HOW LIVING IN JAPAN TRANSFORMED MY IDENTITY
The First Time Around
When I left the United States to backpack in North Africa, I was hostile toward America’s imperial pretensions. Strongly antiracist, I saw myself as an ally of Third World peoples. Yet, when I traveled through black Africa, my hope for revolutionary change quickly evaporated as I met people who aspired to a Western materialist and consumerist lifestyle. And it turned out that my own behavior was not so different from that of other white people, since I treated the people I encountered as less enlightened than myself. My countercultural outlook seemed clearly superior to what I saw as obedient, conformist, and traditional attitudes.
After 22 months on the road, which included stays in India and Southeast Asia, I arrived in Tokyo in 1973. There I could recover from sickness contracted in the tropical areas and teach English to recoup my finances. My only contact with Japan at that point was that I had read D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism and some novels of Yukio Mishima and, most memorably, had seen many movies directed by Akira Kurosawa. My only informant was a friend who had mentored me in Eastern philosophy. His comment about contemporary Japanese spirituality was that if I talked about being interested in Zen in Japan, I would be looked at the same way an American would view a Japanese person who expressed enthusiasm for Presbyterianism.
I began teaching English and jobs were easy to get in Tokyo even though I had no teaching experience and no degree in language teaching. My students were salaried workers in top Japanese companies whose way of life seemed cramped and restricted. I compared it unfavorably with the freedom and excitement that I enjoyed and frequently told my students that I did not want to settle down and live a regular life. But I did not recognise that white skin gave me privileges and helped me to get jobs in foreign countries that were not open to them. Japanese people did not have the same opportunities to get well-paying jobs connected with the Japanese language and were not viewed as desirable companions and status symbols in other countries.
When I spoke with other white people about Japan, a favorite topic was the ways in which Japanese related to us. Some friends made fun of Japanese people’s panic when speaking to whites, others emphasized the need for Japanese to become more international. Most interactions between Western and Japanese people during the 1970s and early 1980s were predictable. Japanese were expected to speak English, show interest in the West, compliment and flatter whites, and do whatever possible to make them feel good. One reason for such behavior was Japanese respect for hierarchy: the United States had defeated them in the war and appeared to be the most successful nation. So Americans could act arrogantly and play the role of world leader. In this vein, I criticized Japanese people for lacking individuality, self-expression, and creativity.
During my first stay in Japan, I reveled in being viewed as important and enjoyed feeling part of a group of Western people with common perceptions. However, I did meet Dennis, an American who was different. He wasn’t in Japan to make money or to teach Japanese people anything and had refused to become an English teacher despite the easy money. He was highly proficient at the Japanese language even to the extent of picking up mannerisms. It amazed me that he studied and performed Japanese traditional comic theater, acted in plays and TV series, served as secretary to a parliament member, and was friends with some famous jazz musicians, critics, comedians, and poets. I liked and admired him, even though I felt unable to go the same route.
From my countercultural perspective, Japan was an abomination. It was worse than the United States in terms of its pursuit of economic growth, its materialism and consumerism, its treatment of women, and its destruction of the environment. So after I had saved a lot of money, I was happy to leave after 15 months in Japan. On my way out, I stopped off in Okinawa where I met a Japanese man from the Osaka area who was staying at the same inn. I went sightseeing with him for four days, even though he spoke no English and I spoke very little Japanese. By staying in the present moment and not judging the person I was with, I enjoyed myself.
In Tokyo, almost all the Japanese I met wanted to practice English, and I was expected to play the stereotypical white role. The unequal power relationship often seemed to get in the way: I was the teacher and they were the students, and I came from the country that served as Japan’s model. This person, however, had great patience and goodwill as I tried to communicate in Japanese. His naturalness and humanity impressed me. When we parted, he said he had enjoyed our sightseeing together and it was sad that our time together was over. For me, this was an epiphany that occurred at the strangest time, just as I was exiting Japan and with no intention of ever going back. Yet, I had experienced a change of heart and knew that if I ever did go back to Japan, I would learn the Japanese language and try to have equal relations with Japanese people.
