My "Half" Family
Wendy Jones Nakanishi
I have three sons who refer to themselves as halves.
In Japan, any man, woman or child of mixed-race parentage is known as a half. I first heard the term over twenty years ago. An American, I had arrived in Japan in 1984 to take up a position at a small private university in the south. Initially, I was the only gaijin, or foreigner, on the staff. But after three years, a Canadian man, his Irish wife, and an English woman were hired. The English woman had been born and raised in Britain, and her father was from London, but her mother was Singapore Chinese: a wartime romance. I was idly chatting with one of our students one day when the young Japanese leaned forward and whispered earnestly, "That English teacher is a half, isn't she?"
I was shocked by the inherent racism I sensed in her comment. I remember blushing and feeling hurt and confused on my friend's behalf.
Those feelings are, naturally, intensified in the case of my own boys, now ages nineteen, seventeen and twelve, when I hear them so described, either by themselves or by others. My husband is Japanese, a pure-blood. I can't help feeling that the term half implies that our progeny are mongrels.
The Japanese are profoundly, if often unconsciously, racist. I know that as a blonde, white-skinned, blue-eyed westerner I am routinely accorded better treatment than those gaijin residents here who come from another Asian country or from Africa.
One of the first English words I heard here was the term homogeneous. Japanese are proud of their single-race culture. Foreigners still represent only a tiny portion of the population, but that is changing, partly due to the boom in international marriages such as my own.
Western men have a great attraction for Japanese women, who have seen American television shows and films depicting husbands cooking meals and changing diapers. They have heard of the western injunction, "ladies first." They compare these idealized Hollywood images with the reality of a country in which men expect to go first in any situation, in which men never venture into the kitchen, in which men are the pampered wage-earners who are absent from dawn till midnight every weekday, and who spend the weekend resting and watching television.
I was thirty-one when I met the Japanese man who would become my husband. He was thirty-four. I had been asked to give a special lecture on British poetry at a cultural center in the medium-sized town of Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku. There was the usual assortment of earnest middle-aged housewives and retired businessmen. They were all eager, their smiling faces turned upturned towards me as I spoke, as though expecting words of wisdom that might transform their lives.
There was one exception: a disheveled young man who sprawled at the communal table, his face cradled in his arms. When he was nudged to attention by a neighboring student, he raised his head and smiled sleepily, informing me that he was a farmer and had been up until the early hours sorting oranges to be taken to the local agricultural co-operative.
I disliked him on sight. I didn't like his lack of contrition regarding his apparent rudeness. I was upset that he had disrupted my well-mannered class. I was suspicious when, after the class, he asked me if I would like to see the greenhouses where he grew flowers.
As they say in novels, "Dear reader, I married him."
From the start, our relationship proved an education of sorts - a lesson in self-knowledge, however unwillingly undertaken. I had suspected that the abrupt young farmer had designs for me; I soon learned, to my chagrin, that he actually wanted an opportunity to practice his English. Takehito had once lived in Kenya for three years, working as an agricultural specialist in the Japanese equivalent of the Peace Corps. One humiliation followed another. My young farmer had no romantic interest in me; he was actually engaged to a young Thai woman who worked in Bangkok as a civil engineer. Takehito's parents opposed the match, ostensibly because she would be unable to find similarly high-paying work in Japan, but her darker skin undoubtedly played a part in their disapproval.
Given our advancing years, our longing for children, and the adamant nature of his parents?opposition to a Thai daughter-in-law, Takehito and I married after a short engagement. Because we were both past the first bloom of youth and had been involved in a number of other relationships, some of which ended disastrously, we embarked on our life together with realistic, or some might describe them as low, expectations, and that fact possibly accounts for the longevity of our marriage. Defying popular odds for such matches, we have just celebrated our twenty-first wedding anniversary, and we are probably more favorably disposed to each other now than we have ever been. I also attribute our happiness to the fact that Takehito has actually lived outside Japan and is not as insular as many of his compatriots. He is frequently described as an unusual Japanese. He has always been a doting father and a helpful husband. He helps the children with their homework every night and washes the dishes.
But marital bliss hasn't always characterized our relationship. We started off badly; I began to contemplate divorce weeks after the ceremony that united us. I found Takehito's friends and family intrusive, and I lamented the loss of privacy. A neighbor invaded our bedroom on the morning after the marital night with a message from my husband's mother; we hadn't managed to get a phone connected yet in the rental property we'd moved into. It soon became clear to me that I had not simply married a man called Takehito. Rather, I had formed an alliance with the immediate and extended family of a Japanese farmer.
It was difficult to take in at first. I was the product of the typical American dysfunctional family. My father left home when I was seven. Two years later, when my parents' divorce was finalized on St. Valentine's Day, no less, he married a woman several years older than my elder brother.
My father moved to a town seventy miles away with his new bride; my mother, sunk in deep depression, retreated to her bedroom, where she lay on her bed and read magazines and ate chocolates. We four children were left to fend for ourselves. As adults, we agree that we each developed toughness of character as a tactic for survival. We also have mixed feelings now about our upbringing. On the one hand, there were privations; it was as though we were orphans, although our parents were alive. From necessity, we had to learn basic household skills. On the other hand, we learned to relish our freedom and independence. We marveled at hearing about the restrictions our friends?parents placed upon their activities. We felt we could do anything we wanted, when we wanted, and we did.
