Japanese, from Elsewhere

What does “being Japanese” really mean?

I’ve faced a question from time to time, one that emerged about fifteen years back, but that has taken on renewed meaning in recent years. How do I describe my husband?

He was born in America, but has lived in Tokyo for almost a quarter century. The typical way of describing someone like my husband is gaikokujin. Even though people generally use this term quite neutrally, without judgement, it still makes me feel a little uncomfortable seeing it applied to him. The reason being that it literally means “a person from a country outside” (of Japan.) In other words, an “outsider.”

My husband has been living and working in Japan for the last 23 years. He has had permanent resident status for the last fifteen. He pays Japanese taxes. He has a registered hanko seal for stamping official documents. He has a Japanese driver’s license. He takes out our trash on the designated days. He exchanges aisatsu pleasantries with our Japanese neighbors. He throws roasted soybeans at oni on Setsubun.

My sister’s daughter turned sixteen a few months ago. She is Japanese, because her parents are Japanese, and has lived her whole life here. Yet my husband knows the country far better than she does. He’s lived here longer than she’s been alive, after all!

Does this sound like an “outsider?”

Hmmm. Although I’ve never said as such aloud to anyone before, I can’t help feeling that he and others like him deserve better than that.

I didn’t always feel this way. I remember when we relocated from Maryland to Tokyo in 2003. Back then, I never thought twice about “gaikokujin.” That was simply how Japanese referred to foreigners back then. The word was everywhere. It was practically a brand. English schools boasted of having gaikokujin staff to market their authenticity. There was even a bestselling manga by the title of Daarin wa Gaikokujin, “My Darling is a Foreigner,” which was turned into an anime and then a live-action movie.

Part of this was inertia and part was identity. Just as there were oceans between Japan and the world there were lines between Japanese and non-Japanese. And most people, myself included, never really questioned it. My husband was an Amerikajin, an American. Thus, he was gaikokujin. That’s the way it was.

Things changed suddenly in March of 2011. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. As the reactors melted down, and the government dithered over its response, large numbers of expats began leaving the country. I certainly didn’t blame them. It was a frightening, chaotic and confusing time. I know it because I was here, watching it happen in realtime, my husband beside me. Our circumstances led us to stay, but I saw the decision to leave as a personal choice, and certainly not something I’d judge anyone for.

Not everyone saw things that way. A schism developed in the expat community about who stayed and who went. Online discussions among foreign residents devolved into arguments, particularly on Twitter, where unease and panic fueled anger. In the midst of it all someone coined a new word: fly-jin – a foreigner who chose to leave. Some wore it as a badge of honor, others saw it as a slur. My husband wrote about it for The New Yorker.

Meanwhile, the situation got me, and I suspect a lot of other Japanese, thinking. Maybe those lines between us “insiders” and “outsiders” weren’t as solid as we’d been led to believe. While nobody I knew blamed anyone for leaving, it started to feel less and less right to describe those who stayed as “gaikokujin.” It implied a certain distance. My darling was a gaikokujin, too, but now I began feeling uncomfortable referring to him as such — because we were going through the shared trauma of catastrophe together, sheltering in place, even at one point rationing food and water together.

“If you ask me,” remarked a Japanese friend of ours at the time, “anyone who chooses to stay in Japan at this moment is Japanese.” It was provocative enough to lead me to do more thinking about what “being Japanese” really means. And I came to believe that it had to do far less with ethnicity or citizenship than it did with shared values.

So, what makes me feel like a Japanese?

Not the national anthem or flag, I can tell you. I’ve never sung the anthem in my life. We simply weren’t taught it as children. Nor were Japanese flags displayed in our classrooms. In the Seventies and Eighties, the memories of World War II, with all of its berserk patriotism and nationalism and cultural imperialism, were far fresher in minds than they are today. Schools had been complicit in indoctrinating children during wartime. Few educators wanted to see history repeat, so most regarded the national symbols with great wariness.

In fact, my first experiences with anthems and flags was in the United States. On my year abroad, I noticed the American flag everywhere, outside all sorts of buildings. Every morning, I would recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day alongside the other kids. And I’d rise for the anthem during sports games. I didn’t mind doing these things, but they didn’t make me feel American. Why would singing a song make me feel Japanese?

So: shared values. In Japan, these values are most commonly expressed as traditions. Traditions are the threads that make up the fabric of Japanese culture. They are a big part of what connects us and holds us together as a society. And that goes beyond ethnicity.

There are so many traditions, but I can list three off the top of my head. The first is sakura, cherry blossoms. As I’ve written about before, cherry blossoms are so deeply woven into Japanese culture that they’re a kind of culture unto themselves.

Sakura, sakura

The second is something else I’ve written about before: rajio taiso – the daily exercises broadcast on the radio! This might sound silly, but it shows that traditions don’t have to be old, and are being made all the time.

Radio Made the Exercise Star

And the third is Mount Fuji. That elegantly sloped, almost-but-not-quite symmetrical peak has been the muse to so many, in times of old and today, from greats like Hokusai down to, well, anyone who ever looks at it. Fuji-no-yama is the name of a popular kids song that calls it “the number one mountain of Japan.” And I wholeheartedly agree.

You may notice something about these three things. They’re things anyone can share, should they choose to. Like my husband. He loves viewing the cherry blossoms. He runs YouTube videos of rajio taiso to stretch from sitting too much in front of the computer. When we get on trains, he often points out Mt. Fuji between the buildings as we race by. Kind of like Pokemon Go, only with a mountain.

Cherries, calisthenics, and glimpses of Mt. Fuji are small things. But at the same time, small things can be powerful ways of bringing us together.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were trimming the kinmokusei tree in front of our house. The former owners had planted it as a bush, and most kinmokusei stay that way. But thanks to getting lots of sun, ours had grown from Totoro size to practically Godzilla size. We’d had to invest in an electric trimmer on a pole, but the tree had grown too large even for that, and we were struggling to tame the unruly branches.

Whenever you do work outdoors, elderly neighbors are sure to stop by to ask what you’re doing, and this day was no exception. As we wrestled with the tree, an older woman commented on how large it had grown. I laughed in agreement. Then she noticed my husband.

“Ara! Danna san, achira no kata?” she asked. “Oh. Is your husband-san from elsewhere?”

Elsewhere! What an elegant way to ask. I’d never heard this before. I’d heard gaikokujin, of course, or the more polite gaikoku-no-kata, but those terms are still meant “outsiders.” Elsewhere was different. It implied that wherever one might have been from, they were here now, together. Which of course we were. Soon my husband joined in the conversation, and he mused about looking for professional help to trim the tree. “Call the ward office,” suggested the woman to him. “They’ll help you. You live here, after all!”

It was an utterly unremarkable, everyday sort of exchange. But there was something remarkable about it too. If things continue like this, in a few years my husband will have lived in Tokyo longer than he did in America. Maybe he came from “a nation outside Japan,” but his home is here now.

What to call him, and the many others like him? “A longtime resident who understands Japanese culture” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Maybe next time someone asks, I’ll just say, he came from elsewhere. But he’s here now. Together with all of us.