Culture and Race
After spending a few years in Southeast Asia, I tried my luck in the United States once more. After a spectacularly bad stay in New York for one year in which it was very hard to make a living, make friends, or find anyone interested in Africa and Asia, I was back in the Philippines. But I couldn’t find any work and was running out of money. Even worse, I was feeling tired of the imitation American culture in the Philippines. When my visa ran out in the Philippines, I decided to return to Japan. But this time I was only going to work enough to survive and was determined to master the language.
But one thing bothered me as I came to learn more about the country in which I had settled: cultural nationalism. It was an unavoidable issue that I had to confront. At first, I was annoyed by the assumption that Japan was unique and could not be understood by foreigners. What also bothered me was the slogan of the Japanese government and big business: tradition and technology. Japan was alleged to have preserved its traditional culture while developing the most advanced technology. To me, however, the highest traditions were spiritual, yet spirituality was very hard to find in modern Japan. Buddhism and Shinto were adhered to only in a ritual and ceremonial fashion. They were part of the culture, but were not practiced in the way that Western people practiced Buddhism. Few people meditated or had any grasp of the subtleties of Buddhist philosophy.
Another area of difficulty was race. There was housing discrimination in Tokyo, the most liberal part of Japan, since about 50 % of the landlords would not rent to a white foreigner. For foreigners with darker skin, the rejection rate was far higher. In addition, marrying a Japanese person sometimes caused the family to reject both the bride and groom. And foreigners could not get bank loans, enter certain establishments, or have the same jobs as Japanese. Combating such discrimination was difficult, since there were no enforceable laws against racial discrimination. For many white people, such discrimination was a new and very unpleasant experience that led them to complain bitterly about Japan. One intellectual friend said that Japanese were racist, had no morality, and only acted on the basis of power considerations. He even refused to believe that income distribution in Japan was far more equitable than in the United States during the 1980s.
But this type of discrimination was not like that of the United States or Europe where nonwhites were treated as inferior in most respects. In Japan, whites were treated better than Japanese as long as they stayed in a circumscribed area and accepted the status of honored guests. The result of such treatment was that foreign people were never accepted as Japanese and were often reminded of being different. Most Japanese people didn’t expect white foreigners to conform. I had many experiences of speaking fluent Japanese and being answered in broken English during the 1980s. Yet, white Americans and Europeans often stayed in Japan for the money and the women and enjoyed being treated like minor celebrities. I had been one of these foreigners, but I finally refused to go on like that. The dissonance between my egalitarian ideals and the way I was living had reached its breaking point.
Shift in Attitude
The decision to open up and be fully present is made in solitude. When I contemplated who I wanted to be, I began feeling ashamed about how I had behaved during my travels. Until then I had mostly treated local people as objects. But the ground had been well prepared by my epiphany in Okinawa, by my friendships with countercultural Filipinos, and by the example of Dennis, my American friend who had found a home in Japan by living on Japanese terms, that is, by giving up many of his privileges as a white American.
Still, there was one thing that gave me pause. Dennis had quickly declined, becoming an alcoholic and finding it difficult to go outside and to work. Many times he had told me how Japanese tried to show him that he wasn’t really Japanese by finding things that he wasn’t aware of that most Japanese would know. As a result, he became paranoid and believed that Japanese people were talking about him and saying he was a fraud. As I observed his fall at close quarters, I took with me an important lesson. Like Dennis, I could never become Japanese. So when reading and writing Japanese turned out to be difficult for me due to my poor visual memory, I didn’t force myself. It was okay not to culturally adapt in some ways, as long as I didn’t act in a racist and ethnocentric manner.