My marriage transplanted a loner, a rebel at heart, into the confines of a conformist, settled family unit. Our lives were inextricably intertwined. We lived near my in-laws by necessity. My husband worked with his parents every day, growing oranges and greenhouse flowers for the local agricultural market. I quickly grew accustomed to phone calls morning and night from my mother-in-law, or Okaasan, as I was to call her, and my father-in-law, Otoosan. Arrangements had to be made for each day's work, or future plans devised. Too, we were expected to attend frequent memorial services for departed ancestors, held in front of the elaborate Buddhist altar in Okaasan's house, and to turn up on Japanese holidays.
The birth of my own boys drew us even more closely into the family net. Naturally, Takehito's parents were anxious to see their grandsons and, equally, they were anxious that the usual formalities should be observed. Japan is a country of networks and groups and associations. A Japanese woman's marriage signifies her joining her husband's family, rather than, as in the west, forming an alliance with one man. Likewise, the birth of a child, at least in our area, is an event that involves the extended family and the neighborhood.
When my first son was several months old, my mother-in-law held an elaborate lunch party for all those relatives and neighbors. It was an occasion characterized by the usual division of the sexes. The men sat on cushions on the floor, each with a portable table set with a large bento meal placed before him. The women, clad in aprons, scurried to and fro between the dining area and the kitchen, bearing trays with bowls of miso soup and flasks of warmed sake and bottles of beer. After the men had eaten and drunk their fill and were lying back, flushed, on their cushions, smoking and chatting, the women apologetically settled before their own portable tables, placed in a drafty corridor near the kitchen, to have their own meal.
I was required to wear a kimono and to kneel before the men, offering sake or trying to replenish their glasses of beer. There was a celebratory toast of sake, and I was requested to moisten my baby's lips with the warm liquid, raising a general laugh when the boy seemed eager to have more.
I had worried that my sons might be bullied at school because their mother was an American. This, fortunately, has not proved to be the case. Undoubtedly, the boys have profited from the fact that their father belongs to one of those long-established farming families of the area and that they are related to many of the people here. Too, I may have assisted in the general acceptance of their mixed-race ancestry by offering to teach some English lessons at their primary school and by volunteering to participate in neighborhood activities.
For me, the greatest problem is, and always has been, that my sons and I speak different languages.
When I mention this concern to American friends resident in the States, they grin and shake their heads knowledgeably: two teenagers and one adolescent boy? Of course you don't speak the same language! Who knows what they're talking about? That is, if you can get them to talk at all. But western friends residing in Japan and similarly circumstanced understand completely. If they live in such a rural area as I do, they may find that they are the only English speakers with whom their children are in constant contact. Raising a bilingual child in such circumstances is very difficult, particularly if the English-speaking parent works full-time and is unable to spend much time at home. My husband is a taciturn individual, even in Japanese, so, despite his fluency in English, our boys have missed out on lively English discussions at the supper table.
My children speak to me in simple Japanese and I reply in simple English. Misunderstandings are common. We sometimes resort to drawing pictures to explain our intentions; other times, we consult dictionaries. My sons have a good comprehension of spoken English, but they are unable to speak it themselves. In this they are like most Japanese, who are taught English at school from the age of twelve, but whose lessons lack emphasis on conversation and listening.
I was granted a year's sabbatical by my university a little over eleven years ago and took my three sons to England, where I had done postgraduate work before my marriage. My sons were then ages seven, five and one. It was unreasonable to expect that they might master English in that short time, especially as it transpired that my two elder sons befriended two Japanese boys whose father was earning a degree at a university near our town. My in-laws sent monthly boxes of Japanese food and videos and children's magazines and books. We might as well have stayed in Japan, as far as my boys were concerned.
In spite of the linguistic divide between myself and my sons, it may be that our particular challenges are the very things that bring life and color to our relationship. When my parents, embroiled in the emotional drama of their break-up, defected from their duties, my siblings and I gained strength from our freedom. Similarly, although it has been a huge source of pain for me that I can't chat with my boys in the way most parents take for granted, we enjoy, paradoxically, an unusually close relationship. Perhaps it is because we are deprived of a common language that we are far more physically affectionate than is common in Japan, where demonstrations of intimacy, even between a mother and child, are scarcely seen. My boys and I are playful; we make jokes. If actions speak louder than words, we know each other profoundly but at an intangible level.
Still, it is a less than perfect situation. I blame myself. I should have made a much greater effort to learn Japanese years ago. My excuses for not having done so are many. I've had a full-time job since coming to Japan. I'm not gifted at learning languages. I've felt overwhelmed by work and household duties. But it's never too late. I am currently enrolled in a Japanese study program.
But I feel that I have imparted a sense of the larger world to my children and that they have imbibed western values that I cherish but that they might not have encountered or found acceptable in a purely Asian environment. They like privacy and independence; they respect women; they can envisage a life outside of Japan. They are international citizens, familiar with the States and England and all the other countries I have dragged them to. In a world that is, to adopt the cliche, increasingly globalized, perhaps the type of family to which I belong, with my own relatives thousands of miles away, and my children citizens of a land not my own, will become the standard rather than the exception.
Now, when people call my children halves, or when my boys refer to themselves by that term, I say, "Not half, but both."
About the Author
Wendy Jones Nakanishi is an American who did postgraduate work in Britain, earning an M.A. in eighteenth-century English studies from Lancaster and then a Ph.D. on Alexander Pope's correspondence from Edinburgh University. Wendy has worked full-time since her arrival in Japan in the spring of 1984, employed by a private Japanese university. She has published widely in her chosen academic field. In recent years, she has also begun writing "creative non-fiction," describing her life in Japan as a foreigner married to a Japanese farmer and as the mother of three sons.
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