It's taken me some time to write out these thoughts.
Partially due to concerns with not wanting to be yet another blind-to-white-privilege chic (and there are many) . I do not want to come across as disrespectful to injustices that many experience for their whole lives. The kind of oppression that I cannot imagine because I have not lived your story.
I’ve only lived mine.
I've wondered if sharing part of my story may add to the collective voice of those who have experienced the pain of being foreign in a place that is for all extensive purposes, your home.
This brief story is about my experience of being born and raised in Japan for 16 years, as a white, caucasian female. I wasn’t born in a metropolitan area like Tokyo where it is common to see a non-Japanese person. I was born in Shimonoseki, Japan which is on the Southwestern tip of Honshu, located in Yamaguchi prefecture (so just think of it as Southern, more country side vibes).
My family was the first American family to permanently reside in our neighborhood. My sister, brother, and I all attended Japanese public school up until 9th grade. My parents are missionaries (they have now lived in Japan for 32 years). When you are the kid of 2 missionaries, ain't no body got the funds for international school. My siblings and I were the first ever Americans to be enrolled at the public school we attended. We were homeschooled in the morning by our mom (for English) from 6am to 7:30 am before heading out the door for a full day at Japanese public school.
To understand the experience of growing up in a more rural area of Japan as a white kid, you also have to understand a bit about the legalities. Though I was born in Japan and have lived there longer than anywhere else, I am not, nor could never become a citizen. I would like to, but in Japan there are regulations that you have to be at least 50% Japanese (by blood) to be a citizen. The only other situation that you can gain Japanese citizenship, is if you are born in Japan and both parents are unknown.
There is a strong position of “native” vs. “foreigner” where I grew up in Japan. The word foreigner 外人(gaijin) literally means “outside person.” It is a word used in common vernacular. See a visibly non-Japanese person walking down the street? The word was either spoken loudly with a finger point, or at best, audibly whispered. I often wanted to disappear, just so I could not be reminded so often of how I didn't belong.
Every 4 years my parents and my siblings would leave Japan for a few months to visit America and see the grandparents, which I super looked forward to. I don’t feel great saying it, but I loved being able to blend in when I was in America. For once I was not a foreigner.
Attending Japanese school until 9th grade was something I look back on and I’m glad I made it out alive. It was isolating but bearable until 6th grade. Then the bullying really began. It was the worst, most isolating experience of my life. I remember the pain of literally being called an infection by my classmates. To some extent I couldn't even acknowledge that it was happening to me because it was too much to take in. This lasted from the moment I got to school until I would leave school after tennis practice at 7pm. None of my tennis teammates would practice with me, no one would acknowledge that I was standing next to them, no one would respond to me during recess.
I had one true friend during that time named Naomi, who was Japanese. She was also a victim of bullying. We became friends because no one wanted to be friends with either of us. She ended up taking her own life at the beginning of our 9th grade year because the bullying got so bad.
And I lost my only friend.
It won't surprise you to hear that I struggled with an eating disorder throughout this time.
I was not Japanese, but desperately wanted to appear physically as close to not being of a European build as I possibly could. And for me, an eating disorder is what it took. The eating disorder also served as a way to numb out the pain I was feeling from losing my friend, and the daily grind of being bullied at school.
When I moved away from Japan at the age of 16, one thing remained with me; I never wanted someone to feel like a gaijin - a foreign person ever again. I’m a human being, pretty certain you are too. We are never actually foreign. The definition of the word means “strange and unfamiliar.”
Our desires as humans are to feel the opposite. We long to feel accepted.
As I look at how we treat "otherness" in regards to body size and shape in America, I see a place where the feeling of foreignness is being imposed on individuals in larger bodies. Department and clothing stores cause individuals in larger bodies to feel foreign by not carrying their size. Businesses and corporations impose a feeling of foreignness by not providing seats in conference rooms, public transportation spaces, and even doctors offices that do not have blood pressure cuffs, examination tables, or even tourniquets for lab draws, to accommodate those in larger bodies. Daily, they send the message that one belongs in that space up to a certain size, but once that line is crossed, one becomes foreign. The very furniture does not welcome their presence. Feeling like a foreigner, chronically, is an immense emotional, psychological, and spiritual trauma. And we are cultivating a culture where so many are experiencing these traumas repeatedly. Trauma evokes two possible reactions. Heart crushing pain or cultivation of numbness to live through the repeated and predictable blows of pain.
For those of us in bodies that our discriminatory culture deems more "acceptable," we need to step off of our pedestals for more than a second and think about something other than our own greatness. We need to take a step out of our own experiences long enough to recognize this cycle of trauma that our fellow humans are experiencing.
If my childhood taught me one thing, it's this:
We should not have to be of the same ethnicity, body size, nationality, color, gender identity, or sexual orientation to take someone into this realm of safety - the realm of acceptance and inclusion. Don't ever treat anyone like a foreigner.
This is what the world needs, and this is what I want to provide;
the feeling of being native wherever you live, because we are all citizens here.