“Raccoon” Spirit, the Face of Japan
Although I was born in America, my first language was not English. In fact, I didn’t learn to speak English until I got to kindergarten. In our family household, there was only one language and one culture; Japanese. It was an unusual feeling for me because although I was born in America, every time I left the house I would feel like I was leaving Japan and going into America.
While growing up in America, I didn’t watch The Little Mermaid or The Lion King. In fact, I have never watched them until I personally made the decision to watch it myself in elementary school. Just as Disney is huge in America, Ghibli animations were very influential in the Japanese community. One of which was popular at this time was Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro). Every Japanese classmate or friend that I associated with during preschool, had seen or read the story. The story starred two sisters travelling with their dad to a new home located in the rural farm villages of Japan. With little things to do at their new home, they voyage into a nearby forest where they meet a gigantic raccoon-like spirit of the forest named Totoro. Hayao Miyazaki creates a beautiful and imaginative world that fulfills both nostalgia of the Japanese culture and the essence of life.
In the late 80s, my mother moved from Japan to marry my father here in the States. Upon marrying my father, she had a dream of opening her own preschool. Her dream came true when she started her own preschool/day care business at our house. Along with nine other students, I was her first student. Her dream was not to open an English speaking preschool, but to open a Japanese speaking preschool where singing, reading, and speaking was strictly done in Japanese.
As the school year continued, my mother would often use scenes from My Neighbor Totoro as reference to show the rural farm villages of Japan or to teach the students about the subtle and obvious Japanese cultures that the movie portrays. Although we had a television set, she refused to use video as a tool in her teachings. Instead, she would often hand draw scenes from the movie and tell a quick synopsis of what the story is about. In Japan, this is an old traditional way of storytelling called Kamishibai, are sometimes even used in Japanese preschools today. Once in a couple of months, my mother would set up field trips to a nearby city park where our class was held outside surrounded by trees and nature. During the fall, there would be hundreds and thousands of fallen acorns that my mother used in many of her craft curriculum. Acorns were very prominent in the movie My Neighbor Totoro and I remember creating a drawing of Totoro handing me an acorn gift basket made with real acorns and leaves. During playtime, just like in the movie, we would run into the forest and assign different types of Totoros depending on how tall we were. We would all bury an acorn that we found and pretend to grow the trees really high as the movie portrayed.
Unlike my parents I was born in the United States. Knowing this, my mother absolutely worked hard to incorporate every Japanese holiday, tradition, even food into our household. She believed in making my first and only language to be Japanese, at least for the first four to five years of my life. She understood that living in the United States permanently, my English will eventually surpass my Japanese at some point and that it was important to at least have my native tongue as a root language. This was not for her sake, but to give me a tool to succeed in life. My mother understood that being able to speak more than one language was a tool to get opportunities for jobs and creating relationships in the future.
I remember not wanting to go to kindergarten simply because I was not able to speak English and make friends. A passage from Azade Seyhan’s Neither Here/Nor There: The Culture of Exile really comes to mind where she writes, “A similar reflective ambiguity surrounds the notion of home: they are relocating from one home to another, except the return to the parental home place has a different cadence — the home is the homeland.” It was a strange concept where although I lived in America, it felt like I was living in Japan at home and I was visiting America everyday. Out of anyone, my mother knew this feeling the best. Just as she struggled and eventually overcame her language barrier, she motivated me by using my interests. One of them being My Neighbor Totoro. She noticed that I had loved the art created by Miyazaki, and that although I was an only child, I somehow related to the two sisters. I loved climbing trees and playing in the dirt. Despite my struggles and desperation of wanting to learn English, she used Totoro as a tool to keep me motivated and push me to carry on. Not only the Japanese language, but like the two sisters in the film, in life as well.
Now, thinking back as a college student, that feeling of alienation from my own birthplace seems bizarre to me. Everything seems so normal that I don’t think back to my language struggles unless forced to. For this reason, I feel so blessed to be bilingual. Yes, kindergarten was a tough time, but I’d trade a few months of social isolation for a second language any day. And I am so blessed that I had a mother who cared so much for my future. She came into the States not knowing the language and I bet she suffered everyday. But through motivation and determination, she overcame it. And it all started with a raccoon.
