Setting It Right

An ‘exiled’ existence is also often eased by the ability to physically recreate healing aspects of the ‘home’ environment such as shelter, gardens, clothing, and food. In fact, diasporic studies have shown that displacement frequently produces the need to reconstruct a familiar environment, be that landscape, amenities, belief systems, language, or lifestyle. Displacement means that ‘[…] the keywords that have organised the fields of diaspora and transnational studies thus far have involved historically charged terms (i.e. nation, nationalism, ethnicity, culture, politics, economics, society, space, place, homeland, home, narrative, representation, alienation, nostalgia, and all their cognates […])’. Those that move to another landscape that is completely different to their homeland often live in opposition to their new landscape. That is, they continue the traits and life choices that were relevant to their previous existence. Their way of dealing with their acquired landscape means that the landscape will be seen by them through different eyes than those who were the original inhabitants, and the landscape will also serve to change them from the people they were from whence they came. As time goes on, and the next generations evolve, their descendants do not totally assimilate to the new environment, but rather bring to it their own style and stamp of existence. In this way, the ‘landscape forms the soul, but the soul also forms the landscape’.

We see, then, that in order to exist outside the ancestral homeland, the new environment is often reconfigured or replicated so that it remains nostalgically closer to that which has been left behind. Often, that replication will require the re-creation of amenities and environment that are more in keeping with Heimlich landscape. Food also plays an important role for those who have been supplanted in a new and extraneous location. However, for the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, lacking in the quotidian elements of a familiar life, re-creation of anything resembling the homeland was impossible. Likewise, acting like a second generation who manipulated the landscape to suit their emotional needs was equally unattainable. Seeing the landscape through the ‘eyes’ of the homeland to extricate ‘exactly such at-homeness’ may have been a possible strategy to acclimatize better in difficult and very different surroundings.