Japanese | Brazilian
In collaboration with Loughborough University
In Brazil I would be "mestiça" (mixed), "nippo-brasileira" (Japanse-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?
My Dad is a White Brazilian, which would be mostly old Iberian roots (colonial Portuguese, Spanish, converted sephardic Jews...) with some Black and Amerindian ancestry. My Mom was also born in Brazil but is the daughter of Japanese immigrants. They met at university in São Paulo when they were doing their bachelors. I know my Japanese Grandmother wasn't very keen on my Mother dating and marrying someone who wasn't Japanese but ultimately she had to accept it.
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. I think I feel like I am more Brazilian just because I can be more Brazilian than I can be Japanese, but not because of personal choice or a conflict in terms of identity. I just am very Brazilian because I was affected and formed by what that country is but the only way I know how to be that is by also being Japanese.
I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil which is a very different place from Berlin, Germany where I spent most of my adult years, 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 can't think of particular situations but I guess I just don't have expectations that my experiences will align with others. Which is fine, I think I'm much more interested in creating bonds of solidarity across different groups than finding a place to fit in.
I do wish I had learned Japanese, at least a bit. I think the language does occupy a territory in the body but in a way I cannot access it. It's very strange, I know full songs from just having them around but I don't know what the words mean.
My advice to others would be to engage in ways that feel right to you, don't force yourself to either embrace it or to reject it. I think the body knows when something truly resonates with you. There are territories that form within you, and like any territory hard borders should be questioned. Also to not see yourself or members of your family as carriers of the knowledge of a whole culture.
If asked ‘where are you from’ I just say I'm Brazilian. Mostly because I'm bored of what follows if I make space for it. It's just exhausting having to explain the whole history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, and how my family fits in; it's not a precious oral history, there are wikipedia pages all about it, so it's more that I don't like to give out that information so easily. Another aspect of this intersects with being a woman, which adds an extra level of sexualisation. Both Japanese and Brazilian women are hypersexualised, so maybe depending on the context I wouldn't explicitly advertise to avoid creeps. Japanese people struggled a lot in Brazil with persecution during WWII while Germans and Italians just blended in as generic White Brazilians, so I just always had in my mind that hiding wasn't much of an option.
Unfortunately being called exotic or other similar labels are the kind of microaggressions that happen so often that you kind of get used to it, roll your eyes, complain to someone you trust and move on. But I also struggled and still do with the terminologies in English. I find for example the term mixed-race very strange, it always feels like I'm talking about myself as a dog, the same with ‘half-’, or even a person of colour. I think it's something between thinking those terms have histories that are not mine to take and feeling like an old Aunt trying to use young people's slang. I find it particularly interesting but something to watch for how such terminologies are migrating to Brazil through US race theory and discourses, substituting the terms there too.
I felt very embraced by friends that come from South-East Asia in Germany, I think in a way I found in them a lovely South to South and Asian solidarity that felt very natural and easy. I'm not sure if people in my institution know of or recognise my mixed heritage but I'm also quite appreciative of the fact that I'm not getting many inquiries about it.