Saying, “Yes, Queen!” to your friends is kind of like a modern day version of “Namaste.” I used to think because of my Asian heritage that a more appropriate phrase for me would be “Yes, Empress!” because in Japan there were no kings or queens.
As we approach AAPI month of 2025, I’m feeling like an ant that got swept away in a gust of wind only to survive and end up a quarter mile from my home ant pile, vehemently searching for something familiar. I recently learned more about a shameful part of Japan’s history. I had heard blips about “comfort women” over the years and did not realize until this year the scale and intensity of the violence. The numbers are shocking and only estimates due to history being erased, but some WWII historians guess that as many as 200,000 Asian girls were kidnapped and s*xually tortured daily for hours.
My family history is a mystery to me. My dad would not talk about his past. Anytime I’d ask about my relatives, he would say he didn’t know or just offer a vague answer before shooing me away. For many years, I secretly suspected my father was somehow linked to Nazi Germany. He had two suspicious scars- one on the back of his hand, the other on his forearm. These scars were remnants of mysterious tattoos that were burned off “in a kitchen accident.” I remember my dad telling me when I was very young that he was in the military. He explained to me what being “airborne” meant, however I’ve never seen one photo of my dad in any military uniform. He had no framed medals on the wall and no veteran friends to chat with or visit. When I was in college, a lightbulb went off in my head and I was certain that everything he ever told me was a lie and I was actually somehow descended from Nazis. Once I asked him if he had PTSD from being in the military and if that was why he now refuses to get on planes. His weirdly delayed reaction of saying “um, yeah” further solidified my suspicion that he was never actually airborne as he claimed. He had a history that he did not want me to know about it.
My mom’s history is equally as mysterious. I never had grandparents or aunts or cousins around me as I grew up. It was just me and my folks. I yearned to know about my Japanese ancestry and history. I craved a connection to my Asian grandma who died when I was one year old. My mother did not go to Japan for her mom’s funeral and I never thought that was weird until I became an adult. It seemed completely normal to me as a youth to not attend the funeral of a parent because neither of my parents went to their parents’ funerals. My grandparents were never spoken about. (Weird, huh?) I never heard tales or anecdotes about them. There are no photos of my mother as a child with family. There are no photos of my mother as a child in a home with friends or relatives. I’ve never seen a family photo from my mom or dad’s past. This never seemed odd to me, until recently. Why do other people have vintage family photos and I do not? My family comprised of an adult offering shelter and food to a child- that’s it.
I was my mom’s charity case as well as her means to survive in America- there was no affection, no communication, and no bonding in my home. (That’s something I will explain more about in a future post.) Once, my mom did tell me a little about my grandmother. She informed me that my grandmother’s name was “Chiko” and that she owned a bed and breakfast on the coast in a rural town in Japan. (Note: the term bed and breakfast was never in my mom’s vocabulary. Her exact words were, “a hotel kind of business” which I took to mean, “bed and breakfast”) According to 23 & Me, my Japanese ancestors were mostly located in a southern island of Japan called Northern Kyūshū, an area known for beautiful beaches. Chiko’s husband, who fought in WWII, died prior to my mom’s birth, which was in 1943. That’s all the information I was given. My mom did not like having conversations with anyone, including me. She only lived in Japan for 19 years before coming to to America with her first husband, yet she never mastered English. She used the language barrier to protect her from having any meaningful discussions with others. As I got older and noticed other families knew intimate details of other family members’ lives, only then did I realize that my familial experience was disparate.
Fast forward to 2024, when both of my parents were placed in home-care hospice. I had been distancing myself from them for years. My half-assed version of no-contact, protected me from the lifelong verbal and emotional abuse, as well as neglect I was subjected to as a kid. One morning in July, as I lay sick in bed with my first bout of Covid, I received a middle finger emoji text from my dad’s phone number. He was experiencing the worst of stage four lung cancer and had bad paralysis in his arm. Did he send that on purpose? I wasn’t sure. We were not close and yes, he was a neglectful father, but he was never abusive to me. He had a terrifying temper and I was low-key scared of him when I was a child, but usually he was kind to me. “It must be from mom,” I thought to myself. I responded with an “I love you, Dad” text, exercising tolerance and understanding. To be completely honest, I was a tad hurt. Maybe he actually did mean to send me that unkind emoji. This shows how little I knew my dad- I wasn’t sure if he did or did not intend to send such a mean text. Later that same morning, I shuffled out of bed towards the kitchen with flu like body aches. As I made some food and checked my emails, STOP SEND LOVE TEXT YOUR DAD, broken English, in all caps, this was the subject line from my mother’s email- an email that had no body. It all made sense now and my suspicion was correct- dad didn’t text me. Mom was the one who had sent me the middle finger emoji from dad’s phone. That was the moment I abandoned the innate desire to bond with my folks. I decided that I had endured enough.
