I mostly encounter “desi” used to refer to the diaspora not the still-on-the-subcontinent Indians, and in context that seemed a distinction worth making.
It wasn’t to distinguish them from Native Americans, since I don’t use the term Indians for them.
You aren’t imagining things. She indeed no longer “true Japanese.” I have met many such people who went abroad for a number of years and then after they return, they just don’t fit really well into Japanese society anymore. Most of them will tell you that themselves. One particular friend, Keiko, went to high school and college in California, then worked for a few years until she was 30. She returned to Japan and has lived there since. She’s 50ish now and tells me all the time about the conflicts she has with “the Japanese.”
For Japanese, the important period is high school and college. Spend that entire time overseas and culturally you are a foreigner forever. Younger kids who spend some time but come back for high school seem to not have that same effect.
Adults can go either way. I know Japanese who worked for several decades overseas but are still just as “Japanese” as the day they left, or who quickly returned to being “Japanese” once they moved back.
OTOH, I know Japanese adults who moved overseas and then never wanted to return.
Japanese society is intense and the group think is deeply embedded. For some reason, spending high school and college years outside of that society forever changes a person.
(Of course, there are individual exceptions, but this is one of the generalisms I’d bet the family farm on.)
This isn’t the case for many, or probably most societies, which really shows how insular Japan is.
It really depends on the group. Some groups are more inclusive, others are not. Japanese is an extreme case, and it’s all of those, ancestry, language and lifetime experience and bonding in the society.
That misses the point of the story, as shown above. There was never a question if the girl held a Japanese passport, but rather if she was culturally Japanese. And she obviously wasn’t because people were telling her that she wasn’t.
It’s a difficult situation for many of them because they wind up not being seen as Japanese by the Japanese, but also not being seen as French, American, or whichever country they have lived in. Many people I’ve talked to say it’s often quite lonely and frustrating.
I grew up Mormon and after having left the faith, find that visiting family is so different. I speak a different language now, have different values and don’t share that sense of being “an insider.”
That doesn’t make sense. Desi is a word similar to Indie, used by Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, etc. It is used by both people still-on-the-subcontinent and elsewhere.
No doubt the people I learned the usage from were terribly misusing it, then. That might just be idiosyncratic to South African Indians (or even more specifically, Cape Town Indians, who often don’t have close ties to India, and quite a lot of them are first language English speakers with only the most rudimentary Hindi or Tamil).
My point was that it is objectively true that the girl was Japanese, because she held a Japanese passport. Whether she is “really” Japanese is a subjective question that can’t be clearly defined (and that you have failed to even vaguely define).
Maybe this is a cultural difference, but telling someone who identifies as X to their face that they aren’t "really " X, despite what their passport says, seems to me like the height of rudeness and bigotry. My response to that would be to glare at the person and turn my back on them, not to consider the content of their speech and wonder if they might have some kind of valid point.
I believe it is some combination of self-identification and recognition by other members of the group. In the vast majority of cases it will be completely uncontroversial. Most people who say they are English are in fact English, and will be accepted as English by most other English people. But identity is complex and there are bound to be some edge cases.
I appreciate the distinction made by the OP between the nation and the state. These ideas are too often conflated. However I think the related word “nationality” should probably be avoided in this discussion, as it commonly refers to citizenship of a state rather than membership of a nation.
This is the topic of this thread. 
Thanks. I want to focus on identity and not citizenship, polities, or nationalists. (Another curious fact: not every U.S. national is a U.S. citizen.)
I’m a Canadian citizen. I’m not sure I’m a member of any nation, as defined by the OP.
Well, yes. And as the OP has said, that is the point of this thread. The people telling the girl that’s she’s not a “true Japanese” aren’t confused because she has a Japanese passport. They are talking about being a cultural Japanese, which by definition is subjective.
It’s not that I “failed” to define why specifically she wasn’t seen as Japanese, I simply didn’t even attempt it. Making wild ass guesses from (at best) third-hand accounts on a message board may appeal to some, but there clearly isn’t enough information concerning her.
I have talked to many such people directly and know what they say, and I doubt they personally could give a concise definition as well, but they could give a laundry list of things they hate.
