Sunday, November 8, 2020

Culture-Japan/USA

 

How culture can play a role, often the same experience seen from various perspectives due to cultural differences.

 

I moved my half-Black, half-Japanese daughter to Charlotte from Tokyo.

 

The first time it happened, I had a difficult time believing that it did. “Kowai (scary), momma,” a 3-year-old Japanese girl shouted, running to her mother. I had been living in Tokyo, Japan, for four years.

I had never seen a child behave like that. The girl cried, clutching her momma’s leg, staring at the horror that stood before her. The mother collected her distraught child, glanced at my 2-year-old daughter and I, and walked away.

We had just moved to a new neighborhood from west Tokyo to the other side of the city.

For the first few years, when my daughter and I walked around our neighborhood, I was big and she was little Frankenstein. People got to know us through our neighborhood’s watchful eyes and the extent to which they got familiar would later be revealed.

I moved to Tokyo to marry my Japanese wife. My daughter was born there. It was the only country that she’d ever known. For most of her life, America either didn’t exist, or it was a mysterious place that Daddy came from.

We would take her to visit my hometown in central Florida when she was a year and 10 months, but she wouldn’t remember.

My daughter at 2, having just discovered the miracle of running and jumping, stood dancing. Her arms stretched toward the sky. She thought the scared girl was freaking out for pretend. It would become a recurring role-playing game, type casting my daughter as a monster who liked to chase children.

My baby, laughing, dotted after the girl who looked alarmed, as if she was besieged. The girl took off while looking over her shoulder at my child. “Kowai,” the girl said again. Her eyes swelled at the terror of my beautiful and jubilant brown girl, celebrating this majestic world called the playground. The Japanese mother shot me a look as if to say, “Why don’t you have your child on a leash?” Varied scenes like this would unfold almost every day on Tokyo playgrounds.

My wife didn’t fully believe me until she caught an older girl pinching our 3-year-old to see if our daughter felt pain like humans. “You will not grow up here,” my wife told our daughter. We decided to move to America so that she could meet other children who looked like her. We wanted to prove to her that she’s not a curious oddity.

Telling her that Black is beautiful flies in the face of constantly seeing white and Japanese people appropriate and capitalize on our culture and our forms of beauty. Since she didn’t get a chance to really know her grandma, she would learn about Black history and our people by growing up here.

Through my wife doing the impossible, she tirelessly worked to get a job transfer to the states, which landed us here. Now on Charlotte’s playgrounds, kids introduce themselves to my now-7-year-old. Strangers, to my unexpected surprise, say hi and at first I wonder if they’re talking to me. People are friendly. In Charlotte, some of the kids that my child plays with could pass as her siblings. She can fully communicate with them.

In Japan, fear of the unknown

In Japan, where the use of blackface is still a contentious issue, my child was the only brown kid. There, Japanese children as young as a year old are already conditioned to be afraid of Black and brown skin (some suspect that it’s a symptom of cancer). They are acclimated to make a distinct difference between Japanese kids and the marginalized others. They are taught to fear the unknown and discard that which deviates from their perceivable norm.

Just the appearance of my daughter was an affront to the falsehood of Japan’s homogeneous society. You can be born and raised in Japan, but if you don’t look Japanese, you are not Japanese. If you are of another Asian ethnicity, born and raised in Japan, you may look Japanese, thus reinforcing the country’s ideal image, but you are not Japanese. In a country that worships collectivism, one has to be like an octopus. One must physically and emotionally read and reflect the atmosphere in order to safeguard one’s mental health and protect against bullying, which plagues Japanese youth.

In 2018, the number of elementary, junior high and high school kids who committed suicide spiked at 323, which was the highest figure in Japan since 1988. While bullying isn’t the dominating factor in child suicides, it is a factor among the myriad of ways that one struggles to echo the country’s exacting cultural standards. While my wife was at work, I was a stay-at-home father. Every day, my daughter was with her African-American Daddy, a writer who didn’t speak Japanese, blasted Fela Kuti and taught her ABCs. Starting preschool would help bolster her confidence and fortify her sense of self.

