Hapa
Take off your shoes when you enter a home. Never pay a visit without omiyage. Oranges and kagami mochi at the New Year. Fragments of Japanese culture have been with me since the very beginning, integrated into my American home before I knew the difference between Japan and the United States. Still, most of Japan is foreign to me. I’ve never bowed in greeting before. The few Japanese words in my vocabulary are frequently confused with Hawaiian words, because my Japan has existed only in cultural remnants carried with my family to Hawaii, now generations ago.
“You’re not Japanese. There’s no way you’re Japanese. I just don’t see it.” Meeting new people is often an introduction of names followed by a guessing game of where I’m from. Italy? Russia? Ecuador? Iran? Sweden? Brazil? French Polynesia? I’ve gotten all of them and more, because making up just 7% (Moreno, 2015) of US citizens, multi-racial is still unexpected and a minority. Official paperwork still asks us to pick one race to identify with, or else mark a check in the ambiguous “Other” box. I still don’t know if I’m “Asian” or “White” or perhaps “Other.” I’ve grown used to describing myself as the casual “hapa-haole” and the more formal “bi-racial” when asked about my race. I offer the term “ethnically ambiguous” to people who struggle to put into words what I look like because they can’t pinpoint my heritage. I don’t blame them– if I saw myself on the street I wouldn’t know either– but I am surprised again and again that in today’s increasingly global society, racial identity still carries so much weight.
Usually, being hapa, or mixed race, is a glass half full type of situation. Instead of just one culture, I have two! Double the family traditions, double the identity. Somehow, however, too much of a good thing has a strangely isolating effect. On my mother’s side of the family, I am the Asian cousin. On my father’s side of the family, the white one. I’ve grown used to walking around my own home town and having strangers approach and ask where I’m from. When I respond with “here,” they often follow up with the question, “oh, but where were you from before that?” It seldom seems to get through to them that I was born and raised right there in Washington State. If I trace back my maternal line of ancestry and return to France, it’s clear I’m not from there either. What happens when I return to my father’s roots? What happens in Japan?
Japan is still primarily a mono-ethnic society, and within the small number of interracial marriages in Japan, most are between a white man and a Japanese woman. With a Japanese father and a white mother, I am even further from the norm than usual. I don’t speak Japanese. Though ancestrally 100% Japanese, my father’s family moved to Hawaii three generations ago and the language died out two generations later. What did I end up with? The Japanese DNA and the Japanese name. The ability to use chopsticks and be unfazed by an entire fish served on a plate for dinner.
I came to Japan with double standards for myself. To represent the US and Asian Americans and also to be good at being Japanese. This posed several instant problems: a) it’s difficult to represent the US when the US is usually around eleventh on the list of guesses for my country of origin, b) I’m only half Asian, and born to a parent of Asian descent raised in the US, and c) what does good at being Japanese mean? To be a “good Japanese” has only been used in my family in the context of eating sashimi and soba and natto. Surely there is more to it than that. However, I also came to Japan with high expectations and open arms, ready to welcome the culture that was the missing piece in my strange mishmash of French Bûche de Nöel at Christmas and New England fourth of July picnics, Hawaiian pidgin and Pacific Northwest wilderness, pagan holidays, and organic farming.
And yet being half Japanese in Japan made me feel more ignorant than at home. My attempts to be culturally respectful felt clumsy. I berated myself. This is supposed to come naturally, right? This is supposed to be home. Change my name and I could pass for just about anything as much as I could pass for Japanese. (Tajik? Israeli? Indonesian? The list of guesses continued even in Japan.) It took me the better part of two and half weeks to realize that no one was putting this pressure on me except myself. While being half Japanese has generated interest, I’ve been met with no judgement. My Japanese co workers have been welcoming. At work, my position in the company is far more important than where I come from.
“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
There’s a Japanese proverb that says “fall down seven times, stand up eight.” Perseverance is key. While I am still continuously falling, it’s not down a rabbit hole. With each fall is the opportunity to pick myself up and with each fall and each recovery, I’m collecting not pieces of an exclusively Japanese identity, but rather clarity on how these pieces fit together with the rest. With each passing day I feel the disparity in my Japanese-American limbo growing smaller. With each ridiculous mistake I make, I feel like a version of myself that is much more naïve than I’d hope to be. However, with each resolution and subsequent insight, I feel a greater understanding. Slowly but surely, I’m beginning to recognize the Japanese in myself. It’s not conventional by any means, it’s not the same relationship to Japan as anyone else, but I’m continuing to strive for that balance, for the best of the American and the best of the Japanese to influence who I want to be. I’m hoping that as time elapses, the gap will close and these best versions will meet in the middle and combine.
I sought too much in trying to find exactly what my mixed ancestry means to me in Japan. This is something I’ll probably never know. This isn’t something that I need to know. Instead, I’m keeping the American– the New England picnics, the Hawaiian family dinners, the Washington State town known for the nation’s largest wooden boat festival. I’m keeping the French Sunday lunches and stories from my grandmother of growing up in a countryside vineyard. I’m adding the respect that I admire in interactions between people in Japan. I’m adding the solace I find in Japanese gardens. The lights of Shibuya and the quiet trails to peaks beyond Mount Takao. Two days after I gazed up at the Kamakura Daibutsu, my mother told me that this exact spot was my grandfather’s favorite place in Japan. My European grandfather, not my Japanese one. This was to me a final metaphorical turning point; I can be white, I can be Asian, and I can be other. Will this put an end to every feeling I have with regards to being perceived as different everywhere I go? Probably not, but I’m no longer an internal battle of Europe vs Asia vs North America. My grandfather and the Kamakura buddha are proof that it can all coexist, because Japan is no longer a far off land where some of my ancestors came from. It’s a real and tangible presence in my life at the moment, and Japan has found a way to fit me in. I’m finding a place in myself for Japan to fit too.
References:
Moreno, C. (2015, June 12). Multiracial Population Three Times Larger Than Census Count, Pew Survey Says. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/pew-center-survey-multiracial-population_n_7572694.html.
