"Henna nihongo" (Strange Japanese): On the Linguistic Baggage of Racial Strangeness

Author(s): Ayako Takamori

Source: Japanese Language and Literature , October 2015, Vol. 49, No. 2, Special Section:
The Politics of Speaking Japanese (October 2015), pp. 485-508
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Japanese

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24615148

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Henna nihongo (Strange Japanese): On the
Linguistic Baggage of Racial Strangeness

Ayako Takamori

Introduction
When I first began my fieldwork research in 2005 with Japanese
Americans living in Japan, people I met frequently discussed their
Japanese language abilities. These exchanges, rather than simply being
about curiosity or assessment, generally led instead to more in-depth
conversations about speaking Japanese as Japanese Americans. Among
nikkeijin，or people of Japanese descent, I observed that questions about
Japanese language ability opened opportuiûties to connect with and
situate one another within shared diasporic experiences. Questions about
language experience might, for example, be followed by other queries
and discussions about generational identity, hometown in the United
States, "J-school" experiences, and length of residence in Japan. They
elicit stories and metalinguistic commentary spanning back and forth
across the Pacific about family history, identity, and potentially shared
communities. These exchanges reveal the significance of language—
pragmatically and ideologically~in structuring Japanese American
experiences in Japan, diverse though they may be, particularly in their
claims of transnational and ethnic belonging and identity.
While Japanese American identities are shaped in the United States
by racial difference and exclusion (Lowe 1996; Ngai 2004; Omi and
Winant 1994)，Japanese Americans do not constitute a highly visible
minority population in Japan.1 Yet linguistic competence and other
embodied, performative markers betray Japanese Americans as also not
quite "Japanese." Kondo (1990:11)described being Japanese American
in the late 1970s in Japan as a "living oxymoron" or a "conceptual
anomaly," a description that resonates with many of the people I
interviewed. While Japanese Americans may look phenotypically
Javanese Lamuase and Literature 49 (2015) 485-508
© 2015 Ayako Takamori

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486 Japanese Language and Literature

Japanese and have Japanese surnames, they are likely to speak, move,
think, and act like Americans一a combination that is often confusing or
idiosyncratic for many Japanese. The cognitive dissonance tnis produces
in Japan unsettles postwar ideologies of Japaneseness, in which
categories of nation, culture, language, and race were elided and
naturalized.
This paper draws on data selected from 67 formal, recorded
interviews with self-identified Japanese Americans as well as additional
fieldwork data from participant-observation conducted in Japan between
2005-2006，and again in 2011-2013.

Number of recorded semi-structuredof

Number interviews recorded semi-structurea interviews _
Japanese Americans 67

Gender distribution Women Men

Japanese American interviewees 15 52

Age distribution at the time of interview

20s-30s
40s-60s 32 18
70+

Table 1.Interviewee data.

Since most of the Japanese Americans with whom I conducted

formal interviews are heritage language speakers with varying levels of
fluency and formal language education, the centrality of language in their
experiences led me to reflect on the effects of heritage language
ideologies more broadly. How are Japanese Americans perceived in
Japan and how does language affect their experiences? Since heritage
language education is regarded as a resource to help preserve a person's
connection to a presumably distant ethnic "homeland," and is therefore
described as an avenue for cultural maintenance and return, I wondered
whether language served this purpose or presented new barriers when
Japanese Americans "returned" to Japan, their "heritage" nation. In other
words: How does Japanese language mediate Japanese American "return"
to Japan? And how does it help shape their identities as Japanese
American and nikkeijin in the context of Japan?

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 Ayako Takamori 487

Japanese language ideologies constitute a rich area of scholarly

production for exploring how language一whether in pragmatics, as
policy, or as an object of metalinguistic discourseis a site for
constructing and policing Japaneseness (Carroll 2001; Coulmas 2002;
Gottlieb 2005，2012; Heinrich 2012; Stanlaw 2004). It is also a resource
for resistance, innovation, and creativity (Miller 1997，2004; Manabe
2006; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). A touchstone in work on language
and identity is Roy Andrew Miller's wryly posited "law of inverse
returns" (1982)，describing a phenomenon he observed in which the
"better" a perceived foreigner speaks Japanese, the less impressed the
Japanese interlocutors are. Over the last twenty years, concern with how
language mediates foreignness, multiculturalism, and belonging in Japan
has framed research on minoritized populations, diasporic communities,
and new immigrants in Japan (Maher and Macdonald 1995; Ryang 1997).
Education is a particularly fruitful area for this concern, with growing
interest in the experiences of immigrant and minontized children and
adolescents (Okubo 2010，2013; Kamada 2010; Kanno 2008; Moorehead
2013), Japanese language learners (Cook 2008)，and kikokushijo
returnees readapting to Japan (Kanno 2000). The complexities of
Japanese language, identity ana ideology exceed the borders of the
nation, as ethnographies of Japanese language in diasporic and
transnational spaces illustrate (Adachi 2001; Doerr 2010; Doerr and Lee
2011; Suzuki 2011; Yamasaki 2011). The flip side of Japanese language
education in transnational contexts is the struggle, under the banner of
internationalization, to improve English language education in Japanese
curricula, desirable for the global political and economic capital English
has come to represent (McConnell 2000; Seargeant 2009，2011). That is,
particularly through the 1980s and 1990s, internationalization is viewed
as achievable, and perhaps even conflated with, fluency in English.
Linguistic diversity and multilingualism一in practice and ideology~is
not, of course, limited to “gaijin” and minoritized "others." More
fundamentally, Miyako Inoue (2006) disrupts notions of a singular
Japanese language in her work on modernity and the emergence of
"women's language." In this volume, Neriko Doerr also outlines a
history and politics of language standardization that served to cover over
the existing and vast linguistic diversity.
Building on this foundation of work on language and identity in
Japan, the significant question for my purposes is not whether the "law
of inverse returns" is true or to what extent Japanese has become
"multicultural"; rather, following Doerr's (2009) critique of the "native

