Final Paper: American on the weekdays and Japanese on the weekends (1970)

American on the weekdays and Japanese on the weekends (1970)

I am a hybrid, not belonging to one but a mixture of multiple identities. Owning two identity cards makes me multicultural: dual citizenship with Japan and America.  With my experiences of living in Japan and America during different developmental years, I’ve become more aware of how important my Japanese-American identities are. It has been a necessity to code-switch because when I’m in the majority, I feel that I can never completely live up to the societal scripts associated with my “Japanese” or “American” identity. Just like how my peer, Hannah Rivera stated in her essay “Battling my Cultural Identity”, “There is a constant ‘struggle of borders’ for me and where I fit in, as I am not White ‘enough’ to be considered Caucasian, but at the same time I am not Salvadoran ‘enough’ to be considered Salvadoran. I do not fit in anywhere, no matter how hard I try. I am constantly facing an ‘inner war’ between these different cultures” (Rivera) it is very challenging for people with mixed cultures and races to feel fit in with a certain group. I have never lived anywhere where I can fully embrace my Japanese-American identity and being a bisexual woman due to environemts forcing me to reject one of my identities that is the “minority”.

For the first half of my life, I lived in different parts of Japan. When I lived in Japan, I felt fully Japanese and never acknowledged my American identity because it is rare to have dual citizenship and the Japanese government prefers people to choose one citizenship over another by a certain age. At the time, I was not as tan, fairly thin, and had straight hair. As a Japanese child, I lived in a homogeneous country and I was part of the majority, meaning I never felt not Japanese. I am Japanese. 

When I was 12, my family and I moved to a white suburban town in Massachusetts, things took a 180-degree turn with how I viewed my identity in this new environment. In the classroom, I was one of the only Asian students who would often be confused with other East Asian students. I remember I was frustrated because I never thought that the other East Asian students had tan skin like me, hair that slowly started to not be fully straight, and my body was developing a lot faster than the other East Asian girls so I was curvier than them. My Japanese identity was erased by my non-Asian peers because the Asian students were seen as monolithic. The only identity I was able to hold onto was my American identity. Yet, I almost forgot about my American identity because I had never felt necessary to express it in Japan. That thought added to the feeling of not fully belonging to the American identity because I did not have the traits of what society told us Americans were “supposed to look like.” I lacked Eurocentric beauty standards such as big blue eyes, blond hair, and tall, skinny, and high nose bridge. I was the minority who was confused about my identity. I started attending a Japanese language school every Saturday because my parents wanted me to make friends who identified as Japanese and to be able to talk in Japanese due to their fear that I would lose access to the cultural identity they found most salient, being Japanese. I was relatively advanced in the class since the majority of the students were people who were connected with the culture and language but had never been to school in Japan like I had. They enjoyed American jokes that were very different from Japanese comedy, people in the class were speaking in English during the breaks in between classes, and overall they dressed very “American,” with  crop tops and skinny jeans. I was not expecting to not feel “American enough" because the majority of the people who went to my Japanese school looked like me, I had assumed that I would find my “Japanese” people. As years went on, attending ELL/English Language Learners classes during the weekdays, spending time with my American friends, and then spending time with my Americanized Japanese friends I became used to code-switching, “she learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode” (Anzaldúa, 379), daily. Juggling cultures was something I had to get used to as a way to fit the societal norms of how a “Japanese” or “American” person should behave. I had an automatic switch that said to be Japanese when you’re home and American when you’re not home; I functioned like a robot, not being able to be fluid with my identities.

I had another eye-opening experience when I went back to Japan. I was pretty confident I would be able to code-switch back to being fully Japanese and erase my American identity. On my first day of middle school in Japan, I came back home crying because I couldn't read most of the characters the teacher was using in class. My classmates would also be in awe of me because I am from America and I look more “American” than “Japanese.” The tan skin, long lashes, curly hair, and curvy body completely made me feel so alienated from my own culture that it made me rethink my identity. Anzaldúa also mentions that 

“She learned to juggle cultures. She has plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrusted out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else... That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness— and thought it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from a continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (379). 

Anzaldúa’s words are explaining how I was feeling perplexed as a “Japanese-American.” I never knew what words to use to describe this feeling: a sense of floating in identities but also not being able to feel complete in both of my identities. 

When I learned about intersectionality in my junior year of high school, I started thinking about how my gender identity is intertwined with my race and citizenship status. Intersectionality “...promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion)” (Hankivsky, 2). There are different and similar expectations when it comes to women in Japan and women in America. Both Japan and America want women to be skinny but in America, you are allowed to be curvy. Japan has historically tabooed curviness so I do not feel supported when it comes to my body image in Japan. Japan wants us to be pale while America wants us to be tan. I am in between the beauty expectations of American and Japanese women. 

