It's a trap

by Niina Sashide Lopes (Japan)

I didn't expect to find Japan

I was born to a Brazilian father and a Japanese mother, and raised in Rio. “Hafu” (as in half) is what we’re called, and for most of my life I accepted that title. Because in a way, they were right. I was too quiet, too petite and too reserved to be Brazilian, which I agreed. My upbringing was very mixed, always making several trips to Tokyo to visit family. It was never a stranger to me. I knew how to behave in my “other half's” society. Stand on the left side of the escalator, don’t eat while walking and etc, etc. But now I was too loud, too big and shared too much to be Japanese, which I agreed. I was always comfortable being in the middle. Until someone told me I wasn’t. After moving to Tokyo to study the first frustration was the language barrier. I was raised bilingual, but my second language was English. So I depended on family members to get everything done. The first shock happened while registering at city hall, where there was no assistance in English and I felt like a fraud for not speaking Japanese. After that, I was denied many apartments for being “foreign”, which killed the thought of daring to call myself Japanese even more. My family also started saying things like “well, as a foreign person so and so will be more difficult”. So my sadness was replaced by anger. Anger at how closed Japanese society is. Anger at how sometimes they would choose to treat me like a foreigner and refuse to speak Japanese, while at other times they only spoke Japanese and got annoyed at my lack of fluency. Listening to other “Hafus'” stories, the same pattern repeated again and again, “no matter how Japanese you look or how fluently you speak, you’ll never be Japanese to them”. So should I give up? Was this what I came here to find out, that my identity is dictated by them? More anger started to build up as I learnt that even the language itself is filled with layers. People have different facets depending on the situation and so different words and grammar is used. I understand the commonality in this, but the Japanese take it so seriously that there’s an expression for when someone shows their true self (Honne) and for the facete displayed in public (Tatemae). “There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at” said French writer Gustave Flaubert. I realised my view was a foreigners view, but with just a little bit more depth. I also thought the Japanese were admirable for their organisation, cleanliness, politeness and efficiency, while recognising its sexist and patriarcal structure. Now I had to clear those off my memory and acquire a new one, as a local. And so I recognised their pain in feeling constrained by society’s expectations and rules. The need to numb themselves with gambling, gaming and other obsessive behaviours. I noticed I was Japanese after all, stuck in the pain of seeking their approval just as much as they sought society's.