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488 Japanese Language and Literature

speaker" concept, I am interested in how underlying ideologies about the

relationship between language and foreignness inform or affect linguistic
interactions such that "Japanese" and "non-Japanese" become
meaningfully distinguished^and often mutually exclusive一categories.
Japanese Americans are an uncanny and "strange" presence in Japan,
being perceived as simultaneously Japanese and not-Japanese in ways
that destabilized both categories. They complicate assumptions of
ontological coherence in Japan in ways that highlight their strangeness,
rather than identification with Japan, and this strangeness is often most
immediately apparent in language. Moreover, assumptions about cultural
heritage latent in heritage language education can unintentionally
reinforce and naturalize Japanese language ideologies that posit linguistic
and cultural competence as innate and biologically rootea in race.
Consequently, heritage language education is not necessarily
empowering for all heritage language learners. Rather than providing a
linguistic connection to a cultural heritage, I argue that being a heritage
language speaker can paradoxically heighten Japanese Americans'
feelings of alienation and non-belonging in their "heritage." Drawing on
ethnographic examples of experiences of different generations of
Japanese Americans living in Japan—from those who moved to Japan in
the 1930s and 1940s to younger Japanese Americans exploring
contemporary Japan in the twenty-first century一I find that Japanese
Americans occupy a hybrid, border space of identity that disrupts
normative linguistic expectations of otherness in Japan. Japanese
Americans increasingly assert their belonging in Japan in ways that
cumulatively and incrementally contribute to shifting discourses of
Japaneseness and the terms of cultural citizenship in Japan.
In broader terms, inspired in part by Azuma's (2005) path-breaking
work on Japanese American transnational history, this paper contributes
to furthering the understanding of how identities are negotiated within
relationships of power and ideological interests, foregrounded by given
historical moments of national (and transnational) becomings. For
Japanese Americans in Japan navigating a slippery space between
"Japanese" and "American," language also plays a critical role in this
process; their ideas and experiences around language illuminate how
"Japaneseness" itself is internalized or critiqued on both a performative
and metalinguistic level.
This article also contributes to understanding dimensions of how
transnational migration requires a constant process of positioning,
defining, translating, and narrating themselves within existing logics as a

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 Ayako Takamori 489

way to reconcile and maneuver within a different set of ontological

categories by which others view and understand them, distinct from
previous ways in which they understood themselves or ways in which
Americans viewed them. Metalinguistic discourses reveal how being
"Japanese American" (already an unstable category) itself transforms or
re-solidifies in transnational contexts, leading individuals in Japan to
relate (or, in a couple of cases, refuse to relate) with the term "Japanese
American." To this end, rather than assuming a pre-defined idea of
"Japanese American" methodologically, I focus here on those who self
identify as Japanese American as a way to interrogate the category itself.
In what follows, I will first provide a brief context of Japanese
Americans and heritage language within the United States; these
ideologies naturalize the relationship between cultural/ethnic identity and
language for heritage language learners in a way that inadvertently melds
with what Jennifer Robertson (2012) calls "hemato-nationalism" in Japan.
This discussion lays the groundwork for ethnographic examples from my
fieldwork, for which I draw on the stories of individuals from different
generations to illustrate ways their experiences in Japan can at times
reinforce and also disrupt dominant language ideologies. These
narratives are divided chronologically into three parts. In the first part,
"Strangeness and Belonging," I introduce Japanese Americans who lived
in Japan longest and experienced World War II in Japan. For this
generation of Japanese Americans, national and cultural identification
(how they positioned themselves at different moments) had high stake
consequences. They were regarded as potential enemies or traitors
regardless of where they were. The second part, "Reinventing Japan,
Reinventing Selves," turns to those whose identifications were informed
by the postwar dynamics of U.S.-Japan relations. This is a cohort that
inherited the collective, and often unspoken, memories of war and
internment while also coming of age in the United States during a time of
tremendous social and political transformation. Meanwhile, Japan saw
rapid economic growth into the 1980s. Finally, in "Changing
Expectations," I will present two contrasting perspectives among the
younger and more recently arrived generations of Japanese Americans I
interviewed. In the 1990s, with the global circulation and consumption of
Japanese popular culture and media, the image of Japan among
Americans is strikingly different from the image of postwar Japan.
Earlier generations of Japanese Americans may have been embarrassed
to identify with Japan in any way. By the mid 1990s，Japan was starting

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490 Japanese Language and Literature

to be "cool." Those Japanese Americans finding their way to Japan

around the turn of the twenty-first century were drawn by contemporary
Japan as much as by a desire to seek out one's cultural "roots" and,
perhaps, a place of belonging. Each of these three moments in the history
of U.S.-Japan relations produced different expectations and ideologies
around language for Japanese Americans. I will conclude with
observations of an even more recent shift among some Japanese
Americans in Japan indicating possible ways in which language,
belonging, and "Japaneseness" are being reconfigured.

