Resident as Foreigner: Assimilation, Alienation, and the Limits of Empathy
Part One
Yudai Chiba is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary.
I grew up in a small town in Indiana. I was never that aware of “race” per se, though there were moments when I felt it. However, it was “nationality” at the forefront of my mind because I had a powerful self-understanding of myself as Japanese.
When I visited my grandparents in Japan, I saw a lot of black-and-white television featuring footage from World War II, usually accompanied by horribly sad-sounding violin music. Rows of people waving Japanese flags, conscripts marching off to war, the Doolittle raids, cities burning, sinking ships, crying children; “the foolishness of war.”
These images became ingrained in my mind as an important aspect of Japaneseness. I couldn’t stand my American teachers and classmates who used their loud voices to pontificate that nuking Japan was “the best solution” and “the only way” to end the war. Yet, I have to imagine that in China or Korea, the Allied victory in WWII is framed as liberation. It is genuinely frightening to consider how much violence Japan unleashed on the Pacific, and how many people in the region still remember this.
Deep down, I think every Japanese person is aware of all the evil and rapacious things their countrymen did in the imperial period. We just can’t countenance it, for the shame of having lost so decisively to the white nations, for the face we need to save in front of the rest of the world, and for the sheer guilt of it all. So many of us repress it. A strongman exposed as weak has much to fear.
As an adult, I think a lot about “assimilation” as something I never fully accomplished. This in itself is not a problem. The rub comes in the form of an anxiety that many people probably share: “I feel different.”
Unwittingly, something within me seems to produce an immune response to my environment. I suppose that on one level, this is a mark of privilege. Thanks to the 14th Amendment, I was born an American citizen. At the same time, I received Japanese citizenship through my parents. This meant that I had permanent status as both an American and Japanese citizen. The upshot is that, if I didn’t like something about one country, I could find the potential for a different world in the other. This is privilege indeed: I could choose what I wanted, I could choose the best of both worlds.
A strongman exposed as weak has much to fear.
There is a tension here between privilege and difference, where difference signifies marginalization. However, I am uncomfortable with this schema. It strikes me as dramatic, or perhaps more neutrally, imbued with moral significance; it turns these words into signifiers of a discourse that is meant to reify invisible power dynamics, a means of invoking justice for the marginalized and arming them with the requisite knowledge to resist the powerful. I am both powerful and weak. What I want people to understand is my alienation.
Empathy requires seeing someone else’s point of view. I’m not here to deny its importance or its power. I’m here to explore its limits, to sketch where I begin to feel the boundaries of its operation, where it begins to tear at my sense of self.
What follows might be read as a kind of testimony, an exploration of alienation as an exercise in empathy, based on my own life and mediated experiences. Who am I kidding though; this “rhetoric of confession” is just masking my will to influence your view of me through writing. I want you to know what it’s like to be me. I want you to see me as I am.
Then again, there is no “I” “just as I am,” an unmediated and transparent self. You will use yourself to construct “me,” despite my attempts to control who “I” am. But I write against myself, hoping somewhere in my mind that I am wrong–that this, too, is not just an oversimplification of reality.
Once during kindergarten, my best friends and I were all laughing about something. It was a wonderful feeling. Then, for some reason, I thought the most appropriate thing to do was to punch my friend in the stomach. I saw his face morph comically from laughter to abject pain. Predictably, he went to tell on me. My mom came to pick me up. When she saw me, she smiled and waved to me. Then the teacher explained to her what I had done. I saw my mom’s face go from smiling to stern. I felt fear. I have no idea why I did what I did.
From first grade, I started attending Japanese Saturday school. This socialized me into the Japanese expat community and helped me speak Japanese fluently. At the same time, it made me feel increasingly foreign. Doubly foreign, in fact, since I felt more Japanese in American school and not Japanese enough at Japanese school.
Sometime in elementary school, the comic One Piece became all the rage in Japan, but I had no idea what it was. At Japanese school, I saw a kid named Mochizuki reading One Piece with his buddies, and I asked him what it was. Mochizuki was short, loud, and rude. His face was round like mochi, as in mochi ice cream. On this basis, I assumed “Mochizuki” meant “one who beats mochi” (it actually just means “full moon”, but oddly, this still works as an etiology). Japanese is a rich language for pre-pubescent trolls. His reaction was something like “LMAO u be so behind the times lololol m9(^Д^≡^Д^)9m” (my translation).
