gross injustice being enacted on American citizens
by their own government. Years later, Takei looks
back on this childhood experience as the impetus
for his community work with Japanese Ameri-
cans as well as for his representation of Sulu in
Star Trek. As the first Japanese-American actor
to work for a nationally broadcast and popular
TV show, Takei was aware of his responsibility
in making Asian Americans visible in American
media and popular culture, as a crucial departure
from traditionally stereotypical Hollywood rep-
resentations of Asians as “buffoons, menials, or
menaces.” For him and other Japanese Americans
who were interned, “Rohwer and Tule Lake were
still not history”; his driving passion therefore has
been to strive for personal and communal recov-
ery through art and politics.
Rocío G. DavisTamagawa Eldridge, Kathleen
(1893–1979)
Kathleen Tamagawa was the product of an early
interracial marriage. During the 1880s, her father,
a Westernized Japanese, settled in Chicago and
met his Anglo-Irish immigrant wife. The two fell
in love and were married, although their union
was delayed for several years by her family’s op-
position. After their wedding, the couple opened
a short-lived business in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
where Kathleen was born in December 1893. The
family soon returned to Chicago, where Kathleen
spent her childhood years. To her annoyance, she
was regarded by friends and neighbors as Japanese
and treated as a living “China doll.” She thus wel-
comed the family’s decision to move to Japan in
1906, assuming she could now be among her kind.
Once in Japan, however, Kathleen felt even more
foreign. Unable to identify or communicate with
the Japanese, she felt herself without any “race,
nationality, or home.” The Tamagawa family ulti-
mately settled in Western-style quarters in Yoko-
hama’s multiracial foreign colony, where Kathleen
attended school. While in Yokohama she met men
of different backgrounds but refused to add “an
additional hyphen” to her identity by marrying
any of them. Instead, she deliberately selected an
American diplomat, Frank R. Eldridge, as her hus-
band because she perceived him (falsely, she later
admitted) to be “ordinary.”
Following her marriage in 1912, Kathleen re-
turned to the United States with her husband.
The Eldridges spent the succeeding years in Wash-
ington, D.C., and Tennessee, where they had four
children. Frank worked for the U.S. Commerce
Department and wrote several books on trade
with Asia. Kathleen, distancing herself from her
Japanese heritage, blended into white middle-class
American life and motherhood.
In 1928 the Eldridges moved to the New York
City area. Following the onset of the Great Depres-
sion, Kathleen took a part-time job as a librarian
at Columbia University to help the family’s fi-
nances. Her mother’s death shortly afterward in-
spired Kathleen to analyze her ambivalent feelings
about her mixed-race identity. She enrolled in a
creative writing class at Columbia University and
began a memoir. The first of the three installments
of the work entitled Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear
appeared in October 1930 in Asia, a popular Asian
affairs magazine. Its positive reception encouraged
Kathleen to sign a book contract with the publish-
ing firm of Ray Long and Richard Smith. In order
to flesh out the manuscript, she added a section
dealing with her 1927 trip to Asia and the letters
from her mother describing the Tokyo earthquake
of 1923.
Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear, the first main-
stream book by a nisei author, appeared in Febru-
ary 1932. In the work, Kathleen recounts her life
in Japan and America as an “accident of nature.”
Although she dismisses racial difference as a triv-
ial phenomenon and mocks as silly those who find
meaning in it, she opposes interracial marriage as
a source of grief and confusion (ironically, she did
not perceive her own marriage as an interracial
union). In an unusual ending, the author “disap-
pears.” Speaking in her husband’s voice, she notes
that the Japanese government has announced
that, because she was not registered at the time
of her birth, for official purposes she does not
exist. She presents the statement as the apex of
the absurdity that her mixed heritage engenders280 Tamagawa Eldridge, Kathleen