Transpacific Baggage: Racialized Difference and Language

The way Japanese Americans relate to language as they refashion
themselves in Japan hinges on the way U. S. racial politics has
historically shaped Japanese American identities. An understanding of U.
S.-based racial formations and Japanese American political history
informs the layered significance language accrues in the transnational
context of Japan. Japanese Americans, as with other minoritized
populations in the United States, face micro-aggressions in their
everyday lives, confronted with comments such as, "Wow, you speak
English so well! Where are you from?" or “What are you?" Such
comments and queries serve to reinforce racial ideologies in the United
States that cast Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and model
minorities, defining them against the backdrop of hegemonic whiteness.2
Their national belonging is continually challenged and questioned,
regardless of how "American" they may feel or how many generations of
their ancestors have called the United States home. At the same time,
persistent forms of institutionalized racism and inequality are disavowed
by the mythos of the successful assimilation of Japanese Americans.
One commonly used indicator, or measure, of assimilation for social
scientists and sociolinguists is language shift within immigrant
communities, along with other demographic data such as rates of
intermarriage, class status, and geographic dispersal (Waters and Jiménez
2005). However, the focus on language shift alone ignores the nuances of
language ideologies, the cultural salience and significance of languages
to specific minoritized populations, and national- or state-level language
(and language education) policies. Examining metalinguistic discourses
can articulate how race-based minorities relate to the nation, as
ideologies shape the affective valence that heritage language speakers
develop for their language. This symbolic dimension of language shift is

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 Ayako Takamori 491

particularly salient for Japanese Americans who, during World War II

and in the postwar period, were compelled under coercive conditions to
prove their citizenship and loyalty to the United States through
assimilation and disidentification with Japan. For Japanese Americans,
the specific historical legacies and collective memories of war，racism,
displacement, and exclusion along with uneven economic struggles to
rebuild livelihoods and communities in the postwar period must be
considered as factors in the failure of Japanese language maintenance in
the United States. For Japanese Americans, then, the significance of
languageboth Japanese and English~is closely imbricated with race
politics in the United States and the trajectory of their collective
historical experience.
Beginning in the 1980s, with the florescence and mainstreaming of
multicultural discourse, shifts in educational paradigms ushered in a new
era reversing attitudes toward bilingualism and ethnolinguistic minorities.
Heritage language as an object of study and pedagogy emerged in the
context of second language education (see Doerr 2010; Doerr and Lee
2013) to deal with the specific educational challenges that minoritized
ethnic populations and children of immigrants face. The intention of this
field is to mitigate language shift and cultural alienationtwo
phenomena viewed as inherently linked. I maintain, in agreement with
John Edwards' (1985) argument, t hat language shift is not indicative of
ethnic disidentification or assimilation. The lexical use of Japanese
words in everyday life indexes a continued symbolic significance of
language in constructing Japanese American cultural identities and
communities. Bilingual and heritage language education is intended to
enable minority, diasporic children to maintain transnational ties of
belonging to multiple places (and nations), to maintain cultural
continuity across borders and generations, and to give positive value to
cultural differences wnich have historically been devalued (Fishman
2001). Such approaches have also influenced recent shifts in educational
models and policies in Japan as well.
Agnes He (2011: 587) defines heritage language as "a language that
is often used at or inherited from home and that is different from the
language used in mainstream society." However, attaching the word
‘‘heritage” to language is more than just a descriptive act; it changes the
relationship subjects have to both language and the imagined diasporic
homeland. As Doerr (2010: 1-2) notes, "heritage" has more recently
been conceived "as an assemblage of muitivocal processes that involve

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492 Japanese Language and Literature

various social actors and institutions, all making claims on ownership,

custodianship, and cultural inheritance of the heritage." Language, for
Japanese Americans, then, is symbolically laden, producing affective
ambivalence. This ambivalence is directed not only at learning and
speaking Japanese, but also the language itself and of "Japan" more
broadly. Consequently, heritage language education is not just about the
technicalities of language acquisition; it is also about the construction of
a heritage language learner's cultural values, world views, and identity,
all framed within relationships of power. Such dynamics can reify and
reassert a new set of hegemonic norms, such that the "maintenance of
minority language can replicate standardizing processes, marginalizing
the peripheral variety of the minority language" (Doerr 2010: 5). Indeed,
language and "fluency" for Japanese Americans in Japan must be viewed
as relative and embedded in a field of social relations. The relevance of
"fluency" comes into play only when one asks: Who determines fluency
and "appropriate" or "competent" use of language, and for what end?