To be brief, my mother was never kind to me unless we were around other people. If there were witnesses, she performatively acted like an upstanding guardian. Within the walls of our home, she called me stupid multiple times daily. There was a great deal of yelling directed to me. If I cried, her response was laughter or ridicule. I was not allowed out of the house unless it was to go to school. When she went shopping at the mall, she would leave me in the parked car. I wonder now if she was subconsciously hoping I would get kidnapped. I was reminded daily how inconvenient my existence was and how she would have divorced my dad if it wasn’t for me and my burden. She never physically hit me. Growing up in the 1980’s, people were starting to understand that hitting a child was wrong, but not much was known about psychological abuse. The childhood desire to be loved was so intense for me and I was being starved. Being denied any tenderness or emotional support led to resentment and frustration. I fantasized that she would actually hit me, so that I would have a great excuse to leave, or tell someone. I’m going to be shockingly honest in admitting here that when I see stories of children murdering their abusive parents, it’s easy for me to understand what motivated them to commit parricide. As a child, I prayed for God to kill my mom. I would even imagine hitting her over the back of her head with a skillet, driven by overwhelming feelings of desperation. Childhood abuse can lead to violent behavior or do the exact opposite and cause heightened empathy. Guess which way I went? (In case you don’t know me, I’m an empath and acutely anti-violent.)
I have two half-sisters who grew up in another town with their dad. He was a veteran and the reason our mother ended up in America. I was so jealous of my sisters because they didn’t have to live with our mother. A week prior to my mother’s unkind text and email, she said some cruel things to my eldest half-sister. When I told her that I had decided to never speak to our mom again, she also went no-contact.
A small tidbit of my mom’s hazy past is about to clarify now, let me explain…
(unlabeled circles denoting parents & unknown grandparents)
My sister wanted to schedule a chat to discuss a family secret. Nervously, I called her on the day of our phone appointment and she tells me about a conversation with our mom. She explains how mom regrettably yelled at her for something and offered to explain why her temper was uncontrollable.
Back in 1975, when my sister was 11 and I was a newborn, Mom told her to never share the following secret: Chiko was not our grandmother after all. As my brain processed this info, I blurted out, “Oh, cool, so Mom was adopted?” instantly finding relief that somehow this explains why our mother was such a mean and emotionally devoid person.
“No… not really.”
I tilted my head in confusion.
“It was near the end of the war and there were many Asian babies that… I guess just needed homes… and none of them were officially adopted out, but yeah…” She continues on with more details. “Mama said that Chiko’s husband died in the war. Before he died he was unfaithful and impregnated a mistress- a mistress who was not mentally fit to care for a baby. (The words “mentally fit” are not in our mother’s vocabulary. She most likely used the word “stupid.”) Chiko sought out and found this baby and took care of her.”
Perhaps our mom was Chiko’s very own charity case?
Post-war Japan, without a doubt, was harsh. The survivors of comfort camps were not encouraged to speak of their *buse and r*pes, and the Japanese government has been trying to erase that part of their history. Was my biological grandmother a comfort woman? This would have been around the end of the war, so all of the comfort women were s*x sl*ves and not voluntary s*x workers, but I suppose it’s possible that my grandmother was a prostit*te or maybe just a mistress. Was my grandmother not mentally fit because she was a s*x sl*ve? Or maybe, my real grandmother was killed like many comfort women were? What if the purported bed and breakfast was actually just a brothel? What if it was a comfort camp? Chiko would have no maternal tenderness towards my mother because Chiko was not her mother. To Chiko, my mom was just a painful reminder of infidelity, death, war and possibly r*pe.
I realize that adoptive parents can be loving, supportive and tender to the children they adopt. However, parenting styles are passed down and I know in my soul that the way my mom spoke to me is a repeat of what was spoken to her in post war Japan.
I don’t have any proof of what I suspect to be true, but it would make sense that my grandmother was a comfort woman. The survivors (there were not many) have shared their stories and begged for a formal apology from Japan. They reported how many of the girls self-exited or were murdered, the consecutive r*pes that lasted for 12 hours daily, they described the crippling pain and humiliation. They shared how no one talked about it after they were freed. It was considered shameful- victim blaming, back in the 1940’s. It was not to be discussed.
My mom did not like discussions.
When I was r*ped at the age of 12, it was not discussed.
Is discussion avoidance some sort of generational trauma for me? Or do I tend to avoid meaningful conversations because I grew up in an environment that was lacking in meaningful conversation?
Chiko inflicted abuse upon my mother, treating her like a burden. This is a kind of narcisistic martyrdom that my mother possessed as well. I was raised the only way my mom knew how to raise a kid- the way Chiko taught her. Chiko made her obsessively clean the “bed and breakfast” and my mother did the same to me in our home. If Chiko claimed the biological mother was not mentally fit, that probably means she told my mom that the woman was stupid.
I was told repeatedly as a child that I was stupid: this shitty language of love passed down from generation to generation.
My mom didn’t go to Chiko’s funeral and I will not be going to my mother’s funeral either: history repeats.
The unlabeled circle denoting grandmother on my 23 & Me family tree is a woman that I know nothing about. I want to know the truth but I don’t know how to find it. Then I consider just leaving the past in the past, because … does it even matter? Perhaps my time remaining here on Earth is better utilized by focusing on helping make the future better for others.
Osaka cuts ties to San Fran because they want to hide the history of Comfort Women
this is incredible. thank you for sharing.