Amane Miura
Fall 2022
Her experience as an immigrant informed her artistic purpose, because she realized that our shared identity as natural beings is much more significant and important than the artificial delineations that humans have created. She hopes to communicate this idea through her art.
Oftentimes, the American dream is highlighted as the dominant motivation for migration.
For many, the American Dream is simply an impossible fantasy that drives the immigrant experience, but the story of Keiko Kubota-Miura, a 62 year old Japanese-American immigrant living in New York, expands our understanding of the migratory experience.
From a young age, my mother’s passion was art.
At first, her parents were not opposed to her passion, because they felt that it would add to her marriageability, which was the most valuable characteristic of a girl in 60s Japan.
They supported her through an arts major at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai), but they were much less supportive of her masters education, because they believed that the fruits of a woman’s studies were only to be pursued as a side hobby to motherhood.
While her brother was under high expectations of following in his father’s footsteps, they were afraid that my mother’s prospective partners would feel intimidated by a well-educated woman.
The reality of a career woman at that time was a workforce permeated with gender discrimination.
Second-wave feminism only began to gain traction in my mother’s 20s, and sexist sentiments were also ingrained in the male-dominated Japanese art world.
She received many art accolades that showed her talent and hard working nature, yet her less qualified male peers were given opportunities as professors after graduation (unsurprisingly, there were only male professors in the whole school at the time).
Although she was certain that art was the right path, she was still struggling to narrow her life’s purpose, so after graduating from grad school and making some money from her small art business, she decided to travel the world to get some more inspiration for her art.
When she visited New York, she was astonished by the incredible creative energy there, and the diversity of artists who were just as passionate as she was about art. She applied to universities in New York for a second masters without her parents’ support to learn English and break into the American Art industry.
With her acceptance to the SUNY New Paltz Metal MFA program and a student visa, she left Japan with one suitcase full of her irreplaceable metal art tools, a backpack of her essentials. Away from the Japanese cultural expectations of women, she finally felt like her gender identity did not restrict her opportunities.
Throughout her life and career, my mother has had good fortune. My mother believes that her good fortune in this process was a result of her hard work.
She seems to live the dream life as an independent, self-employed artist, but I have seen how much her work consumes her from early morning to past midnight.
Her perfectionism and work ethic is unquestionable, but it is important to include the fortune of being at the right place at the right time, as seen with the structural forces that were at play, especially during her green card process.
She was very lucky because she was able to win this lottery and to begin her migration journey before the lottery system was dissolved. She had a brief interview with a immigration worker, as part of the background check in the lottery procedure.
She was even luckier to have migrated before 9/11, as the process was still difficult but still much easier in comparison to the current system.
Before winning the lottery, she was applying for a O-1 Visa (Visa for Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement), and despite her talents and experience in art, there was no way to be sure whether she would have gotten the visa or not.
Having a green card and a work permit opened a lot of opportunities for her. Previously, she was doing odd jobs and being severely underpaid as well, but now she was able to have more stable work to help with living without assistance.
More importantly, it grounded her future in America, and her identity as a legal permanent resident. She did not have to worry about the choice of “going back” as an involuntary one, and that added a lot of stability as a struggling artist at the time. However, this did not stop the issues she faced as an Asian in America.
The majority of her experiences with discrimination were more microaggressive, but there were times when her Japanese demeanor as a soft spoken, hard working and compliant individual were taken advantage of.
Her permanent residence did not change the unreasonable deadlines and requests she received from her employers, and those jobs were the only ones open to her within the field. She was also put in difficult situations as both a renter and a landlord because of her language barrier and lack of knowledge about the American rental policies.
Even after living in America for over 40 years, my mother feels that her geographical identity is first and foremost a New Yorker, then Japanese, and lastly, American.
That distinction between America and New York is significant because she feels too much of an outsider to the whole nation, while she has a connection to her neighborhood community and the community of Japanese-Americans in New York.
But, she feels that her quirks and her immigrant experience make her more of a New Yorker than Japanese. Even though she felt out of place in Japanese society in certain ways, the culture and community back home has changed a lot for the better.
As a result, there is both a ‘pull’ effect toward her Japanese identity as she feels more at home when she visits, but there is also a ‘push’ effect with its advancements that occurred during the time she was absent.
Similarly, her geographical presence in America has a ‘pull’ effect, but she feels a ‘push’ from America as a whole because of her disparate values, mindsets, and her thinking that occurs in Japanese.
Nevertheless, Keiko strongly believes that humans’ need to have a strong sense of identity is flawed.
When she first came to America, she arrived with the preconceived notion that foreigners were extremely different because Japan was so homogeneous, and she further had the idea that the variations were legitimate grounds for separate national identities.
But Keiko learned that those diverse individuals were not so different from her at all, as she was able to interact with others, even with a language barrier.
Her experience as an immigrant informed her artistic purpose, because she realized that our shared identity as natural beings is much more significant and important than the artificial delineations that humans have created. She hopes to communicate this idea through her art.
The American Dream is a complex and multifaceted concept; while financial success is certainly a part of it, it is not the only aspect. For Keiko, it represents an opportunity to pursue her passions and achieve personal and professional fulfillment, regardless of her gender or background.
But more importantly, her story shows that our understanding of the immigrant experience cannot be simplified to a simple concept, because migrant experiences are very diverse.