Carmel Tanaka is one of hundreds of Jewish-Japanese people worldwide, and she’s now working on a unique oral history of the community – which, it turns out, is big in the San Francisco Bay Area
Carmel Tanaka is the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who were Holocaust survivors. She is also the granddaughter of Japanese Canadians who spent much of World War II in an internment camp in British Columbia. Her mother, who was born and raised in Haifa, named her younger daughter after the mountain range that overlooks the coastal city of her childhood.
Tanaka’s parents, both architects, met in the 1970s while her father was a foreign exchange student at the Bezalel – Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where her mother was also a student. “He was the first Asian person my mother had ever set eyes on,” their daughter recounts. “Back then, being in a mixed relationship was considered very taboo, and so, my parents decided it would be easier for them to raise a family together in Canada.”
Aside from her older sister, Tanaka had never met anyone with her specific blend of ancestry until she was nearly a teenager.
It was always a challenge describing herself to people, she says, because she found the idea of using fractions – as in, “half Jewish, half Japanese” – distasteful. “I’ve always considered myself to be fully Jewish and fully Japanese-Canadian,” she explains.
So, when Tanaka first heard the term “Jewpanese” being used in reference to people like her – and it wasn’t that many years ago – her ears perked up. “Had I known that such a term existed while I was growing up, it would’ve made my life a lot easier,” says the 35-year-old diversity consultant who hails from Vancouver.
The Urban Dictionary defines “Jewpanese” as “an individual of mixed Japanese and Jewish ancestry,” adding that “there are probably like seven of them.”
Tanaka begs to differ. “There are way more than seven,” she says. “I already know of hundreds, and every day I hear of more.”
There are few people anywhere in the world better qualified to provide such an estimate. In recent months, Tanaka has put aside everything else in her life in order to devote herself fully to a first-of-its-kind oral history project of the Jewpanese.
The project, which she is undertaking completely on her own (for the time being, at least), is being funded by a special grant from the Anti-Defamation League.
“It is ultimately a way for me to figure out if other Jewpanese people are as screwed up as I am,” she says, only half-joking.
Tanaka has already conducted 50 interviews in cities across North America, including New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area, which she describes as a “mecca for Jewpanese.”
Her interviewees have included the descendants of the first Jewpanese person whose whereabouts are known: Born nearly 100 years ago, this woman, who has since passed away, was conceived out of wedlock in Constantinople (as Istanbul was then known) to a Russian-Jewish cigarette girl and a Japanese diplomat. After discovering she was pregnant, she fled to New York – where her sister lived – to have her baby there.
Tanaka says most of her interviewees had never met another Jewpanese person, with the exception of their siblings, before she entered their lives, with her tripod and camera in tow. Like her, most of them also grew up feeling not very welcome in either the Jewish or Japanese communities. “This tends to create an immediate bond between us,” she says. “It often seems as if they’ve been waiting all their lives for this opportunity to pour out their hearts to someone.”
Tanaka arrived in Israel last week and will be spending the next month interviewing Jewpanese Israelis. She has already located 20, though not all have agreed to participate in the project.
The next stop on her travels will be Japan – a country she has never visited before, but where she has already established contact with a group of Jewpanese people.
Desire to talk
As a queer woman of color whose ancestors on both sides suffered persecution, Tanaka says she has always felt a natural empathy for marginalized groups. “That is the reason I’ve always pushed for greater inclusion in the Jewish community, and opening the tent not only to people of color but also to members of the LGBTQ community.”
Among her “passion projects,” as she describes them, is JQT – an organization she founded and heads that supports queer and transgender Jews in Canada.
Her current project was driven by a similar desire to empower a minority group within the Jewish community, to which she also happens to belong. As Tanaka relays, the seeds for this unique oral history project were planted in May 2020, during the first coronavirus lockdown. “Both Jewish Heritage Month and Asian Heritage Month are celebrated in May, so I decided to organize a Zoom gathering that month for all the Jewpanese people I knew,” she says.
“Since then, it has turned into a monthly event, with anywhere from 10 to 20 participants, and each session is devoted to a different subject. Sometimes we talk about parenting Jewpanese children; sometimes we talk about our shared histories of oppression; and sometimes we talk about lighter things, like our experiments with fusing together Jewish and Japanese food.”
After hearing about Tanaka’s online Jewpanese group, the ADL – which recently set up a special program to highlight the oppression of Jews of color – encouraged her to apply for funding for an oral history project.
At the time, she says, she completely underestimated its scope. “I thought if I were lucky I’d get 20 people to sit down for interviews,” she says. “I had no idea how many Jewpanese there were out there and how much they wanted to talk.”
After completing all the interviews, Tanaka says she plans to turn her project into either a documentary film or series. “But that will require another round of funding and some people to work alongside me,” she says.
One of the first questions she asks her interviewees once the cameras start rolling is what it means for them to be Jewpanese. “One of the most beautiful answers I’ve gotten was this: It is both a blessing and a curse,” she recounts. “That totally resonated with me.”
For more information on the project, visit Carmel’s Jewpanese Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/jewpaneseproject