This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout - narrated in the girls’ own voices - that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.
This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout - narrated in the girls’ own voices - that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.
Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being 'Half' in Japan
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Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being 'Half' in Japan
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Overview
This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout - narrated in the girls’ own voices - that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847693884 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 12/23/2009 |
| Series: | Critical Language and Literacy Studies , #7 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Laurel D. Kamada is a Lecturer Professor at Tohoku University in Japan. She has published in such areas as: bilingualism and multiculturalism in Japan; gender and ethnic studies; marginalised (hybrid and gendered) identities in Japan; and discourses of ethnic embodiment and masculinity. Her other interests include theoretical and methodological discourse analytic approaches to the examination of identity. She serves on the editorial board of the Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism and is on the Advisory Council of the International Gender and Language Association.
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Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls
Being 'Half' in Japan
By Laurel D. Kamada
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2010 Laurel D. KamadaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-388-4
CHAPTER 1
Constructing Hybrid Identity in Japan
... my son is being verbally abused and discriminated against because his name sounds foreign and he looks a little different. There are one or two children in his class with extreme influence over the other children who say to my son in Japanese, 'Foreigners are stupid! Die foreigner!' They consistently use the word 'stupid' and 'die'. How can Japanese children be so cruel and ignorant of children who are different? My son has been biting his teeth at night and scraping them back and forth while he sleeps and fears where he can go around school without being tormented by the children. Some children have even thrown rocks and sand at him for no reason at all except that he is different. Furthermore, they take his things and throw them back and forth teasing him ... If his stress level gets so high because of this problem we will have no other course of action than to withdraw him from the Japanese school November 1998. From an e-mail sent over the BSIG e-list from an American father of an elementary school child in Japan of Japanese and white mixed-parentage
My daughter just sees herself as a Japanese girl who has a strange, bicultural Dad November 2001. From an Australian father of a 12-year-old child in Japan of Japanese and white mixed-parentage
Importance and Timeliness of the Study of Hybrid Identity in Japan
I have lived in Japan for over half of my life as a 'white' foreign woman — a gaijin. I originally ventured to Japan in 1975 for a few years to explore an exotic Eastern culture and to teach English. In the early 1980s, I returned to Japan on a Japanese scholarship to study education at Osaka University. After nearly a decade living on my own there, I married a Japanese man. In a few years we had a child — a mixed-ethnic son who soon came to assume an ethnic identity differing from both of ours.
I was born, raised and educated in America, and then came to live in Japan, as a foreign country, out of choice. I have worked hard to acquire good, but not perfect, Japanese language skills and to understand and adapt to the rules, mores and practices of a complex Japanese society while dealing with my foreign status. While I have had my own struggles with adapting to life in Japan as a foreigner, my son's situation is categorically different. He is not a foreigner; he is Japanese. Japan is his homeland; Japanese is a native language for him.
The first quotation above is from a letter that appeared spontaneously over an e-list of the (Japan) Bilingualism Special Interest Group (BSIG) in 1998 from a desperate father of a mixed-ethnic child attending a Japanese elementary school. It carried the impact of a bombshell on the list members (me included) who make up an English-speaking foreign community in Japan, mostly with Japanese spouses and mixed-ethnic children. A huge flood of discussion emerged in a manner that the e-list had never seen before as mail flew back and forth for weeks. Suddenly it seemed everyone had a story to tell of their child, of someone they knew, or of themselves. Several people had the story to tell of their child, who upon entering the Japanese school system found herself/himself for the first time suddenly called gaijin (foreigner) by classmates.
I had my own story to tell of my unpreparedness as a 'white' American mother in dealing with racialization of my son, experienced on both sides of the Pacific, in America as well as in Japan. I was amazed as I personally witnessed how cruel very small children can be to each other. In Japan, my son was made to feel different and teased for his stand-out curly hair and thought of as a 'White' foreigner. Perhaps this is what made it all the more shocking for me when during a brief residence in a suburban American school; I personally witnessed some elementary school boys racializing my son as Chinese, using depreciatory language. It was the first time for me to feel the sting of racialization in America first hand.
Many parents on the e-list in Japan expressed the extreme shock and disappointment felt by their children in Japan in being constituted as foreigners in their homeland. Up until that point in their lives these children had considered themselves to be Japanese, just like their best friends whom they had played with in their neighborhoods since they were big enough to walk. After all, one of their passports officially verified their Japanese nationality; their first (and for some, only) language was Japanese; and one of their parents was Japanese, along with Japanese grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.
