Migrations – hmmn

A wonderful post (or re-post from a Kyoto Journal article) on being an immigrant in Japan from the wisened perspective of Robert Brady’s Pure Land Mountain.

As a new arrival in Japan it hardly seems appropriate to call myself an immigrant, but I moved here with the intentions of permanently making Japan my home, so an immigrant is what I am. My mother immigrated to the US from her native Finland, and I have often noted to myself the irony of “following in her footsteps” as it were.

Brady’s post brought back for me some of my memories of growing up with a “foreign” parent, the discomfort and disconnect I used to feel when hearing my mother on the phone speaking to her friends in a different language (I used to always ask my father, “Why isn’t Mama speaking normal”), or the endless questions from friends and neighborhood kids about her. That my parents (with 1-year old me in tow) immigrated to Hawaii from the mainland US added another layer to my geo-emotional makeup, to say nothing of my mother’s further removal from her homeland.

Brady writes:

I am the first generation of my family to visit Japan, let alone live here. My wife, who is Japanese, is about the 900th generation of her family to live here. Our children therefore are second generation immigrants and about 901st generation natives, which makes them thoroughly indigenous nisei, and so extremely interesting in many respects. They are more Japanese than me, though less American, and less Japanese than my wife, though more American than her, and more international than either of us.

As my wife and I contemplate starting a family and raising our own “nisei” children, Brady’s post resonates loudly.