“Where Are You From?”: When I Became Japanese

In the third term of fourth grade, I was transferred out of public school and into a small private school. Everything changed. I was extremely culturally confused and had a temper that flared up at very inconvenient times and places that I myself couldn’t explain…and yet I made friends. I had had friends in public school, of course. I had two wonderful friends with whom I still remain friends to this day. But it was entirely different at this new school. All of a sudden, I had people who would come over to my apartment to play with my hamster and try to photograph ghosts. Some of the kids were harsh, and there were certainly classmates with whom I argued all the time, but no one ostracized me.

There was a girl who told me that there were, in fact, English-language shows on Japanese TV. She told me the channel and the time, but once I started watching, I didn’t like the show. Instead I started flipping the channel and discovered Inuyasha. Shortly after that I had discovered Detective Conan and One Piece, and a variety show called Sekai Marumie. My father had to impose TV restrictions on me, declaring I was only allowed up to 2-3 hours a week. This wasn’t a thing that had ever even been discussed in our house before.

I had always been an avid reader of English-language novels. My father had attempted to buy me Japanese novels on a few occasions. Some I had read and some I had not, but I’d never picked up reading Japanese for pleasure the way I had with English. Now, it was like a mental block had been removed: I devoured Japanese books. (I even voluntarily tried to read Harry Potter in Japanese, though I abandoned that after two pages of reading forced me to realize that the humor didn’t translate at all. A subject for a future blog post, perhaps.)

I didn’t realize that I was integrating at the time. All I knew was that I was happy. Suddenly, nationality didn’t matter. I belonged here, in this class, with these people. There was nothing else that mattered. My classmates knew that I was American; and I was the only totally foreign girl in our class. But there were other foreign students in the school, and other foreign-looking students in our class. I grew more secure in my identity, which had nothing to do with any country, after all.

But five years of cultural drifting doesn’t just go away. I continued to have crises from time to time over the notion of where I was “really from” or where I belonged. Yet where previously my default state had been to say “I’m American” and feel sorry for myself being the fish out of water that I was, my default state was to now feel irritation at the unwitting soul who had just dared to assume that I didn’t belong here simply because I looked different.

In sixth grade, the last year that I lived in Japan, there was a young boy, maybe four years old, who would be waiting for the bus on my way to school. On the first day that I walked past him, he shouted, “Mommy, look, a foreigner!” I didn’t think much of it until the next time that I walked past him and he did the same thing. His mother hushed him half-heartedly every time, but with the air of a parent who has more important things to worry about.

Avoiding this child became a matter of routine for me. It wasn’t a big deal, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

Similarly, I completely stopped trying to understand when people spoke to me in English. On one occasion, a friend (half-Japanese and half-English) and I were lap swimming in a public pool, using the center of the lane instead of one side so that people could pass us (as we were supposed to). A life guard came up to explain the rules to us. He did so in English so accented and long-winded that I didn’t understand a word. When I looked to my friend beside me, she looked as confused as I felt.

“Could you please speak Japanese?” I asked in Japanese.

The life guard turned bright, bright red and explained to us that we had to swim on one side of the lane in one concise sentence and left.

My Japanese, I had realized by then, sounds absolutely native. I grew up learning and socializing as a Japanese child, and it shows in my command of the language. But it didn’t hit me how much my cultural identity had changed until my class trip to Hiroshima.

My school had (and still has) a tradition for sixth graders. They spend the first half of the year learning about Japan’s role in World War II, culminating in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The whole school then contributes to the folding of over 2000 paper cranes, which we hang by the statue of Sadako along with a pledge to work toward world peace, that such a tragedy might never happen again. It is educational and somber, but also extremely fun: it is, after all, a class trip.

We went to the park and the museum of the bombing in Hiroshima. I cried, as did a few of my classmates. That night, when we got back to the hotel, I received a letter from my mother. It was a long letter, and I’m sure it was very moving, but I only remember one thing. My mother told me how ashamed I must feel to be American and part of the country that did this. But until that very moment, it hadn’t even occurred to me. I went on a brief but intense emotional roller coaster (much to the chagrin of the teacher who had to sit with me through it, I’m sure), in which I went from “Oh no, I’m a terrible person to not have thought of how I’m a part of the country that did this” to “Wait, why do I have to be considered American at all?” and finally to, “Ugh, who cares? The bomb is upsetting enough without adding an identity crisis into the mix.”

It was the first time that I realized that I no longer identified as American.

In another world, I would have accepted that fact and gone on to middle school in Tokyo. Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t have changed everything: maybe my family would never have moved and I would have grown into adulthood in Japan. But, of course, that’s not what happened at all.