I have always been a good judge of character. Growing up, I could sense people's reactions to me, even before they had experienced it themselves. I could read it in their faces, see it in their body language. It's not that I developed a thick skin but, like my heroine at the time, Wonder Woman, when I saw a comment or any threat coming towards me, up would come my defence mechanism and the disparaging remark would bounce off me. As any one who is different growing up and turns out to be a relatively well-adjusted person, I have my secret weapons - selective hearing and a well-practised smile, with which I have thwarted bitterness and a chip on the shoulder.
You see, I am one of a rare breed - second generation Japanese with the heart and soul of an Irish person, a combination which many people find somehow incompatible. Like two sides of a coin, these two sides of my character remain connected yet separate. My Japanese side manifests itself by foisting sushi onto friends/work colleagues/unsuspecting passers-by and turning bits of paper into a crane or box. But my Irish side is the strongest.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself, in the mirror of a toilet in a pub somewhere, squeezed in between gossiping girls. With my flat Dublin accent, I expect to see an Irish girl with Irish features. Fair hair, curly hair, whatever. Blue eyes, green eyes, something. Hell, if God was kind, a six-foot blonde with legs coming from her ears. But I see, what everyone around me sees, a small, very young-looking Japanese girl who looks as bemused as I feel.
A woman once said to me, slightly sniffily, in an attempt to show me the error of my un-Japanese ways: "If a cat is born in an oven, it doesn't become a bun, you know". This is true. A cat will be a cat no matter where it is born, with an animal instinct to fulfil its purpose - as a cat. People on the other hand, though still with an instinct for procreation and survival, have thankfully, evolved over the years. That is why women are no longer mere baby-making machines and men can be monogamous. Multi culturalism is evolution. And that is also why - with my passable Gaelige, my affinity for the odd pint and, as my mother often bemoans, my strong personality - I can stick the tricolour on my head and claim myself to be Irish.
With a fairly conventional Irish upbringing, I knew little about what it was to be Japanese. Though I did gain some insight from my mother, she was still just "Mum" to me, rather than "Japanese Mum". So like most good children, I absorbed the information - from television. Consequently, Japanese people appeared as (a) endurance-obsessed masochists who liked nothing more than to stand in a freezer in their underwear, (b) workaholic businessmen who, in an effort to turn the world Japanese, would buy up large patches of each major continent. Or (c) bumbling tourists laden with cameras, who had the uncanny habit of wandering into the path of a police chase, and cheer and clap, while taking photographs, believing it all to be a Hollywood show of sorts. As I am a sane and reasonable person, I knew this couldn't be true.
As I grew older, my fascination with Japan went from the ridiculous to the sublime. I gained a deep love of the Japanese sense of aesthetic, which I saw in my mother's art, in her ability to combine shapes and colours in a minimalist fashion. Japanese technology insured that I was the toast of the playground, with my chrome-covered, remote control, turbo-boosted, miniature CD-walkman cum pencil-case. Samurai, ninja, geisha, sumo, Manga, Issey Miyake, sushi - stereotypes and symbols and all part of the images that revolved around my head.
So when an opportunity arose this year for me to travel around Japan with my mother, I jumped at it. It would be a journey of a lifetime, from the most southern island of Okinawa, to the most northern part of Japan, Hokkaido. An exhausting combination of planes, trains and buses, it would take four weeks in total.
We landed in Osaka airport and dutifully queued at Immigration. I have always felt slightly guilty for not keeping a tighter hold of my Japanese roots, and shuffled uncomfortably with my Irish passport. Standing with my feet on Japanese soil, this feeling grew. "Irish," the officer said looking at my passport and then at me. "Yes," I said to my feet. "Do you speak Japanese?" he asked, sternly. "No," I whispered. "Do you speak Gaelic?" he then asked, handing back my passport. "Yep," I coughed. Then he said something which I took as a good omen: "Cead Mile Failte".
Growing up in Ireland, I was used to being surrounded by Irish faces. In Japan, everywhere I turned, my face seemed to be mirrored in those people around me, of different shapes and sizes of course, but in general, they all had the same hair colour, the same dark eyes and the same skin tone. On one hand, I found myself missing the feeling of standing out in the crowd, envying the gajin (foreigners), who were far and few between. But on the other hand, I felt oddly at home.
Looking the part, however, is only half the battle. My grasp of the language is poor, though I can understand a lot more than I can speak. I suddenly found myself cursing my Japanese features, as person after person would address me in Japanese, only to be faced with a blank look and silence. I became the Amazing Grinning and Nodding Mute. My Japanese looks meant I was given less leeway than other foreigners. As I committed one faux pas after another (a word of advice: never point with either your hands or your feet), I got used to disapproving looks from my mother and gasps of dismay from those in the immediate vicinity.
I suddenly realised this wasn't a homecoming. To present myself as Japanese, and to try to see myself in a people and culture which I had not been part of, was to be untrue to myself. It was a feeble attempt, which people quickly saw through and, like the Emperor's new clothes, I was left naked and exposed. I realised that I suffered from the affliction of all second-generation people - the half-way house syndrome in which you are neither really one nor the other.
But I will always have an affinity with Japan. There is so much of the country that I respect and admire - the beautiful, laidback island of Okinawa, the Blade Runnertype landscape of Osaka and Tokyo, the tradition and history of Kyoto, and the stillness and barrenness of Hokkaido.
I spent one night at the main seat of ZenBuddhism, Eiheji temple, set in the remote mountainous area of Fukui, on the west coast of Japan, where snow still lay on the ground. I experienced the routine of the monks, the meditation, the silence and the discipline. Then I had a realisation.
It was not divine enlightenment, but a feeling that I was closer to understanding this culture which had evaded me for so long. I observed the monks in their prayers, their concentration, their comfort in their stillness and I saw it reflected in the placidity and calmness of the Japanese people. I understood the idea of Japanese minimalism, that less was more. Although a Japanese person might not leap to hug and kiss you, a sincere and respectful bow speaks 10 times louder. And I saw that, often, forcing something can break it.