All I Asking for Is My Body

Tosh is three years older than Kiyo, and he bears the brunt of his parents’ expectations and disappointments. Even though Kiyo is the main character, we hear most of Kiyo’s perspective filtered through Tosh’s arguments with their parents. Even though his mother and father consider Tosh to be unfilial, his disobedience only extends to his words. While he openly questions the system that he feels is robbing him of his future, and very body, he never does anything to go against his parents’ wishes. A good student, he drops out of school in the 11th grade to work in the cane fields and help support his family. When he is given the chance to follow his dream and become a professional boxer, he turns down the opportunity so that he can continue to contribute his wages from the cane field to his parents. Even when he gets married, he asks for his parents’ permission first. While Kiyo pays off the family’s debt, it’s Tosh who better represents the family’s Japanese ideals.

Kiyo’s father has lived his entire life serving the needs of his family and his community. When he was a young man, his father brought him and his brothers over from Japan to work in Kahana’s cane fields in order to settle his own debts. When the debts were paid off, and he had enough money to start over in Japan, Mr. Oyama’s father didn’t leave any money for his son and daughter-in-law to live off, even though they had another baby on the way. Mr. Oyama pressures his sons to provide for the family, all the while adding to their burden by having more children. He is particularly hard on Tosh, sometimes hitting him. 

Despite his short-sighted and seemingly cruel interactions with his sons, Mr. Oyama shows integrity after the attack on Pearl Harbor. When he learns that Japanese organizations are going to have their bank accounts frozen, he takes great personal risk to withdraw the money and ensure that each member get his or her share, saying, “The $7,000 represented the dues the members had paid over the years. It was money earned from working in the cane fields for less than a dollar a day in the early days. It belonged to them” (86). 

When Kiyo finally confronts his father about the debt, he feels sorry for his father and realizes Mr. Oyama wants to preserve his good name: “It was the Japanese way, face was that much more important, like the starving samurai who walks around with a toothpick in his mouth, pretending he’d just eaten” (89).

Kiyo’s mother is like her oldest son, Tosh—she likes to engage in conflict. While Kiyo and his father are more laid back, his mother will fight to have the last word. Like her husband, Mrs. Oyama prizes filial duty over everything else. When her parents sent her to Hawaii to be a bride and save them the cost of giving her away in Japan, she did not question it. Because of her father-in-law’s massive debts, she was never able to return to her family, but she never complained. When her mother-in-law treated her badly, she excused the older woman’s actions because she had had a hard life.

When Kiyo tells his mother that he has volunteered for the army against her wishes, she seems only concerned for the debt. The next day, however, she starts sewing Kiyo’s sennin bari, a good luck sash that all of the village women contribute to. Her actions suggest that she is a product of Japanese culture who’s perfectly content to spend her life achieving her filial duties, but she loves her sons despite their differing paths.

When Kiyo is in the fourth grade, he has an older friend named Makot. Kiyo does not understand why his parents object to their friendship or why the older kids, like Tosh, shun Makot. Makot’s family is the only Japanese family living in Filipino Camp. Kiyo is too young to realize that Makot’s mother makes a living as a prostitute for the Filipino laborers, while the father lives off of his wife’s earnings. 

Not only is Kiyo too young to understand the implications of Mrs. Sasaki’s profession, but he cannot understand why Makot should be responsible for his parents’ actions. When his father says that Makot is bad, Kiyo defends him: “But he’s not bad! He treats us real good” (9). While Mr. and Mrs. Oyama come from a culture where the actions of one family member reflect on everyone in that family, Kiyo was raised in a culture where an individual only needs to answer for his or her own actions. This is the first example in the book where the older Oyamas’ worldview, rooted in Japanese culture, comes into conflict with Kiyo’s, which is influenced by his American upbringing.

Obaban (Granny) is considered the “black sheep” (17) of her family because she eloped with her first husband during the mourning period for her father. After being cut off by her family, she and her husband moved from Japan to Kahana. She then left her first husband for another man. 

Only Obaban treated Mrs. Oyama with kindness when she came to Kahana to marry Mr. Oyama. Maybe it was Obaban’s outsider status that allowed her to empathize with someone who was alone and far from home. Obaban believes in bachi, and she gives her life as a substitute for Mrs. Oyama’s retribution, so that Kiyo’s mom can live and raise her children. It is interesting that Obaban, who was run out of her family for being unfilial, makes the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of the family.

Although “Snooky” is only present for about three pages of “All I Asking for Is My Body,” he has a lasting impact on Kiyo: “He was a tall thin funny-looking guy with red hair, a long beaklike nose, light horn-rimmed glasses, and a short upper lip which made him look like he was grinning all the time” (32). Mr. Snook is well-traveled, and he tries to inspire his students to see how the plantation system is sacrificing the workers, while enriching the bosses. He even questions filial duty, asking Kiyo if he would be a “good man” were his filial duty to Al Capone. 

Mr. Snook challenges everything that Kiyo knows about allegiance and honor. While he may be too young to act on these revelations as an eighth grader, they take hold until Kiyo is ready to break away from his family and the plantation. Mr. Snook does not return the next year, but “[r]umor was that he had gone to Spain to fight in the Civil War back in 1937” (96), suiting his revolutionary spirit.

Not much is known about the white plantation overseer in Kahana, except that on the plantation his house is placed at the tip of the triangle, furthest away from the pigpens and outhouses. We also get a sense of the power he wields when he attends his son’s eighth grade class to monitor the comments of Mr. Snook: “Mr. Nelson walked into the classroom in his breeches and boots and safari hat and sat in the back of the class for an hour” (34). He makes his presence known, and warns the teacher about sharing any pro-striker sentiments. Mr. Nelson is a stand in for the plantation system as a whole, what Mr. Snook refers to as “the last surviving vestige of feudalism in the United States” (33).

Reverend Sherman does not play a significant role in the book or in Kiyo’s thoughts until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He goes to bat with the authorities to allow Japanese-Americans to gather together for Tosh’s wedding to Fujie Nakama, and he saves Mr. Oyama and Mr. Takemoto from arrest because he had vouched for all of his Japanese congregants. It is significant that the authorities required the word of a white man to authenticate the allegiance of people who had lived and worked in Hawaii for decades.