Tainari88 wrote:Precisely ThirdTerm. She is fluent in the language, the culture and the rules.
Everyone has an insider/outsider perspective about a foreign culture. She has both perspectives and that is why I found her insights interesting.
My father learned Japanese as a young man stationed in Japan long ago. He sort of liked the idea of learning it and he loved reading about all the cultural traditions. He was there post WWII and said he had seen many faces of people in emotional turmoil after the war...
It is interesting that many people learn so much from leaving their home cultures and nations and experiencing life in other countries.
It is very interesting ThirdTerm.
She's basically Japanese in terms of her outlook, manorisms, etc. Except, that she isn't. There's no naturalized citizenship in Japan for being born there, and also she doesn't have the right skin tone to be Japanese (your post seems to subconsciously allude to this, as you call her 'fluent in the language'. I am fluent in Japanese and I started learning when I was 15. She is a native speaker who was born and grew up for at least her first 8 years there.)
The funny thing was when she said that when she first went to the US she felt that people were looking for categories to put people in. I have said basically word for word the exact same thing about the scene in Japan; in fact it used to drive me crazy. A lot of people in Japan are very big on stereotypes, to an extent that would be offensive in the US or a lot of other countries (but is normal in Japan). Moreover, to mainstream Japanese society, there is a very big 'us and them' dynamic. To be an 'us', you have to be full Japanese--both parents are Japanese--and to have been born in and grew up in Japan. If these things don't all apply, you will be treated differently.
I am sure that as a black American-'Japanese', she has experienced this extensively (she says she grew up in a small town and everyone knew her and her family so didn't treat her strangely and I largely buy that, but in the general society it will be a different story. In fact, it is probably somewhat analogous to the treatment she perceives from black people in the US. In the one case, she is a black 'American' who speaks and acts like a Japanese person. In the other case, she is a black-skinned Japanese person and hence not a part of the black American society (according to mainstream black American society).
In addition, Japan has a lot of open misogyny--definitely more than the US or China (the other two countries I've lived in).
I agree with @ThirdTerm basically, she is very sympathetic to Japanese society. I am almost sure that she would not be considered for many jobs in Japan for being black (despite speaking Japanese fluently and being otherwise qualified). In Japan, you have to include your photo on your resume. Many a hiring manager will see her picture and throw the resume in the trash.
When you boil down what she was saying, it's basically that she wasn't accepted as a bonafide black American by black Americans. It sounds somewhat like a different flavor of what an American-born Japanese person might encounter in Japan. And maybe that's just the way it is. Her discussion of things like slavery though may give some indication here of why she finds it hard to be accepted as well (potentially). She doesn't share a common experience of growing up black in the US or a very deep understanding of the history of race relations in the US. She simply talked about the issues from a particular common mainstream Japanese perspective. I am sure there are many people--i.e. black Americans--who would be happy to converse with her about the issues and explain things from what is to her a foreign and rather alien perspective. However, that she doesn't in the first or in the present instance hold or bring forth such perspectives, one could say she does not share the ethnic (e.g. cultural) heritage of black America--quite aside from skin color.
It's a double-edged sword. When you grow up in a particular culture the manors and deep customs become ingrained at a subconscious level. Take a complex culture like, say Japanese culture, and there are many minute social obligations in how to approach particular situations, and these are very difficult to 100% learn and assimilate for people not raised in the culture. So there is a practical element as well, and this seems relevant to her experiences in the US, also.