I made many hitchhiking and camping trips to almost every part of Japan when I went back. My main purpose was to master the language and become familiar with the country as a whole. I met every type of Japanese person from truck drivers to university professors. One time, in central Japan, I was given a ride by a middle-aged man. He was very respectful and unassuming, and I immediately liked him. We quickly connected with each other and easily glided over the differences in cultures, interests, and lifestyles. Before leaving me off, the man said, “Ichi go, ichi e.” This is the teaching of tea masters which means that a meeting with others is a special occasion that will never occur again and is to be treasured. I was very moved by his words.
There were also some moments of meeting with my students in Tokyo that surprised me. Despite having little in common with these company employees and looking down on their conventional lives, I enjoyed being with them. They emotionally supported me, treated me politely, and created a very positive atmosphere. Best of all, they gave me their undivided attention. They confirmed me as a person, and there were no expectations. What a relief not to be judged by my wit, sparkle, or cleverness! All I had to do was relax and share the gentle pleasures of eating and drinking in a tranquil and harmonious setting. Dennis was right that Japanese emotional sensitivity was special.
The Other Japan
My view of Japan was also changing because I came to know several leaders of the Japanese alternative movements. Shin Yoshifuku was translating the works of many leading New Age intellectuals such as Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, and Stan Grof. He was an invaluable source of information about spirituality in Japan, explaining to me that some Japanese young people were not interested in Buddhism and Shinto but were receptive to the spirituality coming from the West. The irony was that the leading New Age figures had intensively studied Eastern philosophy. Yet, by removing the cultural accretions, their purified versions were attractive to young Japanese.
Koyu Furusawa, a leading writer on organic farming and worker collectives, gave me a new perspective on the trade friction. An advocate of decentralization, he argued that opening up the Japanese market for agricultural products would only benefit agribusiness and global capitalism. It would mean the end for the small farmer, the countryside would become even more depopulated, and people would consume more food grown with pesticides. He told me about producer-consumer cooperatives and worker collectives, and I felt very enthusiastic about these alternative movements.
I found out about a ranch in Hokkaido, the north island, where a group of former student movement leaders had organized a collective. Since it was possible to work there for room and board, I joined them. The weather was extremely cold and the work was hard but it felt good to be at least partially free from an economic system dominated by large corporations. A wrist injury forced me to leave after a month, but I still remember the idealism and good humor of these people.
From that time on, Japan seemed more than Japan Incorporated. So I would always be careful whenever I made generalizations about Japan. My strong identification with the alternative movements led me to organize, together with an American friend, a series of three gatherings called “Encounters with Another Japan.” This gave foreign English speakers a chance to come in contact with the people and movements that were attempting to restore a human face to Japan. I began to view myself as an advocate for the “Other Japan.”
Cultural Integration
My receptivity to Japanese cultural influence was increasing as well. I learned to speak Japanese fluently and married Haruyo, a Japanese woman who had been my Japanese-language teacher. We had two children who went to local Japanese schools and spoke only Japanese. I was hired to teach comparative culture in Japanese at a junior college. Our neighborhood had almost no foreigners, I loved eating Japanese food, and I made some Japanese friends.
Traditional Japanese aesthetics and especially shakuhachi (bamboo flute) music turned out to be wonderful and unexpected delights. Such music was part of the old spiritual culture and had once been played by wandering Zen monks who viewed playing the bamboo flute as a form of meditation. When I got ulcers, I listened to the shakuhachi music of Goro Yamaguchi for several hours every day for three months while lying on my back on the tatami mats. The ulcers went away.
There was also a time when I went to a shakuhachi concert, even though I wasn’t feeling so well. I asked myself whether I really wanted to listen to this austere music which is about as melodious as the blowing wind. Inside the concert hall, the hundreds of people who attended became totally quiet as the performer appeared. He, too, observed some moments of silence before producing sounds which reminded me of natural elements where there is no human presence. Once I opened up to the sounds, it felt like I was absorbed into a vast plain which stretched endlessly. My fatigued body no longer affected me, and my mind stopped complaining that I should have listened to more exciting music. Going out into the night after the concert, I looked up at the dark sky and felt at peace.
