This question has always puzzled me. What information is the person asking actually seeking? Is it, for the most part, a polite way of making small talk? Is it a purely curiosity driven question? Is it an attempt to get to know someone better? Is it a compatibility test? Do they want to know where I live so they can rob me when I am at work? If I say something incomplete for brevity’s sake will they later think I lied to them?
The possible implications of the question are so manifold that I often wish the person who formalized the question had chosen a clear cut route instead.
“Where do you live?”
“Where were you born?”
“Where did you grow up between the ages of 5 and 10?”
“Where does the majority of your personal belongings reside?”
These are questions I can give definitive answers to; the former, however, makes my brain implode and I end up sounding like a schizophrenic living primarily in Switzerland while my alter egos roam around England and Japan at will. Some people must think,
“Surely it’s not so hard to formulate a succinct and accurate answer and stick to it every time”. Of course, that’s an option, but when one is of mixed race, there is a need to have a few variations tucked up one’s sleeves; I find, from personal experience, that this is definitely the case if any part of your heritage is Japanese.
I tend to steer clear of addressing myself as being from Japan when in Japan; I only do it when I’m feeling mischievous or when I’ve established that the enquirer’s world view is close to or on par with mine. I reserve this answer for such cases because often, before the question is even directed at me, I find myself having to convince some people, especially of the 65+ generation, to address me in Japanese while I continue to tell them in fluent Japanese that I can speak Japanese; trying to tell these people I am actually part Japanese would be too much for them to digest! So, against my moral inclinations, when actually asked, I end up telling them I’m from Britain for ease’s sake.
In Britain, my choices are driven more by selfishness, which I’m not sure I should be confessing to! When the desire to sound exotic rises up in me, I will say that I am from Japan. If I want to seem more cultured, in job interviews, for example, I make it clear I am from both Japan and Britain and that I have spent significant periods of time in both countries in a bid to demonstrate my cultural flexibility and my adaptability. When I am not particularly interested in having to elaborate on my answer or I just want to blend in and avoid seeming like a show off, I stick to saying I’m from Poole, England. This works until I get asked what school I went to...
So why not simplify everything and just say I am “half Japanese half British”? Well, that doesn’t really answer the question posed, does it? I could be half British half Japanese but brought up in South Africa with no in-depth knowledge of the cultural implications of being part British or Japanese; in this case I would technically be from South Africa despite being half Japanese half British. Nowadays one’s ethnic background doesn’t necessarily denote where one is from.
This then makes me question whether you have to have lived in a country or to have deep-set roots in the country to be from the place. For Japanese people born and raised in Britain, is saying they are from Japan a legitimate answer to this particular question? If they were raised in Britain but in a Japanese environment, they would feel Japanese despite having spent their entire lives in the UK, but saying they are “from Japan” would imply they came from Japan at one point to live in Britain. If they are undeniably Japanese from a cultural point of view, can they also be from Japan without having lived there? To the general British public, they would most likely be seen as being “from Japan”, but the Japanese may see this differently. There is the tendency to be seen as “different” in your country of heritage and in your country of long-term residence, which only confuses the matter further. Of course, this applies to people of varying cultures, not just the Japanese.
On the other hand, without aiming to disgruntle any readers, one then encounters people in North America who, upon greeting you, will find out you’re from Britain and proclaim that they’re also technically from Britain because they’re great great grandfather was British. They might also be sort of from Denmark because their great grandmother on their father’s side was. Not to say the enthusiasm to assimilate isn’t welcome, but it is a peculiar phenomenon that many visitors to the US or Canada encounter. These tenacious links to other countries may be deemed insignificant by someone actually from the country, but they seem to mean a great deal to the person identifying with them.
Perhaps globalization is reaching a point where mono-culturalism is no longer seen as the societal norm or aspiration, not that it was ever superior to multiculturalism, but in some cultures it was regarded as such once upon a time, depending on the context. It has enabled and encouraged the spreading and interlinking of cultures, bringing multiculturalism slowly further out of the ethnic minority category; more people seem to have a “but” to add to their answers to this clearly outdated question. The new king of small talk for the generation should be, “where do feel you belong?’.
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