Actually, I interviewed once with the manager of a small Japanese branch office of a US company. She was someone like this, having gone to America as a high school student, then went to college there, and finally had worked for 10 to 15 years in the States.
She was setting up a sales office and intended to sell the services to Japanese clients the same way as the US head office did in the States. In the interview, I expressed reservations if it would be successful, but she was adamant that it would work. We thanked each other for their time and I let the recruiter know that I wouldn’t be interested and she let him know they weren’t going to extend an offer to me. I’m sure it saved us both frustration during their learning curve.
Pointing to specifics on failed sales approaches to Japanese is something much easier to define than cultural differences in individuals.
Agreed, it is generally rude, especially since most of the time such heated comments are made are in the middle of a disagreement.
The problem with your proposed response is that usually the people who say that are in some sort of relationship with you, often coworkers, and walking out of them doesn’t help solve anything.
I have been told in disagreements, “You aren’t Japanese so you don’t understand.” Obviously not helpful, but escalating it wouldn’t resolve the issue, either.
There’s a big difference between being told “you’re not Japanese” when you don’t regard yourself as Japanese, and being told “you’re not Japanese” when you do.
The former is a challenge to your right to express any view, or the weight of any view that you do express, on a matter that you “really have to be Japanese to understand”. It might be rude; it might be infuriating; it might even be bigoted. But the latter is a challenge to your very identity; your understanding of yourself. It has already been pointed out in the thread that your membership of a nation involves (among other things) other members of the nation accepting you as such. So if other Japanese people tell you you’re not Japanese, when you regard yourself as Japanese, that’s a serious attack on your identity.
You get this with, e.g., people from Northern Ireland who identify as British, but who get the sense they are not regarded as British, or are regarded as British only in a contingent or qualified way, or “not really British” by people from actual Great Britain. It makes them deeply insecure, with unfortunate consequences for the political life and social development of Northern Ireland.
Well, I’m really interested in understanding your point of view here, but it all seems very vague to me. Could you give some specific examples of situations, hypothetical or otherwise, in which the difference between “real Japanese” and “sort of Japanese” becomes apparent? Like, what exactly was this woman planning to do that had worked with American clients but you didn’t think would work with Japanese?
Where it’s not a question of legalities and formal citizenship, then who indeed has the authority to say “No true Scotsman*…” ?
And I’d query the notion above about “Englishness” being generally accepted. For someone who looks and sounds like me, it is. But I think it may be less straightforward for people from ethnic minorities (nor is “British” necessarily any more universally applicable). And then we’re getting into the realm of “But where are you really from?”
*Well someone had to drag him into this.
I don’t think the claim was that the existence of “Englishness” as an identifiable characteristic possessed by individuals is generally accepted. More that (a) the existence of an English nation is generally accepted, notwithstanding that there is no English state, and (b) one of the characteristics of being English is that other English people think you’re English which, yes, is messy, but is also inevitable if a nation is constituted by shared bonds of belonging. If people don’t think you belong then, by definition, you don’t belong.
It gets messy where, e.g., most English people consider that the nation embraces e.g. people of South Asian descent who have been born and raised in England, but a minority do not. These are some of the “edge cases” to which hibernicus refers. Who exactly is included in the nation has to be established by a broad consensus within the nation itself, and that can change over time. And that means the precise extent of the nation can be blurry at the edges. But the fact that a boundary can be fuzzy doesn’t mean that there is no boundary - there is clearly an English nation and there are many people who are clearly English and many people who are clearly not English.
Some groups are exclusive and make it difficult to join, some are broad and inclusive.
Religious groups are sometimes exclusive, there is no shortage of ‘chosen’ people, convinced that they alone will get access to the executive lounge in their celestial paradise.
Some cultures are exclusive and the Japanese culture is an example. It ties in with the notion of ‘purity and harmony’ that is a feature of that culture. It works well when applied to the attention to detail needed for craftsmanship. Not so much if it means excluding someone because they may have a hint of Korean ancestry of go out of the country for too long.
