Japanese | Brazilian
In collaboration with Loughborough University
In Brazil I would be "mestiça" (mixed), "nippo-brasileira" (Japanese-Brazilian), "nikkei" (Japanese diaspora) or "sansei" (third generation Japanese). I also recently naturalized as a German citizen after living there for most of my adult life. So I guess now I'm a Japanese-diasporic-Brazilian-German?
I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil which is a very different place from Berlin, Germany, so it's hard to compare. Brazil has a very large mixed-race population, probably more than half of the population I think, which is part of a larger romantic foundational narrative used to deny the racist structures embedded in the country. There's a mythical idealism of Brazilian miscegenation between Black, White and Indigenous people to erase the colonialist violence by promoting this notion of balance and harmony of the ‘three races’ that make up the country (there are literal statues of this). Being Asian is, I think, that fall out of the racial trinity of Brazil. Still, where I'm from, São Paulo, has the largest Japanese diaspora in the world, so being half-Japanese comes with its own issues, especially in the parts of the city where I grew up. Berlin on the other hand prides itself on being a very international place but also just mixing Italians with Germans is already considered very different.
I don't think I necessarily felt like seeking balance myself personally. However there were some clear moments in my childhood and teenage years where there was an unspoken rule that you needed to choose to either just hang out with other Japanese kids and do things that they would do or not, so it was more of a performative choice. I took joy in the friends and activities that I did engage with and the others even now in retrospect I just think they weren't really for me. I think there's a practical limit to how much I can identify with the culture from a country that is so imperialist and xenophobic that would not recognize me as a citizen and where I would be considered a second-class foreigner.
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