Emails from Kirsten and Naoto
April 2004
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 00:05:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: More thoughts on the half business
Dear Friends and Family
Well....my father STILL hasn't posted the last month's worth of emails on his site. So it's his fault if I repeat myself.
(he's going to Europe soon, so I guess he can wait until after...)
Naoto is continuing to enjoy his role as "resident dissident" in his company. He tries to come home by 7 p.m. on Mia's bath nights. It seems like his coworkers are beginning to learn about his ways as last night he was asked to do an (impossible) task at 5 p.m. and was told by a coworker "you better hurry up because it's Mia's bath night."
I just hope he doesn't dissent his way out of this job before our baby comes!
I am making a few "mommy friends" from the children's centers in the neighborhood. Now Mia has 2-3 other little children to ignore or scream at when we go to the park/center. For Easter, we hid candy-filled (Did you know Japan didn't have jelly beans? I had to order them special from the Foreign Buyer's Club- and when the other girls tasted them they were so surprised) plastic eggs outside our apartment and Mia and two other older girls "searched" for them.
Now Mia wants to hide eggs every day.
The constant comments about Mia we get now are that she is big for her age and that she is very verbal. She sings songs in Japanese or English or Mia-language almost all the time if someone is not directly interacting with her.
More thoughts on the Half Business
I am still trying to think up snappy comebacks for intrusive strangers who come up to me on the street (and this happened again Monday, mind you) and ask me "is your baby japanese?" or "is her father Japanese?" or (and this one I hate because it implies Mia is only 1/2 a human being) "is she half?"
I was having a granola/Berkeley moment today when Mia and I went into Foreigner-adrape Kichijoji to a Mom/baby music class. It is run by a Haight/Ashbury ex-pat married to a Japanese man.
We danced expressively to songs from at least 5 different countries, waved scarves, and drank soy milk. I was having Earlham college/Coventry flashbacks the whole time.
It was nice to be in a class with at least 4 other biracial children, though. I've been reading essays written by biracial or transracially adopted children in the U.S. It seems that there really is no easy road for them to become comfortable with their identities as biracial/mixed children.
They all seem to go through these stages:
1. not notice the difference as young children
2. go through a crisis in school (for example in Mia's
case never being "white" enough for the whites and
never being "asian" enough for the Asians)
3. if they're lucky, coming to terms with their mixed
selves sometime during college
4. The two most important contributing factors to
well-adjusted biracials seem to be a) parents who
talked openly about race (didn't just try to be
racially "blind") and b) seeing other biracials in
their community, on tv, or in books
I guess we'll have to live in Hawaii or California, then!
Along the way I discovered some ideas I had never thought of before. Like, what do you mark on census forms? Not white nor Asian. Mia is both.
Or, feeling alienated from your parents because you are not the same race as they are. You are something else entirely and sometimes the authors lamented their parents would never be able to understand their situation because they are monoracial.
Or the interesting statistic I got from the MAVIN magazine website (a mixed race magazine for youth- http://www.mavin.net/)that over 75% of both men and women biracials polled in the U.S. (don't know the demographic or economic class of the pollees here) said they would rather date someone biracial then monoracial.
Or the bewildering array of different kinds of biracial/biculturals out there and their bewildering array of different issues. Some examples include:
Hapas (Hawaiian mixes)
Amerasians (biracial Asians fathered by white G.I.s
all over Asia)
Black/white (issues depend alot on economic class in
the U.S.)
Black/Asian (a whole nother ball game because of
racism in the U.S. and in Asia)
White/Asian (which category Mia falls under)
Transracially adopted children of U.S. heritage
Transracially adopted children of foreign heritage
and the list goes on and on.
For an interesting look into this world (that both my
children will become a part of) take a look at the
faces at
http://www.thehapaproject.com/ (and click on
samples on the top, right. You will see a variety of
faces and voices)
sorry no amusing Japanese anecdotes in this one. I've
got a few up my sleeve for the next time.
love and light,
Kirsten
p.s. Cherry blossom season in Tokyo just ended. For a while, it was snowing pink petals on our street every day. Here's a picture of us with Baba in a local park.
Click
picture
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:18:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Naoto the Dissenter
Dear Friends and Family
Well, I am in the last few weeks of waiting for baby #2 to appear.
Today is the beginning of "Golden Week", a week of Japanese holidays including greenery day, constitution day, and children's day. Azaleas are in full bloom along all the major roads and our days are sunny and bright. This is a big travel week, but Naoto and I are sticking close to home in case baby decides to make an appearance.
In Mia news, she is almost potty trained (yay) except for sleeping times.
She is also a bubble maniac. We have to go outside and blow bubbles at least once a day...sometimes more. She is addicted.
Naoto's fears about her Lincolnesque uncoordination are being somewhat assuaged by the fact that she has recently become more physically daring on play gyms. She still whines about climbing ladders or whatnot, but she will do it.
She seems to have absolutely no fear of bugs, however. She loves to find ants, ladybugs, weird flying yellow grasshopper-like Japanese bugs, and bees and then try to pick them up. Yesterday we found an ant colony in a playground sandbox and she sat right down and was soon covered in ants! She didn't seem to care that they were crawling all over her.
Naoto the Dissenter
We promised you news from the Japanese business world, so here are a few of Naoto's peeves. (in no particular order)
1) The women sitting near the conference rooms are continually asked to make tea for customers. Also, apparently no men make coffee if they take the last few drops from the pot. Naoto is very proud that he makes coffee if the office is out. I just wonder how long it will take for him to bring this up in a meeting...
2) His company, like many other Japanese companies, are sticklers about time. You must explain to supervisors even if you are a few minutes late. So, the other day his train came in 5 minutes late. As Naoto went through the ticket gate, he was handed a piece of paper officially stamped by the train company with the date and the exact amount of time the train was late. Apparently it was for "proof".
3) Naoto is temporarily working customer support. (He is actually technical support.) He has to deal with phone calls from a particularly annoying brand of salaryman from a big, influential Japanese company. Apparently, this nemesis of his has the Japanese male habit of answering most of Naoto's suggestions with:
a sucking in of breath through his teeth
a click of his tongue
then a long, exhaled "that's a little..." (chotto)
But doesn't actually say why or what the problem is with Naoto's suggestions or seem to understand Naoto's rather direct answers are truly the real answer.
All I have to say is "ha ha, welcome back to Japan"
love and light,
Kirsten
P.S. we went to sesame street world here in Tokyo with some of naoto's elementary school friends and their children. Here are some pictures. I think I was more excited by the characters then Mia, but she was happy to hug elmo. I wanted her to hug the Count (my favorite) but she was too scared.
Click on a kid to enlarge.