriage that is blessed with neither ethnic rite nor state sanction. Later, Fas-ang, under the pernicious influence of American movies to which she has become addicted, elopes, Hollywood-style, with a town-mate she has met in the movie-house and returns with her lover to Bontoc. This townmate lover is a busol, a head-hunter, a man with a violent temper who has been recently
dismissed from his job in the American base for a rule violation. This lover eventually deserts Fas-ang, and she returns to Baguio where Tanabata takes her back, with great affection and without question. Among other things, this is a story of lawless people, but they are all the more human. Essentially, though, Tanabata is most upright. He may have broken with some traditions, but not with the human moral law. He is the only character in this story who remains steadfast to his human commitments. Definitely he is not our stereotypical Jap, whether brutal invader, slick businessman, or noble, virile samurai. Rather, he is a farmer, unobtrusive, avid, and attuned to the cycles of Nature, of planting and of harvesting. His sensitive fingers coax the soil to bring forth life. More than just a vegetable grower with an eye to profit, Tanabata is symbolic of man ’s urge to nurture. Only those who are steadfast in their love possess the gift and power to husband the earth in all its phases. The steadfast man as nurturer is a life symbol such is Tanabata-san.
Through Tanabata, the Japanese psyche is revealed. Honor rates high in the Japanese code of ethics, even in choosing a mate. Choosing a bride and raising a family are serious considerations, for the emphasis on the household and family requires a high degree of mutual cooperation. Tanabata is taken by Fas-ang's industrious nature and "buxom breast" yet he consults with his Japanese neighbor, Okamoto regarding his choice. For the Japanese, strength of character is in conforming, not in rebelling. Nonconformity brings humiliation and ridicule. Tanabata conforms when' he consults with Okamoto about Fas-ang. He conforms when he shares household privileges with his wife. But when she abandons him, he is crestfallen. A death threat from his wife's lover prevents him from pursuing his wife and son. He rebels as he pines for his wife and son, neglecting his garden altogether. Despite Okamoto's entreaties for him to go on with his life, he "[shuts] himself in" and turns to liquor and becomes an object of humiliation. But Tanabata could not care less, thinking that "in a month, [he] would perhaps go home to die
in Japan". Upon his family's return however, he "(lights) the big lamp that had long hung from the ceiling, unused".
d. ARCHETYPES
There are certain archetypes in the story. For instance, it is in the Busol lover that the love triangle appears clearly as archetypal. Third parties are seen to be seducers who cannot provide the moral basis for a truly humane existence, a civilized society.
Tanabata’s Tanabata’s garden, harks back to a garden so ancient it might well be the most ancient of all. “Ordinarily, she [Fas-ang] was patient, bending over the plants as she rid them of their worms, or gathered them for the sale in the market. Even her hands had been taught to handle with care the tender seedlings, which almost had to be prodded to grow luxuriantly. When the sunbeams filled the valley, and the dewy leaves were glistening, it was a joy to watch the fluttering white butterflies that flitted all over the garden. They were pests, for their chrysalides mercilessly devoured the green vegetables. Still, their advent in the bright morning would stir the laborers to be up and doing before they, themselves, were outdone by the insects (Hamada 1975).
The figure is old, indeed, but only because it is an allusion, though still recognizable even if worms and butterflies have taken the place of the snake. Another snake or worm, if you like is the busol lover, disguised as a butterfly. But perhaps the most pernicious snake of all is Hollywood, purveyor of American moral anarchy.
CONCLUSION
Hamada moves beyond ethnicity and nationality until, at last, he puts us face to face with the human being. And so Hamada portrays Tanabata, the foreigner, the extremely other , as the paragon of human virtue, the possessor of the truly civilized heart. Ironically, it is he who is the other, the foreigner and stranger, who becomes the paragon for a God-like virtue which Arcellana rightly calls love which is charity. Fas-ang shifts from mere literary ornamentation to a stark manifestation of conflict of cultures and gender. However, for Hamada, Fas-ang is not meant to cause further disorder in the tension created by these cross cultural clashes. As seen in the story, a compromise is implicitly arrived at in the end. Hamada's vision then goes beyond the prejudice and discrimination as he works toward the notion and realization of universality.
REFERENCES
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/20408/M.A.CB5.H3_3437_r.pdf?s equence=1 http://jackcarino.multiply.com/journal/item/19?&show_interstitial=1&u=%2Fjournal%2Fitem http://en.wikipilipinas.org/index.php?title=Sinai_Hamada http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/May/15/op/op05p.html http://wabei4.tripod.com/xlation/quilt/tanabata.htm
