Final Paper

 Trying to Understand My Japanese-American Identity (1292)

I am a hybrid. 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 prevalent my Japanese-American identities are. In this paper, I argue that I have never lived anywhere where I can fully embrace my Japanese-American identity and being a woman. 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 of “Japanese” or “American” identity. 

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 at a certain age. At the time, I was not as tan, fairly thin, and had straight hair. I lived in a homogeneous country and I was part of the majority, meaning I never felt not Japanese. I am Japanese. 

When my family and I moved to a white suburban town in Massachusetts due to my father’s occupation at the age of 12, 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 the other non-Asian peers because we 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 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 the Boston Japanese language school every Saturday because my parents wanted me to make friends who identified as Japanese and would be able to talk in Japanese due to their fear 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 had 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.” 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 be American when you’re not home; I functioned like a robot. 

I had another eye-opening experience when I went back to Japan in the summer of 2018 to go see family and friends and to attend a Japanese middle school for three weeks. I was pretty confident I would be able to code-switch back to being fully Japanese and erasing 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 “... 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), that explained how I was feeling perplexed as a “Japanese-American.” I never knew how and what words to use to describe this feeling: a feeling of floating in identities but also not being able to feel complete in both of my identities. 

When I learned intersectionality in my junior year of high school, I started thinking about how my gender identity is intertwined with my race/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 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 was in between the beauty expectations of American and Japanese women. 

Both American and Japanese society see women as second-class citizens. In Japan, this phenomenon is evidenced by the role women play on TV shows. There's always a male host and a woman who assists the host. Not dissimilarly, in America, we see women being treated as second-class citizens in our laws—the right to abortion (via precedent 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. 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. Thus by always perpetuating the view that the male is in every way superior to the female, media misrepresents the role women play” (9).

Thus, the media can shape our views and affect societal values as a whole. 

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 be 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. 

• Connecting that with laws that would have affected my identities (Japanese American, women, bi, multicultural/bilingual)

• How even though those laws were in the past, it still affects me and in the future, how it can affect me since those aftermaths are still embedded in this country

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.