Really cool and interesting video here. 26 year old white girl born to two British parents in Japan and has never lived anywhere but Japan.
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Interesting vid. If that girl isnât Japanese enough for Japanese people, then thereâs really no point in anyone trying to assimilate.
Chinese consulate needs me to provide details regarding my travel to Turkeyâa layoverâlisted on my family visa application. They arenât asking about any other country listed on the five year travel history list. HmmmmmmâŚ
I watched this. Her Japanese is, of course, perfect. Obviously in a homogenous society like Japan, from a racial standpoint if you differ radically from everyone else, itâs difficult to not stick out no matter how culturally entrenched you are.
Doesnât mean she canât assimilate. Just that Japanese arenât immune to making the same types of assumptions about people who donât look like them that weâre all susceptible to on some level.
Heck, I feel pretty well assimilated here and I didnât grow up here and am neither Asian nor a native speaker.
Assimilate may not have been the right term. I was alluding to the earlier conversation in this thread about how hard it is for immigrants to not be viewed as outsiders. Itâs clear that she will always be viewed as one in Japan. Although she has assimilated to some extent.
Also, I thought at some point they mentioned that she wasnât a citizen. I kind of got a feeling that she would be if she could, but she canât. Assuming thatâs true, what the fuck else does Japan want her to do?
Well, it seems like they have a âdo whatever they wantâ bit at the end:
Iâm always wary of generalizing the idea of a person being accepted into a culture or not. I hear it all the time:
âJapan doesnât accept me!â
Who, or what, is Japan?
The reality is that in some areas of her life there are people who will fully accept her (though many people insist this can never be trueâI disagree); while there are other areas and other people who will not fully accept her no matter what she does (Iâve found the same to be true for me both in my home country and in Japan).
Thereâs never any universal agreement by all members of a nation that a person will or wonât be accepted. Itâs always way more nuanced than that. And a lot of that comes down to the individual, their attitude, and their expectations.
As for citizenship, unlike the US, in Japan you arenât automatically given citizenship just because you were born here. I know of many other gaijin with far-less-impressive credentials than her who had no problem obtaining citizenship, and I feel pretty confident I could do likewise if I chose to, so I doubt sheâd have trouble becoming a Japanese citizen if she really wanted to.
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Iâll take your word for it. As I said, Iâm not even sure that she isnât one or wants to be one. I thought heard something along those lines in the vid, but I might be remembering it wrong.
My overall impression was that she was hardly unhappy with her life growing up in Japan. But no question sheâs had a unique upbringing and finds herself in a confusing place in terms of self-identity.
Yeah, I agree with that.
If her instagram is a representative sample it seems like she has a lot more non-Japanese friends than Japanese ones, which I think would be odd for someone who is truly assimilated and accepted as not an outsider.
Unless she deleted a bunch of stuff, she only has 17 posts on her Instagram feed, featuring more fish than humans.
From Youtube videos I have seen, Colombia/Brazil seem like pretty good options for African Americans.
That looks like her business acct.
Hereâs the one I saw:
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Salvador, Brazil would be a great spot.
She says in the video that she met a bunch of non-japanese friends in college so it makes sense that is who she is close to now and not her high school/elementary school friends
That is correct. However, she did go to college in Japan, so non-Japanese students were likely a substantial minority (and probably werenât born and raised in Japan). So it sounds to me like she has more in common with those people than people born and raised in Japan. There is nothing wrong with that. It just seems to be how things are.
The college she went to is one that has an unusually large number of foreign studentsâit bills itself as an international university. So she would have had more opportunity to meet fellow pale faces like herself than at most other institutions in Japan.
Just received my China family reunion visa.
Now just need ~$10,000 to make my way there before November 18.
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And USDOT cancelled my flight.
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So youâre going to live in China for however long the duration of your visa is?
Where in China?