Imagine one curly blonde head among a thousand Japanese elementary school students. That was me. I was six.
My parents came to Japan in 1983, and I came with them because I had so little clout back then. I quickly learned some crucial skills on the playground: how to make a perfect sunadango (sand dumpling), how to speak Japanese so I didn't sound like a foreigner, and how to stand up to bullies. I may never master kanji or keigo, but the playground skillset has stood me in good stead. Now I watch as my daughter negotiates a familiar scenario: same blonde curls, same sea of glossy black hair.
Along the way, I've experienced Japan from wildly different vantage points. I attended an international high school in Tokyo that banned spoken Japanese. I studied Japanese postwar literature at an American university. Many years later, I acted in a Japanese theater production. (I played an American with a good heart and terrible pronunciation.) The show toured Japan for months at a time, and I saw ancient hierarchical social structures still alive and kicking within a traditional theater company. It was an unusual education.
Every time I leave Japan I mourn it; every time I come back I have to get a new visa.
Because no matter how deeply I may feel rooted here, I'm just a guest. I'm an intimate outsider. I have blue eyes, pale skin, and when I open my mouth I sound like a local. Sometimes that freaks out the actual locals.
But I love having one foot in each world: my education is western, my thinking is feminist, my aesthetic sense is wafuu, and my cooking is bad in any culture. That's okay. In that funny space in between, I'm home.
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