Strangeness and Belonging

For Japanese Americans residing in Japan, language is not only the
medium through which cultural belonging and identity is performed, it is
itself a fraught object and site of cultural negotiation. I suggest this has
less to do with language shift or degree of assimilation in the United
States among Japanese Americans than with the overlapping and
mutually reinforcing ideologies of Japanese language and heritage
language一both in Japan and in the United States. In Japan, being
"racially" Japanese yet not being able to speak Japanese like a "native"
speaker produces a cognitive dissonance among many of their
interlocutors, and assumptions of communicative competence deeply
impact their experiences. This perception is not dissimilar to the
assumption in the United States that someone who looks Asian or
Japanese must be foreign, and therefore must not speak English very well.
In Japan, these experiences, however, vary significantly based on
generation and period during which they moved to Japan, as each
generation and age group has been uniquely affected by key moments in
Japan's history ana in U.S.-Japan relations. Individually, the degree of
competence and comfort with written and spoken Japanese vary widely,
and are often independent of self-reported assessment of fluency. The
individual range in linguistic competence or bilingualism are patterned
by such factors as class status, generational background of the parents,
theories of language acquisition in the popular discourse that influenced

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 Ayako Takamori 493

both school curricula and parenting approaches, and geographic and

urban/rural locations in the United States, where much or part of the
childhood was spent. All of these factors affected access to Japanese
speaking communities and educational opportunities. Nonetheless, nearly
all Japanese Americans I spoke with relate to the notion that language
often marks them as "strange" in Japan.
The stakes of this "strangeness" were arguably the highest for those
Japanese Americans who moved to Japan during the period leading up to
and during World War II. Transpacific circuits and flexible citizenship
have always been characteristic of Japanese and Japanese American
migration. Older Japanese Americans who moved to Japan prior to the
bombing of Pearl Harbor struggled with perhaps some of the most
worrying set of transnational and national(ist) identifications, being most
directly impacted by being subjects between two empires (Azuma 2005).
As relations between the United States and Japan deteriorated, many
Japanese Americans were caught in positions of uncertainty. Japanese
American children and youth who were in Japan during World War II
were often instructed not to speak English, and whenever possible, to
hide their American backgrounds in order to pass as Japanese.
The family of one Japanese American woman I interviewed,
Kawamoto, placed their bets on Japan and moved back to Japan before
the bombing of Pearl Harbor.3 The language and culture shock, along
with the political context of war, transformed her，by her account, from
an outgoing, athletic, and free-spirited adolescent in Hawai'i to a quiet,
muted wife and mother trying to pass as best she could as Japanese. In
Japan, she initially made concerted efforts to converse with and even
mime to her new friends and peers. She recounts how she became self
conscious about speaking because “[o]ther people think I speak henna
nihongo da kara ne" (because I speak strange Japanese) and because her
parents closely monitored and censured her behavior after moving to
Japan. She frequently repeated this awareness that others regarded her as
strange, both in narratives of her past as well as the tribulations of her
current life，feeding her lifelong yearning to return to Hawai'i. While this
self-consciousness of being "strange" persists in her current social
interactions, as a teenager in wartime Japan, she feared being "outed" as
American. She often worked late into the nights studying Japanese in
order to catch up with her classmates and dreamt of being an English
teacher, until her parents suddenly arranged for her to marry. Attempts to
refashion herself as Japanese made her draw her energies into being as
inconspicuous as possible, with some spectacular failures, as a proper

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494 Japanese Language and Literature

Japanese wife and mother. Another Japanese American nisei (second

generation) who was a teen conscripted into military service in Japan
during the war was similarly advised not to speak English and not to
speak too freely about the United States. He got into an argument with a
boy in the neighborhood about which nation would be defeated in the
war, prompting his grandparents' reprobation and tensions with the
neighbors.
While in the United States, Japanese Americans were distrusted and
placed in internment camps for the duration of the war, the Japanese
government, though also suspicious of Japanese American loyalties,
thought of Japanese Americans as potential mediators who might be
effective in disseminating propaganda. Many Japanese American youth
were enrolled in a special school, the Heishikan, set up by the Foreign
Ministry specifically for nisei youth, in hopes of enlisting them into the
war effort. The founder of the school “was convinced that they could
arrest the tide of anti-Japanese publicity if they were picked carefully and
properly trained in Japan as press attachés" (Ichioka 2006: 42). Further,
students were selected

because they were considered Nisei who were Americanized but

sympathetic to Japan.... [T]hese Nisei, trained as they were to act as official
spokesmen of the Japanese government, represented a real transformation
of the concept of the Nisei as a bridge of understanding. Instead of acting as
an intermediary between the United States and Japan, they became, in effect,
undisguised propagandists or official apologists for Japanese military
expansionism in Asia (Ichioka 2006: 42一43).