I began to appreciate the traditional Japanese aesthetic of simple naturalness, modesty, and reverence. This sensibility remained in some areas of Japanese life. There were people’s graceful movements and good manners as well as their neat and tasteful fashions characterized by subdued colors. Some interiors of homes still had no clutter, and industrial products had clean lines. Food was beautifully arranged with no heavy reliance on spices. It was a kind of “less is more” attitude which contrasted with the stereotypical American outlook that bigger is better. It was a refreshing change from the pressure to stand out, to make a big splash, to leave little to the imagination, and to pour it on.
My distaste for American communication styles grew as I became less assertive, experienced more empathy for others, developed my ability to intuit others’ meanings, spoke more softly, engaged in lubricating small talk, and tried to be as little like a bull in a china shop as possible. I developed more refined emotions and learned to sense the mood and blend in without disturbing group harmony. This meant attuning myself to the emotions rather than solely focusing on words.
Family Life
Interestingly, my wife Haruyo only partially exhibited behavior often associated with Japanese people. Both of us agreed that in many ways my personality was more “Japanese” and hers was more “American.” I was introverted and shy, and she was extroverted and lively; I was rather reserved, while she was quite open; I didn’t like to talk about myself very much, whereas she enjoyed talking about herself. While we lived in Japan, we got along reasonably well, and cultural differences didn’t appear to be such a big issue.
However, there were a few things I noticed about her way of relating to me that may have reflected a more collective orientation. She demonstrated very clearly to me that she was committed to the relationship which made me feel secure in a way that might not have been possible with an American partner at that time. In addition, her help when I was teaching comparative culture without being able to read and write Japanese was invaluable. I also noticed that she didn’t talk so much about her past and not at all about previous boyfriends. Her need to be fully understood and to explain herself didn’t seem as great as mine or that of other Americans. So I followed her in this respect and justified it as living in the present moment.
When our two children were born, they attended Japanese schools rather than international or American schools. I wanted them to identify as Japanese, not as foreigners in their own country. As it turned out, they were accepted by their teachers and classmates as well as by the neighborhood kids and parents. But they never learned to speak any English. Since I planned to live in Japan for the rest of my life, I didn’t think this would be a problem. But then Haruyo convinced me that when our children grew up, they would face discrimination in Japan as mixed-race people and would have an easier time in the United States. They also wouldn’t have to attend cram schools like every Japanese child and could avoid the brutal preparation for the university entrance exams. Didn’t they deserve to grow up without all that pressure? So, in 1996, we moved to the United States.
Culture Clash
Let’s go back to the late 1980s when I experienced a cultural clash that was quite intense between my country of residence and my native one. It was in this setting that I began to identify myself more with Japan, even though I was lining up on the side of the Japanese government and big business. The main saving grace was that resistance to US demands to open up the Japanese market protected Japanese small farmers and mom-and-pop stores. These were the heart of what remained of a decentralized and more humane Japan. They were the closest thing that Japan had to a community.
Some American writers, the revisionists, had started viewing Japan as the enemy of the United States. They charged that the Japanese government and businesses kept out foreign products while the government aggressively promoted Japanese exports through subsidies and administrative guidance. Nationalism began to rear its head as some Japanese felt that their country was being criticized for its economic and technological success by people with a long history of racism. In an increasingly heated atmosphere, I felt compelled to take a stand.
It seemed that history held the key to understanding why things had turned out this way. Most Americans knew little about history, which often prevented them from having empathy with people from other nations. There were few people in the world who had not been affected by the United States, and many knew about relations between their country and the United States. In contrast, Americans usually had little knowledge of how their way of life and level of prosperity depended upon the rest of the world. So there was a huge gap between Americans like me and the people I encountered abroad. For example, I accepted the American account of World War II that emphasized Japan’s treachery at Pearl Harbor and the need to drop atomic bombs in order to bring about Japan’s surrender. In this account, the war was a confrontation between the democratic United States, defender of freedom, and fascist Japan, pursuing imperial conquest in Asia.
