US-Japan Relations Should be a Japanese American Priority

This article originally appeared in the 2022 Holiday Issue of Pacific Citizen.

Given this year’s holiday issue theme of, “Together Again” I thought it would be appropriate to share some of my recent thoughts and experiences as a Japanese American working in the field of US-Japan relations.

After a decade-plus of Japanese American and Pan Asian American community work, I recently took a position at Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP) in the summer of 2021. JASGP is a nonprofit organization that seeks to inspire mutual curiosity, understanding, and collaboration between Japan and the Greater Philadelphia region through citizen diplomacy. We operate Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, produce the Philadelphia Cherry Blossom Festival, present a US-Japan Business and Public Policy Series, and provide Japanese arts, cultural, and educational programming for all ages. The past year and a half working for JASGP has reminded me why I got into this field in the first place, and I would like to share why I think more Japanese Americans should also become involved in these kinds of efforts.

Whether through circumstance or intentional design, the Japanese American community has historically been excluded from most official diplomatic channels related to US-Japan relations. Yet it is our community who suffers the most when these relations sour. The wartime incarceration is an obvious example, but even in my own childhood amid the US-Japan trade war of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I recall an extreme amount of prejudice targeted at me and my family living just over an hour’s drive outside of New York City. Anti-Asian hate crimes have been on the rise nationwide throughout the past three years and closer to home Shofuso, our only Japanese structure in the city of Philadelphia, was vandalized in June 2022.

In light of these more recent events, I feel there is a certain immediacy in the need to be involved in work that continues to strengthen the relationship between our two countries. While this is not a singular solution, strengthening the US-Japan relationship is one means of safeguarding our Japanese American community from further instances of violence. This can be done effectively on the local level by engaging in cultural and educational programming that demystifies Japan, its culture and its people. In one of my work projects related to the history of Shofuso I found compelling evidence that suggests the Nisei leaders who resettled in Philadelphia after the wartime incarceration engaged with Shofuso and other Japanese cultural programs for this express purpose.

Considering that the same Nisei led both the Friends of the Japanese House and Garden and JACL Philadelphia chapter, the Japanese American community’s involvement in Japanese cultural spaces during that era seems to have had a deliberate goal of building empathy among the Philadelphia population at-large, particularly amid the Redress movement and later US-Japan trade war. The Nisei were somewhat uniquely qualified to do this sort of work because of the many aspects of Japanese culture that their Issei parents imparted on them. I would argue however, that even for Sansei, Yonsei, and later generations who did not have the benefit of a bilingual/bicultural upbringing, that we can and should engage in work that embraces our Japanese cultural heritage, and shares it with others outside of the community.

I acknowledge that for many within our Japanese American community, this may seem like an unattainable goal. After four or more generations in the US, three of whom were deliberately instructed by the government and community leaders to assimilate into the mainstream (white) society, it can seem daunting to even know where to begin. Having intentionally distanced ourselves from Japan as a means of survival, how do we go about reclaiming our ancestral language and culture, let alone engaging in diplomatic conversations in a professional setting?

The good news is that there are more ways than ever before to plug into cultural and language learning programs from the comfort of our own homes. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that digital communications technology has evolved to the extent that we can replicate a variety of learning experiences that were previously only available in-person. Tadaima Virtual Pilgrimage is an excellent example in terms of cultural and educational content that is freely available online. Likewise, many of the Japan America Societies and other Japanese cultural presenting organizations have also created online content. Considering the volume of content that was produced in the last few years of the pandemic alone, it would take several more years to get through it all, as many past programs are freely available on YouTube.

In the context of improving one’s Japanese, there are paid online language programs available widely throughout the country. JASGP used to host Japanese language classes in-person prior to the pandemic, but after participants saw how easy it was shifting to the online format, all of our language programs continue to be offered exclusively via Zoom. Another excellent option for language self-study is the Duolingo app that is widely available on all smart phones with a free introductory version, and paid version that offers additional features. Still, even with all these resources it can be difficult to find a career path in US-Japan relations, which I experienced having spent the first decade of my career working in fields that were only tangentially related.

