blue_mouse

Aiko Minematsu was born in Kobe and moved around quite a bit within Japan when she was very young. In the interview, Aiko says that the first 'cross cultural experience' she can remember was when she moved from urban Tokyo to Gunma, a mountainous prefecture in Japan. She remembers being confused during physical education class because, instead of saying north, east, south and so on to indicate directions, they would say the name of the surrounding mountains.

When she was in 2^nd grade, Aiko left Japan for the United States with her family. She remembers it being difficult because she had to learn a new language and move schools even within the US. But once she got the hang of the language, she began enjoying herself. Aiko now feels she has been left with only great memories from that time in her life.

After several years, she moved back as a ‘returnee student (kikokushijo)’ to middle school in Japan. While she had initially struggled to express herself in Japanese upon her return, Aiko felt that by the time she entered university she had sufficiently acculturated and had ‘graduated’ from being a ‘returnee student’. Aiko spent her undergraduate days believing that she was now ‘fully Japanese’.

As she pursued her career as an English teacher, however, Aiko found herself being drawn to the new returnee students whom she was teaching. It was as though they were pulling on her heartstrings—one string at a time. This puzzled her. Aiko thought to herself, ‘I am supposed to be fully Japanese now, so why are these returnee students resonating with me?’

In her early 30s, Aiko finally became aware that there was something there that required her attention. When she began talking to her close friends about the unexpected reactions that she was having towards the returnee students, one of her friends said to her, ‘Why are you so hung up on trying to be Japanese?’ It caught her off guard. Aiko then wondered out loud to her other friends, ‘It seems like I’ve been trying to be Japanese all this time.’ To this they responded, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve been telling you this for a very long time!’ But she had not been able to hear them. Aiko felt as though she had been the emperor with no clothes – everyone except her had known what was going on with her. The revelation came as a shock. Aiko claims that that was when her journey in search for her identity began.

Now, several years on, the interviewer asks a final, deliberate question in English: ‘Where is your home?’ Aiko—also in English—responds, ‘My home is within myself.’ Aiko confesses, in Japanese, that she used to envy those who had a place to call ‘home’ and people to call ‘childhood friends’. Once she began reflecting on her story, she came to the realization that she did indeed have friends from her childhood—in Chicago—with whom she had long kept in touch as pen pals before the internet came around. She also realized that she didn’t have one home, but she had many. The many moves had made Aiko feel as though she was rootless because nothing seemed to have remained constant in her life. Yet, all these homes had one thing in common: herself.

As the interview ends, the interviewer, Mikiko Hatsuda, confides to the listeners that she had to hold back tears as Aiko relayed that last part of her ongoing TCK journey.