I haven’t done much writing on Ronald Tanaka outside of what I included in my long essay on Asian American poetics, Remote Parsee, that appeared in Telling It Slant and elsewhere.

I’d like to do some sort of anthology of the stranger, more interesting bits of Tanaka’s writing on Sansei identity along with selections from his poems. I’m slowly collecting and scanning whatever material that I can find in the library and online.

This in Tanaka’s bibliography from a database I found online. While much of this looks like dry reading, he actually included some very poetic, and funny, elements in his work. I describe some of this in the fragment pasted below from Remote Parsee.

I have some images from books to scan in. This is the only image I could find of him online. It doesn’t say much to me except that he probably didn’t like being photographed.

Tanaka Bibliography (Research)

Towards a Systems Analysis of Ethnic Minority Literature

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1978

The basic strategy of this paper is to develop a general model for social system communication relations. It first describes the nature of domination and control and then goes on to propose rules as to how control systems deal with what is called communication stress.

The Circle of Ethnicity, Part II

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1981

Focuses on problems in sexuality and physical self concept related to being Japanese in a society dominated by Caucasian values. Includes poetry on the Japanese American experience.

The Circle of Ethnicity

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1980

Defines the “circle of ethnicity” as a logical paradox that grows out of the relationship between Japanese American and Euro American language, thought, and culture. From psychological and metaphysical perspectives, discusses how the paradox confronts every Japanese American striving for personhood in United States society.

On the Metaphysical Foundations of a Sansei Poetics: Ethnicity and Social Science

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1979

It is held that Japanese American poetry has most often been seen as a social and political, rather than aesthetic or spiritual expression. In an effort to integrate these two dimensions, psychological, philosophical, and artistic elements of the Japanese American experience are explored.

Sansei Male Personhood, Corporate Sexuality and Ms. Madeline Girbaud: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Management.

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1989

Explores the relationship among the self-image of third-generation
Japanese-American males, sexual dynamics within corporations, and their managerial behavior. Argues that ethnic and sexual stereotypes
influence JapaneseAmerican participation in the management of U.S. corporations, and that membership in “corporate communities” has become a goal for many Sansei men. Includes a poem.

Herneneutics of Sansei Management: Some Conceptual Parameters.

Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1988

Explores the managerial behavior of sansei, third-generation Japanese-Americans, which directly conforms to neither Western nor native Japanese models, but which contains identifiable elements of each. (BJV)

Fragment from Remote Parsee

The poet Ronald Tanaka, for example, in his 1978 essay for the Journal of Ethnic Studies, “Towards a Systems Analysis of Ethnic Minority Literature,” writes that “ethnic literature can be seen as the attempt by a majority culture to deal with the hermeneutic problems created by the necessity of cross-cultural communication,” an open window which he perceives as only strengthening power relations.  He continues:

This interpretation is opposed to the more popular view that the various ethnic literatures are the independent products of their respective subcultures.  Our claim is that ethnic systems have a very specific function to perform within the majority literary system and the result is a constrained and distorted output.  This means that ultimately ethnic groups do not “have a literature” in the same way that majority societies “have a literature” in spite of what appears to be empirical evidence to the contrary.

This theme of “empirical evidence to the contrary,” of eyeing the crux of identity only to find it is a plant by enemy spies, will show up in many different guises throughout the following essay.  Tanaka goes on to consider the concept of “communication stress,” which he says can be created via the tactics of the “anomaly” and the “opaque,” viable means of resistance for him from the days when Language Poetics were not widely disseminated.

[…]

As the excerpt from Tanaka’s essay quoted earlier states, the forfeiting of information on the terms of the dominant class plays an insidious role in confirming existent power relations, contrary to the oft-cited maxim that minority writers are obliged to “tell their stories” first in order to achieve the basic plateaus of legitimacy as artists.  In another series of essays published in JES from 1979 to 1981 titled “On the Metaphysical Foundations of a Sansei Poetics: Ethnicity and Social Science,” he considers the issue of Sansei—third generation Japanese—”personhood” amidst the paradigms that social science has created.  “Being by definition an ‘ethnic group’, we have from the very beginning been ‘given over to’ social scientists, as opposed to, say, philosophers, artists, or theologians.  In turn, social science has affected our own thinking far more than any other academic thinking,” he writes, sketching in broad strokes the critical arenas in which Asian American writers, whether conscious of it or not, are forced to work, such that even a writer like John Yau, whose inaugural writings were inspired by Oulipo, Surrealist and Ashberian poetics, can be seen as a poseur for wearing sunglasses in his author photograph.

The clinical tenor of Tanaka’s approach replicates the over-determination of the very sciences he critiques, motivated primarily by a analysis of Milton Gordon’s 1964 study, Assimilation in American Life, which reaches such conclusions as: “In virtually all instances of inter-ethnic conflict, no matter how great the initial differences between the groups, people sooner or later become integrated into a single unit and convinced of their descent from common ancestors.”  Tanaka’s stated responses are too detailed to reproduce here; in general, he discovers that assimilation involves the preserving of only those characteristics of Sansei culture that can be linguistically substantiated in the dominant society, but that conceptualization in “White” terms is not adequate for a range of Sansei emotions that are not replaced or replaceable.  The essays themselves—which, in their earlier sections, are straight-forward logical critiques of terms and propositions, but which eventually leap genres to take in the Wittgensteinian philosophical maxim, the short lyric, and the parable—trace a retreat from the norms of Western science into what one might consider a Buddhist distrust of knowledge and logic.  Parts of the third essay seem to anticipate the discoveries of the radical sentence-based poetics of the seventies:

5.0 I take what’s given to me and try to make do.

5.1 I dress as best I can.  And smile a lot.  Perhaps excessively concerned with appearances.  Manners.

5.2  (I got shoes!  You got shoes!)

6.0 I’m not as worried about Sansei as I am about life.

6.1 Do you understand me when I say this?

6.2 When I go to Pt. Peyes, I have to remind myself that it is not a part of my own body.

6.3 So I call the rain different kinds of names.

6.4 I am immersed in the world.  All that is and was and will be.  Rocky Road.

7.0 My preoccupation with ethnicity is strictly logical.

7.1 It’s a product of my class interests.

Tanaka explains in the introduction to the fourth and last of the essays, titled “Shido, or the Way of Poetry,” that he has lost his funding from the Heike Society, and that his “work has been labeled ‘solipsistic,’ and ‘unprofessional,’ and I have been branded an ‘academic quack.’”  Though he published a few more “essays” in JES over the next two years, he has since devoted his attentions entirely to poetry and visual work, such as the photo/poetry sequence “The Mount Eden Poems”—two of which are included in Premonitions and are the only things he has in print—each of which is dedicated to a different vintage wine from the Mount Eden Vineyards and accompanied by a strange, faux fashion shot of Melanie A. Slootweg dressed, not very obviously, as “the kindergarten teacher, Madeline Giboin.”  This sequence runs the gamut from absurdity to romance, from ritual to nihilism, and can be tied in somewhat with his notions of Sansei personhood in terms of inter-ethnic relations (the role of the “White American woman,” for example), and yet it’s deceptively calm surfaces eventually lead to damning voids of meaning, suggesting the struggling logician concealed beneath them.