Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [50]
My parents emphasized that the grades on my Japanese report cards were unimportant—this was an education not in social studies or chemistry but in becoming Japanese. I would have wished it to be the opposite. Subjects could be learned from books. Becoming Japanese required an ability to read my social situation. And this I could not do. I clumped indoors with my outdoor shoes, or called a student in the grade above me by her first name. I passed Japanese language but flunked Japanese race.
It is an exacting subject. The Japanese believe they are a race apart, proclaiming their blood more pure than that of other peoples. Over the years, I would repeatedly watch Japanese racism dawn on white Americans. Initially, the American would be charmed, as Japanese would praise his halting Japanese as much as his exoticism. He would tell me he felt an affinity for the culture, that he might be Japanese inside. I would give a noncommittal nod. In a month, or a year, or five years, he would realize he would never be accepted as Japanese. It might come to him when he went to a hospital for the first time, and watched the doctor recoil from his “butter-stinking” torso. Or it might come when he realized only an exceptional Japanese woman would date him seriously, that her family would probably oppose a marriage, and that his children, if he had them, would face discrimination as “children of confused blood.” Or it might come, paradoxically, when he had perfected his Japanese. While many Japanese laud foreigners who speak broken Japanese, many find it kimochiwarui—nauseating—when foreigners become fluent.
By virtue of my two native parents, I had a chance to assimilate no American of non-Japanese descent possessed. As my sister demonstrated, it was a real chance. Living now in Tokyo, she has gone so native that Japanese compliment her English. I used to marvel at how she passed until one day in college I watched her answer the telephone with Japanese manner and mannerism and realized she was no longer passing. She was Japanese.
Today, when Japanese encounter me here, they often ask if I am half Caucasian. My sister never fields this question. This may be due to physical variation between us. But it seems more likely I do not code as Japanese because of a set of behaviors—how I hold my body, how I move through space, how I speak. Japanese who interact with me are assaulted by my difference from them. They make sense of that difference by implanting it in my body.
In Japan, I realized racial identity has a behavioral component. I am not alluding to the postmodern idea that race is entirely a social construct. I am invoking the more modest notion that perceptions of an individual’s race do not rest on biology alone. Both my sister and I have the blood and skin of the Japanese majority. Yet while these biological traits were necessary to our status as “true Japanese,” they were not sufficient. Our race was also defined by our behaviors.
It would be some time before I would apply that insight to my identity as an Asian-American. I was, of course, aware of the demand to assimilate to American norms. I had spent two days in my Boston nursery school before my mother received a call from my teacher, who complained I was teaching the other children Japanese and asked my mother to stop me before I confused them beyond recall. At dinner, my parents gently impressed on me that while I should be proud to be Japanese, I should also keep it private. That was the first iteration of what would become a mantra in the home: “Be one hundred percent American in America, and one hundred percent