I didn’t know any Japanese people with whom I could talk about these matters, although once I did happen to meet the leftwing media critic Tetsuo Kogawa. He told me that an important watershed in Japan’s modern development was its fateful decision back in the 1880s to identify with the West and “exit” or “leave” Asia. From then on, Japan aspired to become an imperial power, following the example of the West.
I had also read the early 20th century novelist Natsume Soseki when I first came to Japan. In The Wayfarer, the central character felt cut off from family and all the people around him. He had become a modern individual, lonely, alienated, and searching for meaning. For him, there seemed to be only three possible ways out: madness, suicide, or religion. Soseki’s description of the trauma and dislocation brought about by Japan’s sudden and forced encounter with the modern West gave me insight into the psyche of Japanese people. He also helped me realize that some Japanese had penetrated the depths of human psychology and were highly sensitive to moral dilemmas. I could also feel the pain of Soseki’s characters because I had shared so much of that pain.
From my reading of history, it became evident to me that American anger toward Japan and the ensuing Japanese resentment against the United States during the 1980s was the latest act in a tragic drama that had not been resolved by World War II. I interpreted Western outrage at Japanese unwillingness to open their country and embrace laissez-faire capitalism as a criticism of Japanese attempts to preserve their own way of life. Instead of pointing the finger at Japanese intransigence, I thought the focus should be on the long history of white racism against Japanese people and the ways it was resurfacing due to Japan’s increasing economic power in the 1980s.
The colonial context of US-Japan relations also needed to be recognised. Since the time that Westerners forced Japanese to open their country and trade with them through gunboat diplomacy, Japanese had experienced psychological trauma and feelings of helplessness. What Westerners perceived as aggressive and hostile behavior on the part of Japan was a reaction to the Western threat to their independence and way of life. The Japanese reluctance to allow Western people a firm footing in their country was a defensive strategy to protect their own cultural space. It could be traced to the experience of Western attempts to impose alien values on Japan in the name of Christianity, capitalism, and civilization.
Power Transition
The distribution of power has had a great effect on relations between Japanese and Americans. Since World War II, Japan has allied itself with and followed the United States in return for relatively open access to American markets. But as Japan became stronger economically, many Japanese people were no longer willing to automatically look up to Americans as their teachers and benefactors. A more independent attitude began to arise, which affected the ways in which Japanese communicated with Americans. When I gave talks and wrote articles supporting Japan against harsh American criticism during the trade friction, some Japanese supported me which gave me a sense of belonging.
In this era of power transition, I looked for a way to become more active. During the 1980s, I began to study intercultural communication. A branch of the Society for Intercultural Training, Education, and Research (SIETAR) had been recently set up in Japan as a professional organization for interculturalists. I helped to build it up and made efforts to ensure that its institutional structure reflected genuine equality between Western and Japanese members. Until then, it had favored Western intercultural practitioners under the guise of internationalizing Japan by having all the meetings in English. As a result, discussions were often dominated by Americans who had recently come to Japan and were very willing to give their opinions about every subject while Japanese often remained silent.
Japanese people eventually took over the leadership of the organization. The emphasis also began to gradually shift from communication between Japanese and Americans to communication between Japanese and other Asian people. When I first began traveling, I had relied on being a member of a powerful group and having local people relate to me on my terms. Now, I was actively engaged in bringing down old racial hierarchies. Thanks to the catalyst of my Japan experience, I developed a new identity: I no longer acted like a colonizer. I identified with all people.
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If you are interested in an in-depth look at modern Asian and Islamic Civilizations, see my A New World Arising: Culture and Political Economy in Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic Civilizations (2024).