Unlike a lot of multicultural and foreign families that live in Japan, we were fortunate enough to send our daughter to an international preschool. She may have been the only Black girl at school, but her first teacher was a gifted educator from Kenya. Besides me, my daughter’s teacher would be the only other Black person in Japan that my child would see every day.

In Tokyo, school with temperature checks during COVID-19

In the months leading up to our move to Charlotte, my daughter was starting first grade. She was going through the distress of attending Japanese public school, an environment similar to the military. Like America, Japan’s schools would close to fight the pandemic, but in early June, despite the debate over the potential spread of COVID-19, Japan’s schools reopened. At the time, the country’s COVID-19 fatality rate was 900 compared to America’s estimated 108,000.

My daughter would show me the seriousness with which she had to stand up straight like a soldier and bow to her teacher. “Smile, stick out your tongue. Make funny faces,” I told her. “You won’t be there long,” my wife said to her. Like my experience of becoming the token Black friend among many of my white classmates, my daughter made friends under limited conditions, but the boundaries were ever more stringent. My child’s skin, radiant curly Afro, double eyelids and round eyes would define her identity. There was nobody else like her, and even those who were different dared not associate with the other Black kid to attract unwanted attention. Still, my wife and I thought that this was a great opportunity for her to learn her native tongue and further develop her inner strength.

My daughter was Japanese, though. It was her country, too, and she needed to be exposed to a perspective that contrasted the first three years of her educational career. My daughter’s Japanese would get better by leaps and bounds. Learning to read three different sets of pictograms (or what we’d understand as their alphabet), she would learn one of the most difficult languages in the world, and she would teach Daddy.

In Charlotte, virtual school during COVID-19

Here, like other Charlotte families, our child attends virtual school. She likes her new teachers. Some of her classmates are Black and she can’t wait to go to school in-person next week and show off her school project that she’s been making while at home.

Outside of Charlotte’s few parks, she can’t go outside. In Japan, our neighborhood had become her stomping grounds. She was a lot more independent there. Kids played in front of their apartment buildings and at the dozens of surrounding playgrounds. Mothers, elders and the older kids watched the younger ones. In the mornings, the kids in our building had to meet downstairs, and under the guidance of parents, they’d form lines with the older kids leading the way to school. Prior to becoming a father and living in Japan, as a Black kid who grew up in central Florida’s predominantly white suburbs, I had never lived in a close-knit community, nor did I know what it meant to do so.

A memory: Losing my daughter at age 5 in Tokyo

Japanese people may have treated my daughter and I differently, but their common decency would be irrefutable on the day that I lost my child. Riding our bikes home, my 5-year-old wanted to go to the playground. It was summer time. Everybody was outside. She was upset that Daddy said no, but it was already late and Daddy had to cook dinner. By our home, we came upon a track that circled around a park. She wanted to go in the opposite direction to converge with me at the point where we’d veer off the track to our apartment.

Then she changed her mind, unbeknownst to me, and she began trailing behind me. I started pedaling fast, ensuring that I’d be the first to arrive at our point of convergence. I didn’t see her, so I rode along the track. We were bound to meet, but ultimately, we didn’t. Screaming my child’s name, I aimlessly weaved the streets. My memory’s film started developing a picture of the world as I knew it at that moment, as I would leave it. “We found her. We found her,” my wife said over the phone. I had reported her missing to the police, who would later find her in a nearby park playing with some older kids.

Thinking it strange that this 5-year-old girl was playing in the park by herself, they called the police. She went missing for three hours, during which time she had taken a mini tour of our neighborhood. The parents in the park comforted my wife, who was beside herself.

My daughter was unfazed. When I asked her where she went, she said, “I went to go play.” All I could think was, thank god this wasn’t in America.