At the same time, according to an account by Tomi Knaefler (1991:

100)，the students spoke limited Japanese and were subjected to constant
surveillance and harassment. They were distrusted by the police and
local people. The situation reversed dramatically at the end of the war.
Japanese Americans like Kawamoto suddenly found that their ability to
speak English, previously something to hide, was now a valuable asset.
Kawamoto's husband pulled her out from the domestic sphere after
World War II in order to interpret for the Allied Occupation forces.
Three Japanese Americans I interviewed who lived in Japan in the
postwar period served as interpreters during the Allied Occupation. They
also remained in Japan and lived virtually as Japanese, even though they
toid me they still yearned to return to the United States and steadfastly
identified themselves as Americans. Among themselves, this
identification was marked linguistically as well, in that they spoke

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 Ayako Takamori 495

English to each other and, when they did speak Japanese, still frequently
peppered their conversation with English phrases and words. Those
Japanese Americans, like Kawamoto, who stayed in Japan after the war
ended appear to be virtually Japanese in their day-to-day lives, even as
they continue to identify as Japanese American, keeping their U.S.
citizenship and staying active in nikkei and Japanese American networks.
Kawamoto was tied to Japan because of her family and children, but she
never completely felt socially or culturally at home in Japan, still
referring to her use of Japanese as strange and struggling to form close
bonds with other Japanese women. Some Japanese Americans told me
they were at least partially motivated to move to Japan to find new forms
of belonging and “home，，since they felt marginalized and racialized in
the United States. However, they also quickly discovered that Japanese
racial and linguistic ideologies tend to reinforce Japanese American
strangeness一or estrangementin the context of Japan as well.

Reinventing Japan，Reinventing Selves

Until the 1980s，the educational paradigm in the United States
emphasized assimilation and monolingual English acquisition.
Dovetailing with the postwar American ethos following internment
experiences in whicn identification with Japan was actively disavowed,
Japanese American families did not (or were unable to) prioritize
Japanese language education, especially impacting the sansei (third
generation). Saturday Japanese schools were still a shared, and often
dreaded, cultural and institutional experience in Japanese American
communities. However, unlike the hoshûkô system that replicated
Japanese curricula and was specifically intended to facilitate the
reintegration of kikokushijo or transnational returnee Japanese children
into the Japanese school system, Japanese language schools in the United
States did not generally provide sufficient language training that would
enable Japanese American children to feel confident or competent
speaking Japanese like a "native" speaker in Japan. Since the 1980s with
the shift toward multicultural and bilingual education, and particularly
during Japan's rapid economic growth, Japanese language acquisition
was suddenly encouraged and valued. Moreover, the 1970s and 1980s
saw a new wave of transnational Japanese was raising their children in
the United States. For these families, Japanese language did not carry
any historical baggage or signify racial alienation; rather, Japanese
language was a resource and possible form of cultural capital that would
enable more mobility within a transnational economic system. Most

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496 Japanese Language and Literature

Japanese Americans I spoke with in Japan were shaped by these

ideological shifts and believed that bilingualism is a positive and
valuable attribute. Many feel embarrassed about not having learned
Japanese as children and lament having lacked or missed the opportunity
to learn Japanese earlier. They intend to raise their children in bilingual
environments, at home or through schools. Not everyone, however,
adheres to these now hegemonic assumptions about the value of
bilingualism.
One interviewee, Frank, a long-term resident with three young
children and married to a Japanese woman, explained to me his decision
not to enroll his children in international schools or to require them to
speak English at home: “I know for many Japanese Americans, there's
this self-consciousness, stigma of being a minority. For [my children] to
grow up in the environment here, their core self is much stronger...." His
children, born and raised in Japan, are not learning English formally, he
explained further, because he does not want them to experience the
cultural conflicts he endured while growing up as a visible minority in
the United States. He subscribes to the theory that bilingualism can have
negative effects in child development because it would prevent them
from being fully competent in either language, a theory of language
acquisition and education that gained popular traction among his parents'
generation. Language, for Frank, came to stand in for cultural identity.
The belief that a child's brain is incapable of bilingual competence then
implies, when extended to culture and identity, that biculturalism and
hybrid, transnational identifications would also be a detriment, where an
individual is unable to realize himself or herself fully in one culture or
the other. Even as he expresses a desire to improve his own Japanese
language skills, informed by his childhood and adolescent experiences in
the United States, he associates being a bicultural minority with
conflicted identities, bullying, struggles to belong, and being marked as
other, or strange. For him, and for many other Japanese Americans, the
sense of alienation he had in the United States lea him to search for his
"roots" in Japan, despite his strong identification as American.
While Japanese Americans often felt embarrassed by their lack of
competency in Japanese, other Japanese Americans felt their “fluency’’
worked against them in certain contexts, particularly if they betrayed an
American accent or made minor grammatical or lexical mistakes. One
Japanese American sansei recalled reading an English language
newspaper during his commute on the train. A fellow passenger angrily
ripped the newspaper out or his hands. While we may never know why