I began my journey back to Japan about seventeen years ago when my Issei Hibaachan died. Hibaachan was our matriarch, at the age of 95 the last surviving Issei in our extended family unit, and our only direct link to Japan. When Hibaachan died I began to question whether I was still Japanese without her presence in my life. It took two years for my plans to materialize, but in the summer of 2008 I moved to Kyoto and began a Japanese language intensive program at Kyoto University of the Arts. By the end of that six-week program I had learned enough conversational Japanese to navigate daily life in Japan, as I spent the next semester living in Tokyo studying at Temple University Japan Campus. After that experience I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Japan Studies and had the opportunity to live in Kyoto again during the summer of 2010 while conducting research for my Master’s Thesis, which dealt with the cinema of Occupied Japan from 1946-1952.

Coming out of grad school with an admittedly narrow focus, I somehow managed to get a job working at the local film commission as a liaison to Hollywood film studios shooting on location in Philadelphia. I also started part-time teaching undergraduate classes about the history of Japanese cinema at Arcadia University. While my day job had little to do with Japan, I was able to keep one foot in Japan Studies through my academic work. When I became involved with the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival as a film programmer, and later as Festival Director, I was able to use that platform to share not only Japanese cinema but also Japanese food culture, theater, and other art forms that were related to the onscreen programming in a given year. However, given that our focus was diasporic cinema, there were limited opportunities to do this work in earnest. It took a pandemic inspired career shift for me to finally find a full-time job in this industry, and certainly not for lack of trying.

I initially went to Japan and learned Japanese to prove to myself that despite being mixed race and not having grown up speaking the language, I was Japanese enough to have a relationship to my ancestral culture. As a result of my time in Japan I finally felt able to identify as a Japanese American, as I came to know and love aspects of Japanese culture that were not available to me growing up in a predominantly white suburban environment. This experience also gave me the perspective to identify the many elements of my upbringing that were both Japanese and Japanese American, and the ability to discern the nuance between these two, sometimes contradictory, cultural influences. The last fifteen years of my life have been and incredible journey to better understand what it means to be Japanese American, which in turn led me to become deeply involved with the JACL and other Japanese American community organizations.

In a sort of backwards way, I would not have found the community I was seeking unless I had first made contact with my identity as a Japanese American by traveling to Japan. Similarly, it was my work in the Japanese American community that allowed me to be hired into my current position at JASGP, which involves reintegrating the multigenerational Japanese American community back into daily activities at Shofuso. Reconnecting to Japan has brought incredible joy and fulfillment to my life, and now that I am working in the field of US-Japan relations, my closeness to Japan has begun to shape this current phase of my career in new and exciting ways. 

I do not mean to minimize the impact of institutional white supremacy and internalized racism that accompanies the intergenerational trauma preventing many incarceration descendants from pursuing an education in Japanese language or culture. These are very real challenges that our community continues to grapple with on a daily basis as Japanese Americans navigate our conditional acceptance within mainstream America. I also acknowledge that my experience is specific to me as a mixed-race white-passing Yonsei who benefits from immense privilege in even being able to study in Japan in the first place. However, I share my story to suggest that many within our community may also be grappling with the fear of being perceived as “not enough” and I would like to encourage others to push through that and find your own way to make a meaningful connection with contemporary Japan.

I recently had the opportunity to represent JASGP at the international symposium organized by the America-Japan Society of Kyoto, which was my first work related engagement in Japan, aside from chaperoning a couple of school trips. In many ways this was a homecoming of sorts, since Kyoto was the city where I first lived in Japan. This was my first visit to Kyoto since 2016, although I had the opportunity to chaperone the Kakehashi Program in 2019 just before the pandemic began. Three years is not a terribly long amount of time between visits abroad, but in the early months of the pandemic, I found myself questioning whether I would ever be able to visit Japan again given the uncertainty and anxiety around prolonged border closures. I can only imagine how my Issei Hibaachan may have felt during the many decades she was unable to visit Japan during and after WWII. Returning to Japan was a cathartic experience that allowed me to shed a lot of the pandemic stress that I had been carrying around with me, and reinvigorated my interest in working to bring our countries and people closer together.

