A Glimpse from the Past: Reflections on the History of TSCA

By Mark Richardson

Welcome to a series of occasional articles on the history of TSCA. Our Association is now thirty-five years old, just the time in life for a little wholesome nostalgia. Even a mini-midlife crisis might not be a bad thing for TSCA. Nothing traumatic, just enough reflection on the past to help us see not only where we've been but where we're going.

To begin at the beginning, I'd first like to inform our newer members, and remind the old-timers, of what Kashiwa Day commemorates. But more, I want to fill in some of the surrounding historical circumstances that I think make that occasion more remarkable than it might appear. 

It should matter a lot now that the original Kashiwa Day thirty-five years ago seems like yesterday, at least to TSCA old-timers, when Torrance mayor Ken Miller and Kashiwa mayor Ryotaro Yamazawa signed the formal relationship agreement on February 20th of 1973. To color in some background, let's recall that it was only twenty-eight years before that day in 1973 that Word War II culminated in V-J Day of 1945. In other words, the founding of TSCA seems not that long ago to us, but for some of the founders it was a shorter time ago, more like "just yesterday," that our Japanese friends had been our implacable enemies. 

So consider for a moment the founding principles of TSCA in light of that menacing shadow. TSCA was created "to promote friendship, goodwill, and understanding" between Torrance and Kashiwa. More broadly, Sister City International was instituted by Dwight Eisenhower to let "the people themselves give expression of their common desire for friendship, good will, and cooperation for a better world for all." Worthy objectives. But it's difficult for language like this to maintain, over time, the force it once had. We're inundated now with the rhetoric of feel-good diplomacy. It's easily lumped in with all the other white noise that we're not even aware of being unaware of. So we lose historical perspective, and with it a recognition that embedded in the words of our charter are the seeds of a radical transformation in our perception of the Japanese: from sinister adversary to full partner in the quest for a humanitarian utopia. 

A transformation like this does not happen easily or quickly. It's astonishing to me that it happens at all. If you think that "friendship, goodwill, and understanding" just happen when one people establishes relations with another, take a look at our early encounter with the Japanese through the eyes of Westerners who were there and wrote about it. It's a fascinating story of mutual alienation--not antagonism, just blunt miscomprehension. 

Here is one sample, an observation by A. B. Mitford in the opening pages of his classic Tales of Old Japan: 

The books which have been written of late years about Japan, have either been compiled from official records, or have contained the sketchy impressions of passing travellers. Of the inner life of the Japanese, the world at large knows but little: their religion, their superstitions, their ways of thought, the hidden springs by which they move--all these are as yet mysteries. 

Mitford had been British Attache to Japan from 1866 to 1870 when he wrote this in 1871, just under twenty years after Commodore Perry