Filial Sons

This past week we read All I Asking For Is My Body by Milton Murayama. I really enjoyed this read and several aspects of the book stuck out to me. The one area I wanted to focus on was the role of filial piety in the novel. Before the reading, I had only briefly been exposed to the philosophy of filial piety and I found it quite interesting to learn more about its influence on the Oyama family. From the very first chapter, we see the mom pressuring Kiyoshi into ending his friendship with Makoto by saying,

       “You understand, don’t you Kiyo-chan? You’re a good filial boy so you’ll obey what your parents say, won’t you? Your father and I would cry if we had two unfilial sons like Toshio…” (Murayama 3)

            At that young age, statements like this would surely cause me to obey my parents too! The quote above is just a small example of the continuous expectations the Oyama parents have for their sons. As I read further into the novel, I learned that the idea behind filial piety is to take care of the parents by bringing honor to the name of the family and to perform tasks to support the parents. It is under these notions that Kiyo and Tosh eventually end up taking on the task of repaying the $6,000 family debt by working long arduous hours for the plantation. I thought it was really intriguing to see the transformation made my Tosh and Kiyo in regards to their roles as filial sons. Tosh was depicted as the loose cannon son who couldn’t be depended on. He was the more progressive and outspoken of the two sons and declares through out the novel

“Shit, all I asking for is my body. I doan wanna die on the plantation like these other dumb dodos. Sometimes I get so mad I wanna kill them, you know what I mean?” (Murayama 48)

So when Tosh ends up settling down, getting married, and continuing to work at the plantation to pay off the family debt, needless to say I was surprised. It seemed to me that Tosh never accepted the role but was eventually suppressed into it by a deeper connection for family respect than I had expected. Kiyo on the other hand does a total role reversal for me. His mom says rather frequently that they won’t depend on unfilial Tosh, instead, the family will rely on Kiyo. Truly, I had expected Kiyo to end up chained down to plantation life and family debt, so when Kiyo signs up for the military, I felt proud to see Kiyo break away. I was proud to see him take his life in his own hands and generate some of his own luck. I also appreciate the way in which Kiyo broke away. He didn’t say “Sayonara suckers, deal with the debt your selves,” he promised to come back. He knew that his escape from his role as filial son was only temporary and had always plan on coming back to offer support. His loyalty was always with his family, he just took the opportunity to grab some “freedom from other people’s shit. ”  (Murayama 96) And, luckily, it paid off.