Communications Several Years Ago I

Communications

Several years ago I was walking along a busy commercial street in a mid-sized Japanese city. The street, called Otamai Dori, was the main shopping thoroughfare in Himeji, a city of about 400,000 located south of Kobe and north of Okayama. It was Saturday afternoon, which is a busy shopping time in Japan as most schools and businesses that keep Saturday morning hours had been let out for the weekend.

Himeji is a port city on the Pacific Ocean. One of its main sources of revenue came from importing and exporting goods. Even though the city is a stop on the Bullet Train's route, attracts a large number of sailors from around the world, and is located between Tokyo and Hiroshima, few foreigners make it into the downtown area. One reason may be that its main tourist attraction, Himeji -- Jo, the country's only remaining original castle, is well-known among the Japanese, but not outside of the country. It is frequently overlooked by outside visitors who prefer to spend their limited vacation time in the more famous and tourist-friendly cities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima.

I had moved to the city several months earlier to teach English conversation at the local YMCA international language school. I was lucky to have been hired as I am of Italian descent and English is not my first language. But when I was hired the head of the school had said they were interested in starting classes in other languages such as Italian, French, and Spanish. "That's where your background could come in handy," the director, Miyake-san, told me.

I had chosen to move to Japan after forming close relationships with two Japanese-Americans in college. Through them I learned about Japanese food, manners, art and, best of all, the plethora of lucrative teaching jobs for recent college graduates. I love college, but I did not know what I wanted to do at the time. I thought about traveling to Italy, where my family is from. But before I did that, I wanted to have an adventure and move someplace where I don't speak the language and where I don't know anyone. I wanted to go to a country that was completely different from my Italian and American experiences. Dozens of applications and two interviews later, I found myself on a plane, heading east, my bags packed and slightly sick with anticipation at the realization that I was moving to a country where I did not speak, read or understand the language and where my olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes contrasted dramatically with the Japanese's straight black hair and dark brown eyes.

On this afternoon I was walking slowly along Otamai Dori to window shop. Having survived on a very limited budget in college, I was giddy to finally have enough money to make a few impulse purchases. On that day I was looking closely at the sweaters in a Benetton clothing shop. There was one grey, short wool sweater jacket with silver buttons and brightly colored trim that I really liked. As I stood there, trying to decide whether to go in and try on the sweater, I heard someone across the walkway shout in my direction.

At that time Otamai Dori was like a cross between an actual street and a mall. Across the street and over the shop roofs ran a wide, plastic roof that shielded shoppers from rain and snow. The roof, together with the shop buildings seemed to create a kind of sound shelter against the traffic noise that rumbled just a few yards from the shopping center. Even on busy shopping days, one could easily hear individual conversations and the tinkling music piped out of loudspeakers over the low rumbling din.

At first I did not pay any attention to the shouting. The people were speaking in Japanese and, I assumed, trying to get the attention of someone else on my side of the street. I only looked up after a minute or so when the shouting continued and I heard a familiar word, "Haro!" Or "Hello!" I looked up and turned to look across the street. I squinted into the crowd, assuming the shouts were from some of the Japanese people I had met. I scanned the crowd, looking for one of my neighbors in my apartment building, a group of my students or perhaps a fellow YMCA employee. I started to run through names in my head. The first few months in Japan had passed in a blur. Everyday brought what felt like an avalanche of new names and words, customs to understand, information to absorb and language to learn. I had always been good at remembering names before moving to Japan, but lately I was not only forgetting names, but also struggling with recognizing faces. There was just too much information to juggle.

"Haro!" "Haro!" The people were shouting louder and waving in my direction. I smiled and waved back tentatively. Having not recognized any of the faces, I decided to just smile and hope that whoever knew me would step out from the crowd and greet me personally. But no one from crowd across the street moved toward me. More and more people from the group started shouting "Haro!" And waving at me. I then realized that I did not know any of these people. They were shouting "Haro!" because it was probably the only word of English they knew and they were trying it out on someone who looked, to them, like someone who could understand that word.

Most foreigners in Japan at this time were native English speakers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, or England. When I was in America, I always stuck out as a person who either came from the Mediterranean area or whose family had moved from there. The way I spoke and looked always looked a little different from the people around me. In a way, I was used to being different, but I was also used to being recognized for my Italian heritage or at least for one of the countries nearby. In Japan I was beginning to realize that all Japanese think non-Japanese are from an English speaking country. For some reason, this really bothered me. I didn't mind being recognized as a foreigner, but I wanted to be recognized for being the right kind of foreigner and not just lumped in with all the other white people.

This was not the first time I encountered a group of friendly strangers shouting greetings at me. As with previous encounters, I smiled and waved again, feeling a bit like a celebrity. But the tone of this encounter, at least for me, grew dark when out of the crowd I heard another familiar word, "Gaijin, da yo!" This translates loosely to "Hey, looky at that thar' foreigner!"

