Hi JSA! My name is Mia White, resident e-board member. I am a third year ASCI major at Cal Poly who joined JSA in the fall of 2019. Like many other members of JSA, I have a complicated relationship with my Japanese identity. I am ¼ Japanese. My mother was born and raised in Japan until she was 13 before coming to the US with her family. She was never a Japanese citizen because she was born on an American Air Force base. I was born and raised in Petaluma; a city in the North Bay of California famous for poultry, American Graffiti, and the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest (yes really). Petaluma is not much different than San Luis Obispo; mountains to the east, the ocean not far to the west, and predominantly white. In Sonoma County where Petaluma rests, the Asian and black population is not more than 7% combined in any city. Growing up in a family who couldn’t afford to travel abroad and thus rarely strayed far from home, I never noticed how unusual it was. Upon reflecting on my childhood there, I could count the amount of Japanese people my age I knew on one hand.
Throughout my life, I never identified with any other part of my heritage other than being Japanese. In my eyes, me being Japanese was expressed through the rainbow senbazuru in the living room of my childhood home, making my friends take their shoes off at the door, visiting Japantown in San Francisco and shopping at Nijiya Market, and watching Ghibli movies that my friends hadn’t heard of. To my friends in Petaluma, I was always labeled the “Asian one.” I had no idea how Petaluma’s lack of Asian diversity had affected me until I came to Cal Poly and experienced culture shock; not because of how white it was, but instead because of how much higher the Asian population percentage was. This truly came to a head after I joined JSA in the fall of last year.
As I began attending general meetings, I quickly realized I knew so little about Japanese culture and was suddenly insecure of my whiteness; something that I had never experienced before. That I spoke little to no Japanese, that I knew nothing about the Japanese culture that JSA talked about, that my family had only afforded to go to Japan once a few years ago, and the fact that I wasn’t close with my full Japanese family were among the reasons that the Japanese identity that I had constructed and relied on growing up were challenged after joining JSA. I began to wonder if I even belonged. Thankfully, over time, I noticed that there were so many other people in JSA that had their own cultural crises. Talking with different members about how they were self-conscious initially surprised me. I remember wondering why someone who had been to Japan so often or who spoke Japanese or was ½ compared to my ¼ was also lacking confidence in their cultural identity. That is when I began to recognize that I was comparing myself to other people in JSA and thus invalidating their own insecurities. I was self-conscious in JSA at first because I mistakenly felt that I was not Japanese or Asian “enough,” but joining taught me that there is no criteria anyone has to meet to be able to fit in. I began to appreciate that while JSA challenged the identity that I had constructed growing up in a disproportionately white area, it also gave me a sense of cultural community that I had never experienced before and began to depend on. JSA has helped me understand that there are so many different shades of a Japanese/Asian identity and that it does not have to look or feel the same for everyone. I do not have to be 100% Japanese, I do not have to know every custom or celebrate every holiday, I do not have to go to Japan every year, I do not have to pronounce everything correctly (or even speak Japanese), to be Japanese. And neither do you.
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