However, both American and Japanese society see and depict women as second-class citizens and the lack of healthy representation of Asian women who are bisexual harmed my idea of what it means to be a Japanese-American bisexual woman. Media is a big reenforcer to those ideas. In Japan, this phenomenon is illustrated by the role women play on TV shows. There's always a male host and a woman who assists the host. In a similar way, in America, we see women being treated as second-class citizens in our laws—the right to abortion (via Roe v. Wade) was overturned by a group of men in the U.S. Supreme Court. This limits the choices a woman can make about her body. As a result of my Japanese-American hybridity, I have never felt empowered as a woman due to these societal inequalities that place people who identify as women below men in both cultures.  While many of my white American friends had shows growing up that looked just like them like the Disney princesses and shows like Hannah Montana, Barbie, and animated characters such as Scooby Doo, Madeline, and Pinky Dinky Doo, the only shows that were the closest to my identity was Ni Hao Kai-Lan which was a Chinese American girl. That show being the only “representation” I felt as a child while not fully representing my culture because I’m not Chinese harmed my conception of belonging from a very young age. Due to the lack of representation, I felt the lost of belonging in media and American society. 

Additionally, I’ve never felt comfortable talking to my family about my sexuality because in Japanese culture, there is a stigma of talking about sexuality and resulted in the lack of bisexual women in Japanese media. This is particularly why the first legalization of same-sex marriage in Japan was in a district called Shibuya in 2015 and there hasn’t been much progress since then. The first time I saw a queer Asian woman in American media was when I watched Joy Wang in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” in 2022. They portrayed Joy as someone who wants to keep her relationship with her immigrant Asian parents but has a hard time since they don’t quite understand what it means to be queer. While it was such a relief seeing a character who looked like me and had similar struggles, I wish I had seen that kind of representation sooner. Bhasin explains the impact of media by saying, “By being selective in what it shows, and how it shows it, it interprets and creates its own reality. A part of this is the selective reinforcement of values, attitudes, behavior.” (9). Thus, the media can shape our views and affect societal values as a whole which can harm communities in different ways such as self-esteem, family dynamics, and even laws and policies. Relate this paragraph back to your thesis in a concluding sentence

While in America I am considered a duo-citizenship holder, more specifically Japanese-American, I do not feel that I can freely express that and feel comfortable belonging in both because society loves to box people into one group. On the other hand,  Japan that doesn’t matter because they do not allow duo-citizenships because according to Judge Hideaki Mori, “Dual citizenship could cause conflict in the rights and obligations between countries, as well as between the individual and the state”(p.3), enforcing homogenous and erases the idea of hybridity. In America, even if it is legally written, I do not feel that way and Japan doesn’t accept the fluidity of my identity. American on the weekdays and Japanese on the weekends. While I understand that it is wonderful to be able to be official citizens of two different cultures, I also understand that it can be separated because of the polarity between the values of two cultures. I’ve learned that it is okay to feel confused about my identity because “people can experience privilege and oppression simultaneously” (Hankivsky, 3). The reason why people feel separation or lack of connection between two or more cultures is because society has put expectations on what is acceptable and not acceptable to act based on your identity through media and culture. 

Physically being in different countries has made me code-switch not only the language but also my identity. It forced me to reject one culture over the other which became exhausting as time went on. Instead of thinking about which part of my identity is “most salient”, I want to look at it from a different angle to challenge myself that it is okay to be a hybrid and balance between different cultures in different environments and contexts. The fluidity of my identity will allow me to navigate both media and culture as well as ideas of womanhood. My fluid identity and rejection of “salience”  is what makes me who I am. 

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Aunt Lute Books, 1990. 

Hankivsky, Olena. “Intersectionality 101.” The Institution for Intersectionality Research & Policy, SFU 2014

Bhasin, Kamla, and Bina. Agarwal. Women and Media Analysis, Alternatives, and Action. Produced and published by Kali for Women in collaboration with Isis International and the Pacific and Asian Women’s Forum PAWF, 1984.

Admin@csg. “Is Japan’s Ban on Dual Citizenship Outdated?: CS Global Partners.” CS Global Partners Limited, 28 Feb. 2023, csglobalpartners.com/is-japans-ban-on-dual-citizenship-outdated/. 

Rivera, Hannah. “Final Paper.” Final Paper, Blogger, 7 Dec. 2023, riverahfys6.blogspot.com/2023/12/final-paper.html. 

Karen Matsuoka

• Hybridity

• Intersectionality

• citizenship/legitimacy

• Historical events affecting the LGBT community

• The salience of social media and other web 2.0 tools