Day 3-examples and quotes from My Year of Meats

Examples:

-the book cover

-Jane talking about her ethnicity

-the Japanese and their view of American culture

-the whole show My American Wife

-the Japanese criteria for the show

-Jane incorporating families that did not fit into the Japanese criteria

-the way Oh and Suzuki act at the strip clubs

Quotes:

"She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest. Through her, Japanese housewives will feel the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of hearth and home--the traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America"(8).

"My name is Jane-Takagi-Little. Little was my dad, a Little from Quam, Minnesota. Takagi is my mother's name. She's Japanese. Hyphenation may be a modern response to patriarchal naming practices in some cases, but not mine. My hyphen is a thrust of pure superstition" (8-9).

"Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!

DESIRABLE THINGS:

1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality

2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Paork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: 'Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!')

3. Attractive, docile husband

4. Attractive, obedient children

5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle

6. Attractive, clean house

7. Attractive friends and neighbors

8. Exciting Hobbies

UNDESIRABLE THINGS:

1. Physical Imperfections

2. Obesity

3. Squalor

4. Second class peoples"  (11-12).

"NOTE IN RACE AND CLASS- The reference to "second class peoples" does not refer to race or class. Kato does not want you to think that Japanese people are racist. However, market studies to show that the average Japanese wife finds a middle-to-upper-middle-class white American woman with two and three children to be both sufficiently exotic and yet reassuringly familiar. The Agency has asked us to focus on wives within these demographic specifications for the first couple of shows, just to get things rolling" (13).

"During my Year of Meats, I made documentaries about an exotic and vanishing America for consumption on the flip side of the planet, and I learned a lot: For example, we didn't even have cows in this country until the Spanish introduced them, along with cowboys. Even tumbleweed, another symbol of the American West, is actually an exotic plant called Russian thistle, that's native not to America but to the wide-open steppes of Central Europe. All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint" (15).

-Jane thinks that eventually all of us will become the same.."we're all going to be brown" (15). She mentions herself. She mentions that race will become ancient history.

-When they shoot the first episode with Suzie and her family. During the game show part, we find out that Suzie's husband is having an affair. With all of the editing, the episode shows that they make up and show that they are just the wholesome American family that can work through any problem.

"In Taos, New Mexico, Suzuki and Oh stayed in a pink adobe suite with a fireplace. They got drunk and made a small, cozy fire in the hearth, and when they ran out of firewood they burned the telephone book and the Bible, then a chair and a bedpost, and finally the bedroom itself" (34).

"In Austin, Texas, after Suzuki passed out while running a bath and flooded thirteen floors of the Radisson Hotel, I asked him if baths, too, were not so common in Japan, but he shrugged. 'Of course we have baths,' he said. 'We are famous for our baths. It's just that our tubs are so much deeper' " (34).

"To the Japanese person, Walmart is awesome, the capitalist equivalent of the wide-open spaces and endless horizons of the American geographical frontier" (35).

-Joichi Ueno liked to be called John which means that he was trying to be more "American".

-John acting stupid at the strip club, saying that stripper are so happy and that Japanese women aren't like this.

-When Sloan first meets Jane, she was not what he was expecting.

-When Jane shoots the Martinez family, John gets upset because it says it is not called "My Mexican Wife" (38).

-the Beaudroux Family (65-76)

-When the crew asks Jane about guns (88-89)

-When Jane mentions Oh and Suzuki asking her about obesity (123)

-the whole idea of picking the Thayers over Miss Helen

-John being extremely racist about Miss Helen when talking to Akiko (129)