I refuse to read One Piece to this day.
When I was in middle school, I remember two girls in my class berating one of my friends for something he failed to do. I stepped in to tell them to stop harassing him. On the way back from school, the girls came up to me and told me to stay out of their business.
“Okay, okay! I’ll stop.”
That was my response. And they went away.
I saw a movie last year called Didi. Directed by Sean Wang, Didi shows the challenges of adolescence for a Taiwanese-American kid growing up in California. It’s really just about normal life, nothing too dramatic; no deaths, no poverty, no overt discrimination, no big events. But you see “Wang Wang,” the main character, flailing as he tries to adapt to the changes of puberty. He tries to be cool; he tries to get along with girls; but he botches his response to almost everything. There’s a devastating scene where Madi, the half-Asian girl he has a crush on, initiates an encounter by telling him: “you’re cute for an Asian.”
Adolescence sucked. It just really sucked. I was something of a model minority. I did pretty well in school. I had been playing violin since four, and by this time I was a decent player. Aside from occasional hiccups, I rarely got in trouble. But even then, confidence was difficult to come by. Like Wang Wang, I was well-meaning but socially awkward; I had a bowl cut and wore straight jeans when everyone else was wearing low-rise pants and cargos, Aeropostale and Abercrombie. I was short. I just looked so different. I never felt attractive. I almost didn’t feel the right to.
…“you’re cute for an Asian.”
I became quiet in high school. I used to be pretty vociferous about my opinions. When President George W. Bush began the war with Iraq, I was pretty vocal in expressing opposition to this in class, even though teachers and many of my peers expressed support for the war. At some point, though, I started to become wary of what I said.
My family moved from rural Greencastle to Indianapolis so I could go to a private high school there, and I found myself in a new context with no friends. I didn’t grow up in a politically conservative household, and the widespread conservatism of my high school peers was new to me. I noticed they cared about civics, government, and political engagement and they went out of their way to educate themselves. Beyond the political positions of specific candidates, they were more articulate (and more aggressive, I would add) about their own political beliefs and why they thought a brand of fiscal conservatism and the Iraq War were good ideas. I felt less educated in these matters and couldn’t summon the curiosity to be more articulate myself. Politics seemed less important than practicing violin, so I kept quiet.
My predominating memory from high school is the feeling of shame. I gave up during soccer tryouts twice. I kept losing local violin competitions while many of my peers won. I was a mediocre student and I knew it.
Junior year, things got better both academically and socially, but prom, oh God. Everything was off. I arrived super late because I had been visiting a college and my return flight got delayed. I missed the ritual of picking up my date. My date and I didn’t have the same friends, so I missed spending time with my own friends. I was a terrible dancer and felt nervous the entire time. One guy kept flirting with her. We disagreed about whether the after-party was a fun prospect and just went home, both dissatisfied. I felt like I had ruined a cornerstone of high school for her. And myself.
If I thought high school was bad, college was worse. It was so bad, in fact, that I became a Christian.
I remember a Korean evangelist on campus telling me I should read the Bible. A month or so later, I wandered into the local Japanese church. By the spring of my sophomore year, I had “gone confessional.”
It was so bad … that I became a Christian.
True to their name, evangelicals are at the vanguard of proselytization, and something about their passion and sincerity resonated with me. This was a concerning development for my parents, particularly my mother. She had encouraged me to attend morning mass at my Jesuit high school, which I never did; but now that I had found religion on my own terms, it turned out to be too much too fast with too many strangers involved. It also didn’t help that my parents associated Christians with conservative politics, both fairly and unfairly.
I decided not to be baptized while I was in college. I felt caught between my Japanese church and my Japanese family.
(To be continued…)
Yudai Chiba is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research concerns the reception of the Bible in modern Japan and what it means to "receive" a text. He is also interested in teaching about Christianity in secular contexts and has been featured as a guest in the Japanese history podcast COTEN Radio.