Ohakka-Mairi
By Phil Tajitsu Nash

Walking amid the stones is like a talk with old friends. Isaku Kida used to edit the weekly New York Nichibei newspaper, and his quiet laugh and questioning eyes fill my senses when I stare at his marble marker. How a man so thin, with the fine fingers of an ancient Confucian scholar could have lugged heavy twine-bound bundles of the paper down the creaking wooden stairs to the post office each week is still a mystery to me. Yet he and his wife Emi persevered for four decades, up to the late-1980s. Before the advent of the Internet, they manually researched, wrote, edited, typeset, printed, administered, and mailed a weekly bilingual paper that was read, at its peak, by only a few thousand readers. Their labor of love is now just a footnote in the annals of Asian American publishing, and the Japanese and Japanese American readers they served have now dispersed or passed away. Yet when I look at this simple stone set on this grassy knoll, decades of memories pass before my eyes.

Every Memorial Day for the past 36 years, I have joined about 100 members of the New York Japanese American community at the annual ohakka-mairi (grave-washing) ceremony at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Located on the border between Brooklyn and Queens, it sits in a working class neighborhood that is a long, hot 16-stop ride on the elevated J train from Manhattan. The nearest highway has changed names from the Interboro to the Jackie Robinson Expressway, and a new food market has opened across the street from the cemetery entrance, yet the black cast-iron Cypress Hills gates have not been painted in what seems like decades.

The Japanese American section of the cemetery sits in an ethnic ghetto, flanked by stones with Jewish names like Wolf and Fish and Italian names like Amaruso and Ingressano. Decades ago the community elders had the foresight to encourage families to buy plots here and at neighboring Mount Olivet Cemetery, so now I make annual visits to the headstones of people who once served me bowls of hot udon and vegetable tempura at church bazaars.

I first came here in 1964, when my grandfather Misao Tajitsu passed away. Grandma Ritsu used to gather the family here every year with a feast of rice balls, chicken teriyaki and cold barley tea served out of the back of someone’s car trunk. When Grandma passed away in 1985, my mom picked up the tradition. She served the tea and rice balls, but added mini bagels with lox and cream cheese. This year my cousin Suzu Kawamoto took over, and made two varieties of rice balls and tea, with dinosaur-shaped graham crackers for the kids.

When I first started coming here, I used to be able to fly my kite and play kickball in the open spaces near the graves. Now my children and their cousins have a hard time staying away from the many cars that come by on the narrow road that leads here from the main gate.

The Buddhist and Christian priests take turns giving the first sermon at Mount Olivet and Cypress Hills, and church members come together on a bus that is sponsored by the Japanese American Association. I used to understand more of the Japanese parts of the services when Grandma was living in our house, but since I no longer speak the language on a regular basis, I’m a bit rusty now. I do make a point of saying a prayer for my relatives both in English and Japanese, however, and to both the Christian God and Buddha.

I’ll never forget the first time that Grandma, a fervent Christian, took my hand and led me up the grassy slope in front of the Buddhist altar to offer some incense to our ancestors. I never actually asked her why she offered incense every year when this was not part of the Christian church service. Raised a Buddhist, she still felt comfortable with that tradition, I guess. And in a small Japanese American enclave like post-war New York, the Buddhist and Christian churches always felt like two parts of the whole to a multi-racial suburban kid like myself.

I remember 20 years ago when the crowds at ohakka-mairi were twice as large as they are now. But each year, more of the white-haired ones have become names carved in stone. Their families come once a year to pay their respects, and then go back to their American traditions of barbecues and ballgames. The younger ones are not used to trimming the hedges, planting the flowers, and washing the headstones. For most, hand-held video games and music in headphones offer a more exciting reality than the sight of a wind-blown branch or the smell of freshly-turned earth.

This year, however, my 11-year-old son Devin decided that he wanted to help with the planting. He took the flowers out of the plastic containers, and paced them in even rows in front of Ritsu and Misao’s grave. He laughed as he splashed the water from gallon jugs onto the gravestones. Then he stopped and had some crackers and rice balls while I finished the planting.

Devin watched as I offered some incense to my ancestors at the Buddhist altar. He said he didn’t want to go to the altar with me, so I didn’t want to force him. He did squeeze my hand, however, after I came down from the knoll to the tree where he was standing and watching. And when I looked past him, I saw Mr. Kida and my grandparents smiling from across the crowd.