The online discussion was so impassioned and rich that we decided to put together a monograph on the topic of ethnic bullying in Japan in order to address many of these problems and to help others in similar situations. Someone was appointed as editor and articles were requested of the list members who had so energetically shared their private experiences, their journeys and their solutions to problems.Most of the members of this BSIG e-list are English-speaking foreign nationals concerned with issues of how to instill bilinguality in our mixed-ethnic children in a society where bilinguality and minority language education is not an option for most such children within the Japanese educational system (see Kanno, 2004, 2008).
Suddenly multilingualism was not the only issue that I and others in this community in Japan had to consider. Now the notion of hybrid identity had entered our thinking, and we could not retreat from considering complex questions as our children started growing up. I began to realize that these questions needed to be empirically researched in order for us to know how to understand and deal with raising mixed-ethnic children (to aid parents), devise curriculum and provide counseling (to aid educators), offer answers to immediate questions (to aid children personally dealing with issues of identity and social marginalization), and facilitate better communication between members of the foreign community in Japan and their Japanese neighbors.
This was the catalyst that drew me to this topic at a time when there was nearly no research at all undertaken on the topic in Japan. Members of this foreign community in Japan had zealously demonstrated the importance of the need to understand the hybrid identity of their children being raised in Japan.
This particular research community of mostly 'white' foreigners married to Japanese, who have been residing in Japan for two or three decades now, represents pioneers of a new segment of Japanese society. While ethnically mixed children of international marriages have existed in Japan since before World War II, up until recent years they have not been seen in large numbers, making these children of today the first ever generation of a sizable (and growing) community of such children to appear in various regions around Japan, particularly in the larger cities. The impassioned timeliness and importance of this topic had been demonstrated and this e-list discussion clarified the need for a study on the hybrid identity of these children.
The second quotation above illustrates the feelings of another sort of 'white-foreign' parent of a mixed-ethnic child in Japan. This was written by a father, who perceives his daughter as not having any particular issues with her 'biculturality'. This quotation, along with the first one, represents just two diverse ways in which parents of such children in Japan understand their children's ethnic identity. However, how the parents view their children and how the children themselves construct their own identities do not always match, and are not fixed attributes. What this book examines is how the children themselves actually constitute their own identities and position themselves within various contexts in their daily interactions with others.
An Emerging Hybrid Identity in Japan
This book examines how six adolescent girlfriends in Japan discursively construct their hybrid identities within the context of Japan. While the term hybrid can assume many nuances, the focus of this book is on children of mixed-parentage born and raised in Japan. While children of Japanese and South American (mostly Brazilian) mixed-parentage have been one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in Japan in recent years, in this study I narrow the focus to specifically examine children with one Japanese parent, and one non-Japanese (white-foreign) parent who was born and raised in an English-speaking environment of Britain, the USA or Australia. (The reasons for this decision are presented in the section 'A focus on Japan and on children of Japanese and "White" mixed-parentage' [p. 8].) While in many ways, these participants might just seem like 'the (Japanese) girl next door' and that is how they often see themselves (and as illustrated in the second quotation above), their associations and solidarity with each other form an important part of their identities within their own communities as well as within the larger Japanese community.
The first generation of a sizable community of these mixed-ethnic children (referred to as 'half' in Japanese) has emerged in Japan in recent years, challenging the long-held myth of Japan as a single-race society (tan'itsu minzoku). However, in spite of such changing demographics, the discourse of Japan as homogeneous still continues to inform political, social and educational practices in Japan. One of the main objectives for undertaking this study is to explore how racialized, ethnicized and gendered practices are discursively taken up and represented or rejected by members of this new community of children of mixed-parentage. The argument I make is that this examination will lead to a conceptualization of how apparently delimiting and constraining discourses might, in fact, be open to a reconstruction that is more positively enhancing. I further argue that while social 'othering' may serve to isolate and marginalize a certain group of mixed-ethnic minorities, hybridity may also lead to an identity of privilege and heightened self-esteem in the same individual according to the accessibility of certain more empowering alternative discourses. In this study while I foreground the examination of ethnic identity, I also explore gender identity, particularly the intersection of ethnicity and gender.
The girls are all the same age and in the same grade at different schools in a geographically broad community. They consider each other to be 'best friends' and have been associated through their foreign parents' network of friends and associations since pre-school or earlier. This study, conducted over the span of their early adolescence (ages 12–15), problematizes how they take up, represent or reject racialized, ethnicized and gendered practices in their daily encounters with others.
What is particularly interesting about this group of mixed-ethnic youths — and what is shown in this book — is that while these girls often struggle to positively maneuver themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses that disempower them as 'others' within Japanese society, paradoxically, at other times within alternative more empowering discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy a celebrated status that they discursively create for themselves. This book shows how these girls come to celebrate their individual mixed-ethnic cultural capital and how, through this construction, they are able to negotiate their identities positively as they come to terms with their constructed hybrid identities of 'Japaneseness', 'whiteness' and 'halfness/doubleness'.
