Back in February, my Japanese friend and I were eating dinner at a restaurant in Tokyo when a brief news segment about the Democratic primaries flashed across the television screen on the opposite wall.
"Isn't this the first time in U.S. history where there might be a woman president or a black president?" my friend asked.
"Half-black," I corrected her. "His mother is white and his father is black."
Though our conversation drifted to other things, I still remember this brief exchange. In that moment, a passing reference to the complicated war of race and identity in American politics was enough to make me nostalgic for home.
However Japanese my cultural upbringing, being born and raised in America meant that I have fully inherited the very American neurosis of obsessing over the touchy, hot-button issues of race and identity.
For the past seven months, I've been living on a rice farm with my grandparents in a small suburban town. Thanks to the power of the internet and globalization, racial subject matters very specific to the American experience still manage to crop up on my mental radar.
First, there was the documentary that I watched about black teenagers of Central Los Angeles forming urban dance groups as an alternative to gang life. Then there were the nerdy Skype conversations with friends back home about the racially charged artwork of African American artist Kara Walker, whose disturbingly seductive paper silhouettes depicting slavery life was on display in Los Angeles, and brought about uneasy questions of race, sexuality, history, hypocrisy and liberal-guilt. Then there was my reading of and listening to Obama's Philadelphia speech that acknowledged the painful, uncomfortable but inevitable realities that came with living in a multiracial society.
On a base level, this very American obsession with race and identity can be viewed as mere voyeurism for ongoing human conflict. On a higher level, this very American obsession with race can be a call of challenge to carry on the impossible, never-ending social experiment of creating a truly egalitarian, democratic society for all.
This challenge is near masochistic. It is a long and bitter struggle. And yet, it is this very impossible challenge - and the people who dare to fulfill it - that makes me nostalgic for home. It is this very challenge that, dare I say, makes me feel any semblance of patriotism.
Our own Japanese American community, of course, never had the luxury of having easy answers for racial and national identity. Our very identity, to begin with, is a juxtaposition of two nations that were once at war with each other. It is this very contradictory identity that sent us to internment camps during World War II and created further divisions within our community where one faction volunteered for the U.S. Army and another faction pointedly refused on matter of principle.
Generations later, it is this same community that would form coalitions with the Muslim American community in wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. It is this same community that would challenge itself to redefine the very notion of being a JA with the rising number of interracial marriages and Hapa.
Such particular contradictions, struggles and triumphs don't exist in Japan. Maybe this is why I can never see myself ever living permanently in Japan.
Back at the restaurant in Tokyo, I wished that I could explain to my friend how though I had a Japanese last name, being born in America brought about unexpected loyalties to other minority groups, contradictory loyalties within oneself, and a never-ending struggle to juggle the sometimes opposing, sometimes complementary forces of personal ethnic identity against a greater backdrop of national identity.
Of course, my Japanese language skills aren't sophisticated enough to express such elusive complexities. Even if I were that fluent, I still wouldn't expect my Japanese friend to completely empathize anyway. Some things can only be lived through, in order to be understood.
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