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 Ayako Takamori 497

exactly this particular passenger reacted so violently, he was presumably

angry that someone who appeared Japanese would be flaunting his
facility with English publicly or was perhaps angry that English (and its
perceived hegemony) was intruding ever more in a Japanese space.
I heard countless times how Japanese Americans used katakana for
their names on business cards, even if they knew they have kanji
characters. Others I spoke with used their English middle name in Japan,
even if they generally went by their Japanese names in the United States
or among their Japanese American friends. Another strategy that
Japanese Americans utilized was to speak "bad Japanese" intentionally,
depending on the context and situation. One young Japanese American
mother spoke Japanese with ease and married a Japanese man. She
explained to me that she intentionally speaks "bad" and "limited"
Japanese to the other mothers at her children's school so that she will not
be expected to behave like a "Japanese mother." Further, in service
situations, she hardly ever uses any Japanese, claiming she receives
better treatment if people think she is just "American." Language for her
was a form of resistance to hegemonic notions of Japanese femininity.
All of these strategies outlined above also help to place Japanese
Americans clearly in the "foreign" category where they would otherwise
be regarded with confusion as "strange" and outside known identity
categories. Japanese Americans assess situations when they think it will
be more beneficial to be treated as a foreigner than someone who speaks
good Japanese, but does not quite perform themselves as "perfect"
Japanese. "Failing" at being fully Japanese becomes weighty when "race"
and language are assumed to be inextricable and biological. Therefore,
presumably, Japanese Americans who perform Japaneseness imperfectly
(and by extension their parents who have "failed" to properly raise them
as "Japanese") may be evaluated as deficient. I have heard Japanese
individuals wonder aloud as to why someone with Japanese blood is
unable to speak Japanese "fluently," assuming that language is
biologically inherited or that the inability to speak Japanese reflects the
failings of Japanese parents.
Avoiding negative social evaluations一the fear of being perceived as
hen, or strange一sometimes leads to "language shyness" (Krashen 1998)
among Japanese Americans. Language ideologies are also internalized
through the constant sanctioning and surveillance of linguistic
performances; that is, regardless of actual ability, Japanese Americans
expressed a sense of inadequacy in terms of their Japanese language
ability. Japanese Americans I interviewed described how they became

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498 Japanese Language and Literature

more concerned, or at least more aware, than they were previously of

other people's evaluations of their language competence after moving to
Japan. Ted, for example, was dismayed that gaijin tarento (foreign
celebrities, see articles by Miller and Suzuki in this issue) could speak
Japanese more "naturally" than he could: "It's not fair that a gaijin can
speak better Japanese than I can." Here, Ted aligns himself with being
Japanese (as opposed to gaijin), and reasserts the expectation that
because he is "racially" Japanese he has a birthright to the Japanese
language. Not being able to speak as well as he would like is an injustice,
even as he resents expectations of linguistic competence. Ted reveals an
internalization of a language ideology that assumes Japanese language
inheres in Japanese "blood." This concept of fairness may also indicate
the way in which Ted, and other Japanese Americans, may feel they are
being judged and that expectations to speak "perfect" Japanese are
unreasonable. The flipside of the "blood" or race-based ideology is the
exclusionary assumption that an individual, such as the foreign
celebrities, who are not ethnically Japanese, should not be able to speak
flawless Japanese. These assumptions reveal, yet again, the unshakable
isomorphism of language, race, and nation in Japan. It is precisely Ted's
realization that he is unable to fit neatly within these language ideologies
which construct Japanese national identity that reinforces his marginality
and non-belonging in Japanese society.

Changing Expectations
As the examples above illustrate, language is both the medium and the
object through which identity and belonging were most immediately and
meaningfully performed and negotiated. Their perceived "strangeness" in
Japan can be attributed to a lack of widespread awareness of "Japanese
American" as a concept and identity category. To smooth interactions,
many Japanese Americans purposely resort to speaking "bad" Japanese
or refuse to speak any Japanese at all in public in order to avoid
confusing their interlocutors as they navigate their lives in Japan.
However, others actively rejected the expectation that, as a Japanese
American, one ought to have at least studied Japanese. They also
critiqued the assumption that exposure to and facility with one's heritage
language was necessarily empowering.
Take, for example, Michael, who is a young nisei originally from
California. When I asked him about his language training, he told me he
received no formal education in Japanese language in the United States. I
assumed that his parents deliberately chose not to teach him Japanese,