Another main aim of this book is to 'give space to the competing voices of participants' (Baxter, 2003: 72) who might otherwise be silent or silenced and whose stories might otherwise not have been known. This book has a storyline throughout that follows these six girls out of childhood and into the rapid physical and mental/emotional growth years of early adolescence. It analyzes spoken data, collected over several years, during a time when these girls were highly conscious of being in the public gaze and at a time when they were often confronted with issues of acceptance and popularity at their schools. Adolescence is a time of extreme self-consciousness in terms of not only ethnic identity, but also newly emerging gender awareness and gender identity.
There is a pervasive Japanese proverb, which warns of diversity or difference getting squashed:
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. (Deru kui wa utareru)
This proverb implies that those who fail to work hard enough to avoid standing out in Japan either must certainly face being pressured into conforming or, where that is not possible, can expect to face some kind of 'othering' (or bullying) by their peers. While these girls work very hard to conform to Japanese behavioral norms, conforming to the norms of physical appearance is something beyond their agency, as they recurrently attract the stare and notice of others due to their conspicuous 'ethnic' features. Within this context, a major question central to this book arises: how do these girls constitute themselves on the basis of their physicality? Within this Japanese proverb, facial and bodily features differentiate people of non-Japanese ethnicities from the mainstream as 'nails that stick up' (as foreign-looking outsiders who stand out conspicuously). This study explores how the participants work to positively position themselves in the constitution of their hybrid embodied identities, which they are unable to hammer down (conform, transform) into the physical 'embodiment' of 'Japanese'.
The search for an appropriate term
This book deals with mixed-ethnicity and mixed-ethnic identities in the context of Japan. My long struggle to find an appropriate term to use to refer to participants of this study became a process of elimination. I realized only after I began the study that the term bicultural, while applicable, was not specific enough, in that it does not clearly distinguish between bicultural children of two (biological) Japanese parents who have lived overseas, with that of bicultural girls in this study who have one (biological) non-Japanese parent who was raised outside of Japan and one (biological) Japanese parent who was raised in Japan. The term bilinguals also does not fit these girls, as not all of them were comfortable or highly proficient in using their minority language; all of them spoke Japanese as their primary language — or one of their primary languages. While in this study all of the participants' non-Japanese parents were 'white' and English speaking, I further resisted the use of the term biracial to refer to these girls, partly because of the association of 'race' with the 'black/ white' model of 'racism', which grew out of a particular historical context in the West. Also, the notion of the validity of the concept of 'race' itself has been highly questioned (see the section 'Introduction: Ethnicity, Ethnicism and Racialization' [p. 16]). Rather than using binary categories of bicultural, biracial, bilingual or dual-ethnic, in this book I was looking for a more neutral, non-binary term that signified a mixing of (uncountable) ethnicities.
At first, I also rejected the use of the concept (within post-colonial theory) of hybridity or hybrid identity to refer to the girl participants of this study, as it is a very unfamiliar term in Japan and it seemed to convey an unpleasant, non-human connotation. However, in the end, I finally decided to use these terms, particularly when I was referring to the participants' 'hybrid' identities and not to them personally as 'hybrid' people. The term hybridity - which in its simplest form means mixing (Bhabha, 1994) — has been widely used in post-colonial contexts in Europe, North America and Oceania. Within post-colonial theory (e.g. Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Werbner, 1997; Werbner & Modood, 1997; Young, 1995), studies examining hybrid identity have looked at how people have dealt with ambivalent identities caused by a mixing of cultures, races, ethnicity and languages.
While I had been searching for a term that the participants, in referring to themselves, might use, what became apparent was that most of the time these girls did not particularly use any specific term to describe themselves. When given examples such at multiethnic, double, half, Eurasian and so forth, and then asked to write down what they would prefer to be called in either English or Japanese, all of them wrote down that they just wanted to be called by their given names.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls by Laurel D. Kamada. Copyright © 2010 Laurel D. Kamada. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Constructing Hybrid Identity in Japan
Chapter 2: Examining Discourses of ‘Otherness’ in Japan
Chapter 3: The Participants and the Data Collection
Chapter 4: Negotiating Identities
Chapter 5: Claiming Good Difference; Rejecting Bad Difference
Chapter 6: Celebration of Cultural, Symbolic, Linguistic, and Social Capital
Chapter 7: Discursive ‘Embodied’ Identities of Ethnicity and Gender
Chapter 8: Discursive Construction of Hybrid Identity in Japan: Where has it Taken Us?