Conversely, the US, a nation that was founded by immigrants, probably articulates this most famously in the Emma Lazarus poem on base of the Statue of Liberty with the “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”.
Japan is the opposite sentiment and immigration is difficult policy for them to embrace, despite it being a solution to the economic difficulties that arise from a demographic trend towards of a steadily aging population.
Other countries that have experienced immigration, notably Britain, France, Germany in the decades after WW2 became more inclusive. Looking around London today, there are dozens of varieties of British. It is always an interesting question to ask people who have lived on a country that is not of their birth, how they feel, what is their identity. It is a very subjective thing and in a melting pot like London, the answers may be unique because though the dominant political and cultural environment is British and it is important to know how it works, there is a no pressure to conform. You can make up your own culture from the best bits of the others that you see around you. Or you can live in a bubble in a community that has a foot firmly rooted in the old country. There are many diasporas.
It is a personal choice and these days, travel is cheap, especially across Europe. It is not difficult to move to another country and culture. It is not the one way trip that it was in the past. Though it has had a few set backs recently, there is a growing supra-national identity called European and this is especially attractive to the younger generation for whom the notion of a rigid ‘national identity’ is an ill fitting box.
But it happens all the time. Some of it is mean spirited, some is just a representation of reality. When I lived in Nashua NH, just over the boarder from MA, I had just finished 4 years of college in NH. I considered myself a New Hampshirite. My address was in NH, my drivers license was from NH. But to someone who’d grown up in NH, especially in the rural sections upstate, I was just another transplanted Masshole. Having not been born there, or at least grown up there my drivers license meant nothing. I was a flatlander and would remain so.
Even being born there doesn’t necessarily mean anything. As the old joke goes, if a cat has kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.
Technically, I was a New Hampshirite. Culturally, I was not. The concept of nation can be used in multiple ways, depending on the audience.
Just to add another wrinkle to the discussion, there’s also the matter of which school you attended. Here in Texas, for example, especially during football season, It’s common to hear someone refer to themselves as a member of the “Aggie nation” if they attended Texas A&M, the “Longhorn nation” if the attended the University of Texas at Austin, and so on. In my neck of the woods, my hometown university changed it’s name in the 90s, from Texas A&I to Texas A&M - Kingsville. Some of the older graduates consider themselves to be members of the Texas A&I nation, into which no one else will (obviously) be able to join.
The problem is that there isn’t a quick way to show this. But you asked, so buckle up.
That story was back in the mid 90s, when most of international phone calls were faxes, phone rates were insanely expensive and it was a couple of years before email became common in the business field I was in.
The American company this woman worked for provided a fax service in which they supplied an adapter which plugged into the phone line between the fax machine and the outlet. (Normal phone calls were something like $3.50 for a first minute and $2.00 a minute after that. This service charged a dollar a page per fax, which was a tremendous savings. )
In the interview, the woman said they would not have a sales person visit the customer. It was going to be all done by phone. They would get referrals from existing customers then call the referral. They would ship out the adapter and have the new customer install it, make a test fax and they would be good to go.
I suggested in the interview that it would be difficult for Japanese customers to accept this. (This was the mid 90s, now it would be different.)
The customer would expect an actual sales visit and would never touch the fax line themselves. She disagreed so I obviously didn’t work for them.
Shortly after I got another job working for a Japanese import company. My boss said one of our customers had referred a company to us and wanted my opinion about their offered services.
It turns out that this was the exact same fax service company. Six months later, now they were actually doing sales visits. I recommended signing up and told the sales woman that I could install it myself, but she said, no, they were going to take “personal responsibility” for installing it. Now they wouldn’t let me touch it.
Kudos to her and the company, they completely changed direction, 180 degrees from what she had adamantly stated in the interview. Not all people can do that.
Japanese society for adults is highly regimented, with a zillion rules of what is and isn’t acceptable. There are strict rules for language usage, social customs and interactions, which can only be ignored at one’s peril.
Foreigners are given more slack. However, the more one understands Japanese and social customs, the less forgiveness is offered.
When I used to do consulting for Western clients, I would use apologies as a classical example of the difference in customs. In America, where I grew up, apologies are not forthcoming or are given grudgingly.