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 Ayako Takamori 499

since, according to a popular theory, bilingualism was thought to hinder

development and language skills. It was also common for Japanese
Americans to tell me they regretted not studying Japanese earlier, but this
was not the case with Michael. He rejected my implication that not
prioritizing Japanese language learning was a mistake: "My parents were
struggling just to survive. They didn't have time to teach us Japanese.
Worrying about passing on Japanese culture was the least of their
worries." As Muehlmann has argued, language death or language shift
across generations does not necessarily indicate loss of cultural identity,
as is commonly assumed. In her work, Muehlmann (2008) finds that the
Cucapâ in Mexico did not have the time or resources to teach their
language to the youth. Though younger generations are able to say no
more than a few words in Cucapâ, they do not feel any less "Cucapâ"
just because they do not speak the language. Other salient cultural
experiences supersede language maintenance. Similarly for Michael,
poverty, class and labor conditions played a significant role in language
acquisition (or the inability to acquire a heritage language). The
relationship between language and identity for him is not predetermined.
Michael's decision to move to Japan was motivated by his self
identification as Japanese American. Not knowing Japanese did not make
him any more assimilated or any less Japanese American, in his view.
During my research in 2011-2013, I noticed a subtle trend in how
Japanese Americans recounted their experiences in Japan, perhaps
indicating cultural shifts in the relationship between language and
belonging in Japan. Much like Michael, some of the people I interviewed
were unapologetic and unselfconscious (at least overtly) about their
accents or "imperfect" Japanese. Many long-term Japanese American
residents and immigrants in Japan simply learned to converse in Japanese
with ease and felt confident speaking Japanese. While the length of time
in Japan played a role for many, this confidence was particularly
noticeable among those Japanese Americans who used Japanese
extensively or exclusively in their work or personal projects and who had
close social networks of Japanese-speakers. For others—whether relative
newcomers or multi-decade permanent residents一Japanese is simply a
useful and effective tool to connect with multiple and diverse social,
cultural and ethnic groups and nikkei communities within Japan.
This was the case with Dan, a young Japanese American, with whom
I spoke in the fall of 2011. He had recently moved to Japan just prior to
the 3/11 disaster. At the time of the disaster, he was just beginning to
build a career and professional network in Japan. However, after the

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500 Japanese Language and Literature

disaster, he felt compelled to volunteer in the clean up of tsunami

stricken regions. Eventually, because of his ongoing volunteer work and
growing familiarity and experience with the region, he took on a position
as a volunteer coordinator to assist in the communities in Tôhoku. Since
many of the volunteers were non-Japanese or nikkeijin, his role was
particularly crucial in being able to translate and communicate with local
evacuees and community members, even if the Japanese he spoke was
different from Tôhoku dialects. As he grew more comfortable conversing
with different communities in Japanese, his language abilities (accent
notwithstanding) and his proven commitment to the Tôhoku region were
highly valued in enabling a collaborative relationship with local
communities, the volunteers, and the aid organization. His role in
Tôhoku, enabled by his language skills, became foundational in shaping
his new identity and experience as a Japanese American and nikkeijin
resident in Japan. In our conversations, he did not regard language as a
central source of difficulty or marginalization in Japan.
Increasingly, rather than accepting and internalizing Japanese
language ideologies, Japanese Americans like Michael and Dan, were
routinizing and normalizing their accented Japanese. Presenting their
"strange" Japanese as mundane speech acts barely worthy of comment,
rather than a deficit or stigmatizing marker, constitutes a performative
statement of belonging in Japan and an unapologetic assertion of
selfhood. As Rhacel Parrenas (2011:12) suggests, ‘‘[citizenship not only
is a set of tangible rights and duties but also entails a social process by
which individuals claim and stake their membership in the nation-state,
including the articulation of their right to be different...." That is,
Japanese Americans are destabilizing assumptions about the
inalienability of language, race and identity through this stance, while
claiming cultural dtizenship in Japan.
Other possible explanations for this shift in attitudes about language
may include broader demographic and political changes influencing the
public discourse of national identity and multiculturalism. In the 1990s，
the phenomenon of nikkeijin labor migration to Japan, primarily from
Brazil and Peru, received significant media attention. The 1990
Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act provisioned long
term work visas for immigrants of Japanese descent, a policy informed
by the assumption that nikkeijin would be able to assimilate into
Japanese society with greater ease than other non-Japanese. It quickly
became clear that nikkei residents in Japan face social and cultural
challenges (along with other forms of discrimination and inequality), and

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 Ayako Takamori 501

these issues were sometimes making national news headlines. As the

population became more established in Japan, nikkeijin were increasingly
racialized and lumped into the "foreign" category. By the mid-2000s,
cultural activists, NGOs, educators and community leaders had become
more vocal and more organized, establishing various community-based
cultural and social justice oriented programs for nikkei residents and their
children.
Another arena in which cultural change is visible is in popular media.
While gaijin tarento have a long and established history in Japanese
television, comedian David Ury has turned the stock character of the
gaijin tarento on its head. He produced a series of short YouTube videos
and skits centered around his character, Ken Tanaka, a white American
adopted by a Japanese family and who speaks limited and heavily
accented English. One particular skit that was especially popular among
Japanese Americans in Japan depicts a group of fluent Japanese speakers
trying to order food at a restaurant. The Japanese waitress cannot
cognitively reconcile foreign-looking individuals speaking "perfect"
Japanese (much less regional dialects). Although each character orders in
Japanese, the waitress believes they are all speaking another language
and does not understand their order. Faced with the awkwardness of
dealing with foreign customers with whom she cannot communicate, she
turns to the one Japanese-looking character in the group to translate for
them, asking if they want to order hamburgers (which all Americans
must prefer). This Japanese-looking character, played by Asian
American actor Stella Choe, is the only one who does not speak any
Japanese. In frustration, one of the Japanese-speaking characters makes
an impassioned, pleading speech in Japanese demonstrating "native"
(and regionally specific) knowledge and affiliation:

I realize we may not look like we can speak Japanese. But it's now the
21st century. It's time to accept that physical appearance is not necessarily a
reflection of cultural identity! I am speaking Japanese. Japanese is my
native tongue. I was raised in Awa, Komagawa City, Chiba Prefecture,
where the major industries are fishing and peanuts. And we're proud
sponsors of the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team. So please, all we ask is
that you acknowledge and accept that we are speaking Japanese (Neptune
and Ury 2014).4

The character, played by David Neptune who in actuality was born

and raised in Chiba, concludes the speech with an entreating bow that is

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502 Japanese Language and Literature

echoed by the others. The waitress, however, remains confused and

continues to direct her questions to Stella Choe's character. Among
Japanese Americans who viewed, shared and commented on the video
via social media, the skit humorously illustrated a scenario that is all too
familiar to them. While clearly comedy, many viewers claimed the
exchange in the video is not an over-exaggerated representation of their
own experiences. More importantly, the video also effectively articulates
a maxim that has long defined the crux of Japanese American identity,
both in Japan and the United States: "physical appearance is not
necessarily a reflection of cultural identity." That this idea is circulating
within the Japanese media world to an appreciative audience reflects, I
believe, a changing discourse of Japaneseness.

Conclusion
Japanese Americans are located in contradictory spaces, they are not
folly Japanese in that they often fail to perform Japaneseness adequately
but are nonetheless privileged foreign residents as North American
English speakers. As nikkeijin return-migrants became an increasingly
known identity category and population in Japan, the frame of reference
within which to place Japanese Americans shifted as well (even if the
class status and cultural capital did not correspond with stereotypes
associated with the term nikkeijin). Japanese American experiences
communicating, interacting, and living as heritage language speakers in
Japan illuminate the centrality of language to claims of transnational and
ethnic belonging and identity. My initial argument about language
(Takamori 2011) was that that heritage language education is not
necessarily empowering for heritage language speakers. Rather than
providing a means of connection to an ethnic and cultural heritage,
heritage language education can paradoxically serve to heighten a
language learner's feeling of alienation and non-belonging. I also argued
that Japanese Americans constitute an uncanny presence in Japan, insofar
as they disrupt ontological coherence in Japan. Here, in revisiting and
extending these arguments, I suggest further that Japanese Americans in
Japan, and others who occupy similar hybrid or border spaces of identity
constitute a conceptual contradiction in normative linguistic expectations
of otherness, which may cumulatively disrupt and shift the limits o
Japaneseness. By normalizing accents and strangeness, one sees,
hopefiilly, incremental cultural shifts, in which their strangeness and

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 Ayako Takamori 503

their accents are no longer cause for surprise or confusion, but rather a
mundane aspect of life in Japan where differences are an accepted given.
The ways in which Japanese Americans individually engage with
language ideologies vary widely, based on their specific positionalities
and shaped by factors such as class, gender, race and generation. Some
Japanese Americans were fluent and comfortable with their American
accent. Language, for many other Japanese Americans，carried
significant cultural weight, especially in Japan: embarrassment, self
consciousness or nervousness. I began with the following questions:
How does language shape Japanese American identities in Japan? And
does Japanese heritage language education for Japanese Americans
provide an avenue of return or a connection to Japan? For many, the
answer to the latter is no. For others, yes, but perhaps not in the ways
they (or their teachers) anticipated. That is, Japanese language is less a
defining feature of Japanese or Japanese American identity than a
performative and metalinguistic medium through which identifications
are constantly negotiated. It is perhaps not over-optimistic to suggest that"
possibilities for changing normative language ideologies are not
completely foreclosed, as people attempt to claim belonging and
citizenship in Japan on their own terms—accents and strangeness
included.

NOTES

I am deeply indebted to those in Japan who generously entrusted their stories

and experiences with me during my fieldwork and beyond. I thank Laura Miller
for her support, patience, and encouragement. I am grateful for the constructive
feedback, conversations, and intellectual engagement of Nobuko Adachi, Lydia
Boyd, Neriko Doerr, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Satoko Suzuki, Bambi Schieffelin,
Shinji Yamashita, and an anonymous reviewer. Fieldwork was supported by
grants from the Torch Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science. Any oversights in this article are my own.

1 Estimates of the number of Japanese American residents in Japan are difficult

to ascertain, as neither the U.S. consulate nor Japan's Ministry of Justice keeps
records of U.S. nationals by ethnicity. As of 2013，there are about 50,000 U.S.
citizens who are registered residents of Japan, according to the Ministry of
Justice. Online at http://www.e-stat.go.jp/SGl/estat/List.do?lid=000001118467.

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504 Japanese Language and Literature

Accessed October 15，2014. A high percentage of these residents are lik

claim Japanese ancestry. Additionally, of the population of Ja
Americans residing in Japan, a significant number maintain Jap
citizenship if a parent was able add them to the family registry, and are
fore not included in the demographic data of foreign residents.

2 A notable exception to this is Hawai'i, where Japanese Americans are n

minority population and where whkeness is not culturally hegemonic.

3 All names of interview subjects are pseudonyms.

4 The quote here is from the video subtitles.

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