As the chorus of "Haro!" faded, a few more "Gaijin!" Gaijin da yo!" emitted from the crowd. My smile faded. I no longer felt like a celebrity. Now I felt like an animal in the zoo or a museum exhibit. The addition of the term gaijin, which means "foreigner," changed the tone of the exchange for me. I went from feeling like an exciting, compelling human to a strange and curious creature. The reason is because of the nature of the two words, "Hello! Or "Haro!" And "gaijin!" Humans use the word, "hello" to greet and welcome others. As with other greetings, "hello" is meant to put others at easy and show that they are welcome.

With the subsequent use of the word, gaijin, however, I saw how "haro!" was used in this instance not as a greeting, but as bait with which to capture my attention. The group saw me standing across the road and started shouting "haro!" To see what I would do. If I reacted, from that distance I looked different. If I did not react, I was probably some weird native who had died her hair from black to brown for kicks. When I did react and turned toward them, showing my very non-Japanese shaped eyes, the group became excited that their bait worked and they had accomplished their goal, get the foreigner's attention. The subsequent utterance of the word, gaijin basically just identified what they had caught, in this case, my attention.

Looking back, I realize now that the group did not mean any harm. I was something new and a little exotic. Few Himeji residents had regular interactions with non-Japanese people unless they worked at my school, enrolled in our language classes, or happened to have a Japanese English Teaching fellow or JET teacher in his or her class. Most foreigners lived clumped together in specific apartment buildings and only a few developed close friendships with the Japanese. At the time, there were only about 50 foreigners living in Himeji, so its Japanese residents had barely a 1% chance of encountering a gaijin. I was a rare and exciting discovery for this group of boisterous Japanese teenagers.

But to me, a young woman standing alone on a busy street in a still strange country, the word gaijin changed the tone of this encounter. For the group of teenagers waving and shouting at me, the word gaijin was merely a way of identifying their rare and exciting discovery. For me, a citizen of a country whose history has its share of prejudice and violence, the impersonal identification of me, based solely on my appearance, sounded like the racial and ethnic epithets hurled at Italian immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, Irish immigrants, Jews and millions of other people in the United States.

The word gaijin simply means "foreigner." It is not a derogatory term. But in Italy and the United States, two countries rich with immigrants from all over the world, the act of impersonally identifying a person's racial or ethnic background based solely on the person's appearance, is considered insulting. In Italy this is because foreigners are usually tourists and insulting tourists means losing money. Also, the population in Italy has been growing rapidly over the last decade thanks to massive immigration from the surrounding European countries and Asia. Today, about 7% of the country was born in another country or was born to a foreigner. Before the immigration boom in Italy, the population was rapidly shrinking.

In the United States this is because the country prides itself on being a "melting pot," which meant that any race, ethnicity or culture was accepted in, as long as one's name and appearance looked and sounded "American" or white and of Anglo origin. This compelled thousands of Jews, Italians, Poles, Russians, and other Europeans to assimilate by changing their names into more English-sounding monikers: My friend's grandfather changed his last name from Zlotniki to the English translation "Gold," for example. Another friend of mine changed his family name back to the original Italian name and he is now "Fantigrossi" instead of just "Fanta."

Many immigrants came to America to escape difficult conditions in their native countries. Once settled on American soil, many new residents worked hard to assimilate into the new American culture and shed their old ways. To point out someone's difference, therefore, was to point out how one had failed to become accepted into American society. The newest wave of immigration in Italy has not had the same effect on its newest citizens. Instead, Italy is more like a salad where different cultures and backgrounds keep their distinct traits, but they all work together to make a great country.

Another reason I reacted so strongly to being called a gaijin was because of the history of racial discrimination in the United States and around the world. For centuries Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Aborigines have suffered from discrimination in employment, housing and education. Down in the southern United States, Jim Crow laws made it illegal for a people of one race to use bathrooms designated for the other race or to sit in the wrong place on the bus or at a lunch counter. Despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act and numerous other laws that strive to provide equal rights to all races, genders, religions and creeds, people today still discriminate based on appearance. In South African, Apartheid made it legal to discriminate against Black Africans and New Zealand and Australia are just beginning to treat their aboriginal citizens better.

The Japanese teenagers calling out to me were blissfully ignorant of all these offenses. Unlike the United States, it is nearly impossible for a non-Japanese person to gain Japanese citizenship. And few foreigners choose to live for more than a few years in the country as it is difficult to feel settled in a place where the language is difficult to learn and one's appearance is so different from the general populace. The Japanese do have a history of discrimination, but it has been directed primarily toward other Asians: Koreans, Chinese, and Philippinos. I was merely a curiosity to the group, not unlike being a celebrity. The calls of "haro!" And "gaijin, which sounded to me like taunts or even threats were really just the excited identification of me as an exciting new discovery.