Visiting Japan at my current age brought up a lot of new feelings, especially now that I am a father. In part, because my knowledge of self and comfort within my identity allowed me to speak to Japanese people with confidence as a Japanese American. I became reflective of how little I knew when I first arrived in Japan some fifteen years ago. At that time, I felt shame and regret for not having learned Japanese sooner, and envious of my peers who had spent time in Japan earlier in their lives. Now, I feel content knowing I have made it this far in my journey of self-discovery as I continue to explore what it means to be a mixed race Japanese American, and am excited to be able to guide my son in his own exploration of identity.

Not exclusive to this trip, but with each visit to Japan, I find my appreciation for certain elements of the culture continues to deepen in new and unexpected ways. For example, I spent my first two nights of this trip in the Namba neighborhood of Osaka. A younger me would have enjoyed the crowded nightlife of Dotonbori, but I found myself more drawn to Doguyasuji – a covered shopping arcade filled with restaurant suppliers who sell specialty cookware, utensils, and restaurant uniforms. Perhaps it is just a part of getting older, but there was a time when I would not have looked twice at some of the shops I spent hours perusing during this last trip.  

In this sense I find the Japanese concept of kaizen or continual refinement to be particularly apt in describing my own relationship to Japan. The more that I learn, the more I realize there is left to discover. Likewise, I would also use kaizen as a metaphor to describe what the ideal US-Japan relationship should look like. In terms of the bilateral relationship, our two nations have never been closer than they are today. However, to think that this means no attention is needed to build or strengthen this relationship would prove a critical oversight.

Compared to the bubble economy years, American students are less interested in studying or working in Japan. Japanese immigration policy is largely to blame for this, as it is notoriously difficult to get a permanent visa to live and work in Japan as a non-citizen, so many college students forgo it as a realistic possibility for post graduate employment. From the Japanese perspective, there are also fewer reasons to go abroad when the aging population of Japan has resulted in an unprecedented number of job openings in their own domestic economy. Considering how safe Japan is compared to the US, risk-adverse Japanese citizens may be further deterred from venturing overseas amid the rise in anti-Asian violence. There is also the matter of the isolationist mentality that has developed in reaction to the COVID lockdowns, which is a factor in both Japan and the US.

While Japanese Americans may not be able to address these core challenges directly, our involvement in grassroots cultural exchange programs and other citizen diplomacy efforts may help on both sides as a presence that both Japanese and Americans can relate to. That seemed to be the case in my latest trip to Japan at least, as I found conversation flowed more easily with our Japanese counterparts in the America-Japan Societies once they knew about my Japanese heritage.

Now that the travel restrictions have been lifted to allow easier entry into Japan, the Kyoto Symposium was the first opportunity for the US-based Japan America Societies and Japan-based America-Japan Societies to hold a joint meeting since the COVID pandemic began. The meeting started with a formal introduction from each representative organization, sharing details on our current program areas and recent developments amid the pandemic. While it was interesting to learn how our peer organizations are engaging in this work, my favorite parts were the many casual conversations between sessions with Japanese colleagues as we argued about baseball and swapped travel stories in each other’s countries.

After the joint meeting concluded our delegation participated in a day-long summit with policy experts and diplomatic officials weighing in on issues related to security in the Indo-Pacific region, challenges and opportunities in bilateral relations during the COVID pandemic, and best practices for strengthening US-Japan relations on a local level.

One of the speakers made an analogy that I thought to be quite profound. Although US-Japan relations are the best they have ever been, like a garden, the relationship needs regular tending to ensure its continued prosperity. At risk of stumbling into an Issei gardener trope, I wonder who better than the Japanese American community to entrust this great responsibility to?

Becoming a member of your local Japan America Society or participating in some of their cultural exchange programs is a good first step to getting involved in citizen diplomacy. For individuals already involved in this work looking to take their engagement to the next level, consider joining the U.S.-Japan Council, a membership organization founded by Japanese Americans and focused on amplifying our voices within the field of US-Japan relations. JACL is also doing great work to this effect in our continued partnership with the Embassy of Japan on the Kakehashi Project that brings youth ages 18-25 to Japan for short-term homestays. Another homestay program open to participants of all ages is the Japan America Grassroots Summit organized by the Center for International Exchange.

With so many resources available it is easier than ever before to get involved in US-Japan relations. It is deeply satisfying to be involved in this work, and I encourage others within our Japanese American community to seriously consider how they might become more involved in strengthening and maintaining this critical relationship over generations to come.