If you live in Canada, you’re Canadian. If you live in the USA, you’re American. But if you live in Japan – well, you’re not Japanese.
If you live in Japan permanently, you have Japanese citizenship, but you’re not considered Japanese the way a person can be considered part of the culture of Canada or the USA. There is a division created between the cultures, by geography alone, so much that the people of Japan (or the Orient in general really, but I’m concentrating on my own experience here) are made out to be a different animal all together in the race of human beings.
For myself, I was born in Canada, raised in Canada and with a Canadian-majority family, yet integrated so much with Japanese culture that I can relate more to that culture. This identity in myself was not fully realized until I was able to travel to Japan. Once I was there, I discovered that was where I felt like I belonged. This Canadian existence was so difficult to return to, because I had always rejected it for one reason or another that I didn’t fully understand, and now I fight it. I think of myself as Japanese for this reason – because the person I am fits into the Japanese culture much better than it fits into Canada.
I’m made out to be an alien in both places. In Canada, I don’t blend in well because on the outside I look different, reflecting how I feel on the inside. I’m an artist, what can I say; the chaos of my mind leaks out into every aspect of me. Canada is known, however, to have so much multiculturalism that any culture of its own is lost to diversity. Where is the opportunity to exercise the diversity of yourself? Diversity has been made to be something strange and unusual. In Japan, however, while I look the part, there is always something about me that is unmistakably Canadian, no matter how Japanese I become. At first encounter, I am Japanese, and yet I walk down the street drinking a cup of coffee, and sometimes I forget to remove my shoes. My language as well is heavily influenced by both languages I speak – Canadian English, and Japanese. My tattoo artist, Os Paredes, once said during one of my tattooing sessions, “I speak funny where ever I go! In Brazil where I speak Portuguese, I have a Canadian accent. But in Canada where I speak English, I have a Brazillian accent! So I never quite fit in anywhere.”
There seems to be a trend being produced here – multiculturalism within oneself is COOL. It’s not that you have an identity crisis. It’s that you’re fighting down the other half of yourself.
So am I Japanese or am I Canadian? The popular opinion is that which I’ve already mentioned – you’re not Japanese unless you have Japanese blood – but I have a very different view of this born from being trapped between cultures and places. I am actively living Japanese culture, language, no matter where I live in the world. And so I call myself Japanese. Is this only because I’ve been able to break through the barrier of this far-away land to obtain the traditions and influence? Can this concept be used in the way I throw it around so carelessly? Is it because I have an understanding that allows me to view the culture no differently than any other culture that gives me that carelessness?
Do I alienate myself with this mindset and blame it on the outside? I won’t deny that at the times I feel alienated I don’t place the blame on narrow minded Canada. Yet I won’t deny also that I have fault in part. While integrating myself with Japanese culture, no matter how I am set apart and viewed – as someone who has betrayed Canada perhaps? – I make no attempt to fit in. But this is all part of who I am, as an artist, as a writer, as a normal person with a way of life. I share this insight because this way of life, and any artist’s way of life, lends heavy influence into their work. I am an artist and my medium is words, and so I am naturally gravitated toward a certain way of using those words like the way a painter would chose one paintbrush over another. They may all be choices we make subconsciously, never asking ourselves why we would chose one thing over another. I think these are things that we should all be conscious of, as our influences are as much a part of our identity as how we obtain them through the nationalities and cultures we relate with.
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