What is home? Many speakers and artists, like Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi with her musings on what it means to be a “local” of a certain place, have grappled with what it means to have a “home.”
Like Selasi, I am multiethnic. My mother is Japanese, my dad Canadian. I was born in the city of Hamamatsu, where we lived for five years before moving to Vancouver, where I’ve lived ever since. In having spent most of my life in Canada, I’ve lost much of my native Japanese fluency, and have, in a sense, become more culturally “Canadian” than “Japanese.” But perhaps I’m neither, straddling a cultural and ethnic liminality between these two places, these two “homes.”
In the 2016 Canadian census, there were reported to be 92,920 visible minority Japanese Canadians, 121,485 Canadians of Japanese origin, and 232,375 Canadians belonging to multiple visible minorities. Where would I fit? Perhaps the first category – although I’m not fully Japanese, and many people have been genuinely shocked when I’ve told them of my Japanese heritage when they’d believed me to be entirely “white.” Certainly not the second, as I’m only half ethnically Japanese, and certainly not the third either, as half of my identity is not a visible minority. Thus, it seems there is no place for individuals like myself on the census. Do government statistics determine if one has a “home” in Canada?
In 2019, I took a trip to Japan, returning to my “home” country for the first time in years. I saw my family, revisited my hometown, explored locations I had never been to before. In seeing family and old friends, I produced a unique version of my Japanese-Canadian ethnic identity – I was simultaneously a foreign bastardization of cultures unwanted by Japan’s harsh ethnic purity and discrimination, as well as an insider being welcomed back to my “motherland.” Is there a place for “mixed-race” people like myself in the Japanese nationalistic desire for homogeneity?
My identity was not an inward one shaped by my own conscious desires and actions but rather an outward performance informed and (in)validated by my audience. This is what sociologist Rusi Jaspal and psychologist Marco Cinnirella are describing in an article of theirs’ when they write of how “‘voluntary ethnicity…is unlikely to be possible since the identity must be ‘validated’ by significant others” (6).
So my “identity” was constructed through exterior perception- was I Japanese? Canadian? Japanese-Canadian? None of the above? Was I “home” when I had dinner with some old family friends I hadn’t seen in years? During that particular conversation, the people around me were quite shocked that I was able to speak Japanese so well – and so was I.
Japan is still highly monolingual (Hayashi 2005), and as somebody who straddles the line between Nisei (the “second-generation,” children born in the new country to Japanese-born parents), and Issei (the “first-generation,” those who were the first to immigrate to the new country), my linguistic identity in many ways informs ethnic identity. Miwa Nishimura, a bilingual scholar at Georgetown University, examines the complex code-switching of Japanese/English bilingual Nisei speakers, noting that they generally employ a mix of English with Japanese phrases and sentences to “express their shared ethnic identity” while using full Japanese when addressing native Japanese folks (Nishimura 1995). When I revisited my “home,” I was shocked at my own Japanese abilities; though I had not practiced much of the language in preparation for my trip, nor spoken much Japanese at all in my Canadian life, I found myself being able to hold a conversation with my native Japanese friends and family. It was almost as though I were subconsciously relearning my “Japaneseness.” And yet my friends and family, too, were shocked at my Japanese, thereby excluding me from possessing full Japanese nativeness – my ability to speak the language was an unnatural surprise. In many ways, home is shaped by language: our abilities, or lack thereof, to communicate with one another, to produce emotion, connection, love and shared experience.
So was I home in Japan? Or am I home in Canada? Perhaps I’m like Selasi, and I’m a local of multiple origins. Selasi’s ted talk returns time and again to that ever-so-loaded question: “where are you from?” These questions take center stage as our country grows complex in identity, culture, and “mixedness” – we can look at, for example, UBC journalism and Jasmine Mani and Carol Eugene Park’s intimate examination of growing up mixed-race in Canada, of having two identities never “integrating into one.” Or we can read HuffPost’s musings on the question of where one is really from, as though those of us of mixed-race origin must dichotomously choose one side over another.
I have been asked that question – where are you from? – in both Japan and Canada. My answer always differs. When in Japan, I’m “from” Canada – and when in Canada, I’m “from” Japan. Japanese people think I look more white than Asian, white folks the opposite. And yet my face doesn’t change, does it?
A photo I took of Kinkaku-ji, the “Golden Pavilion,” when I visited Kyoto.
So in Japan, I felt at home – and not at home. I was immersed in the story of Japan, and of its people – I went to Kyoto, where I walked silent through ancient temples and decrepit ruins. I went to Nara, the country’s first capital, the birthplace of the empire. I learned the stories of Japan’s cultural trauma in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and witnessed the history of the atomic bomb when I saw the famous Genbaku Dome. I bathed in the stories of Japan not just in words, pictures, or voices , but in experience, in visiting my family for the first time in years, in being shocked at my sudden ability to hold a conversation in Japanese, in retracing my steps down the street of my childhood home. But even in those stories, I felt both wanted and unwanted. My identity was shaped by the world around me and the performance I gave to it, however subconsciously. Home is contradictory; it is elusive and unstable. My stories are of the in-between, and I take what I can from the “sides” I (don’t) belong to. People will always ask me where I’m really from – but I think I will be asking myself this, too.
A photo I took of the Genbaku Dome, a symbol of the destruction of the atomic bomb detonated on Hiroshima.
Works Cited
D’Souza, Joy. “Identity is Complex for Mixed Canadians.” HuffPost, 16 Oct. 2016,https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/26/mixed-race-canadians_n_12157752.html.
“Hamamatsu Guide.” Japan Visitor, https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-city-guides/hamamatsu-guide.
Hayashi, Asako. “Japanese English Bilingual Children in Three Different Educational Environments.” Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, edited by Cohen James, et al., 2005, pp. 1010-1033. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=22305D30C8B73AB2F06FC4BBF92A679E?doi=10.1.1.655.1501&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
“Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome).” Unesco, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/.
Jaspal, Rusi, and Marco Cinnirella. “The Construction of Ethnic Identity: Insights from Identity Process Theory.” Ethnicities, vol. 12, no. 5, 2012, pp. 503-530. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39666/1/1315870_Jaspal.pdf.
Nishimura, Miwa. “A functional analysis of Japanese/English code-switching.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 23, no. 2, Feb. 1995, pp. 157-181. Semantic Scholar, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-functional-analysis-of-Japanese%2FEnglish-Nishimura/3e7e0906fa9ce551fc784222768f18fedcf25162.
Statistics Canada. “Census Profile, 2016 Census.” Statistics Canada, 29 Nov. 2017, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=01&Geo2=&Code2=&SearchText=Canada&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&TABID=1&type=0.
Selasi, Taiye. “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where _i_m_a_local/transcript?referrer=playlist-what_is_home#t-6522.
UBC Journalism. “What is it like being mixed race?” Vimeo, 13 Feb. 2019, https://vimeo.com/317143217.