(Note that I’m taking in generalities, and one can always find exceptions. I’m not going to qualify everything I say.)
In Japan, apologies tend to be social lubricants, and are offered even if one doesn’t consider oneself to be at fault. In fact, in sales, you apologize first, even if you know that the customer is at fault. Then, you find ways to carefully show that the customer is indeed at fault. This is even if the customer is being abusive.
Very few non-Japanese can swallow that and I had an American friend who blew up his main customer by refusing to apologize for something that was their fault.
“Returning Japanese” as they are called, having spend their formative years in another society which will have emphasized pushing back often don’t get that they need to adopt to society.
Next, Japanese society is vertical rather than horizontal. The strongest relationships are between sempai (more senior members) and kohai (more junior members) rather than between equals.
As children, there were different expectations, so they didn’t run into this through junior high. It’s in high school and college, where students very involved clubs or sports, where this sempai – kohai structure really gets baked into their core.
The first thing new friends do is to try to determine their respective ages so they can completely restructure their language to speak more respectively or talk down, even if it’s just one year’s difference.
Language is incredible complex, with a half a dozen or more words for the pronoun “I” based on the relationship between the speakers, just to take one example.
Your typical middle level manager at Sony, a married man with two children and a stay-at-home wife, would use five or more of these pronouns in a typical day, depending on if he is talking to his boss, his boss’ boss, male subordinates, female subordinates, customers, suppliers, close customers, customers he isn’t close with, his high school baseball teammate (who was one year ahead of him 25 years ago), his high school baseball teammate (who was one year behind him 25 years ago), his wife, his favorite hostess at his favorite club, another hostess at the same club, his younger kids, his older kids, his older sibling, his younger sibling, his mother, his father, neighbors he likes, neighbors he doesn’t, the delivery person, etc. etc. If just reading the list of people is exhausting, image keeping them all straight.
However, the switching is automatic and without thinking. It’s an integral part of Japanese society and it serves as a constant reminder to both the speaker and listener of the status of their relationship, who is senior, junior, degree of closeness and so on. Knowing the rules allows one to “read the air” and understand when something is off. Not paying attention kills you.
If you are a Japanese adult, you value this and live it. If you have spend your formulate years in an American high school and university, then chances are that this isn’t second nature to you and you may even resist the idea of constantly scanning your words to ensure they are proper.
These are just a couple of examples, and it goes on and on forever. There are rules for knowing the seating position of business people in a taxi cab, depending on their status. There are rules for seating in conference rooms and who is allowed to share what opinions and in which situations.
Once, on a sales call, I was being shown to a conference room by a young employee when she froze. She couldn’t remember where to seat me, and it would have been deeply and personally embarrassing to her boss had she made a mistake because it showed a lack of education for his employees. I quietly suggested to her that perhaps I take the center of the table facing the door, (the position of honor) since I was the guest. For a customer I was more familiar with, it wouldn’t have been a faux pas, but something we would have laughed at.
New Japanese employees take a year or two to mature into “adults.” The social rules and language of adult society are so radically different than student life.
None of this matters in America and if you don’t value it, you will make mistake after mistake after mistake. You don’t care, but others will see you as “not a true Japanese.”
Keiko, my 50-something Japanese friend, resists these types of rules, despite having lived in Japan for 20 years since she returned. She only has Western friends or similar Japanese who are also returnees because she considers it too much of a bother to be friends with “true Japanese.”
She regularly (but unintentionally) insults Japanese by selecting the wrong degree of familiarity. It’s impolite to be too familiar or not polite enough. She also won’t apologize, despite it destroying relationships. Not only did she spend her high school and college years in the States, then worked for eight years, but she did all that without her family, which was back in Japan.
She was completely immersed in American culture after she left Japan as a child, missed out on all the years where Japanese learn these lessons, then returned at 30, an age long past where Japanese are expected to be the masters of these rules.
Once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker?
As I said in my initial post in this thread, it’s very lonely and frustrating for many of these returnees. They aren’t Japanese but they aren’t Western, either.
Hey–just want to say what a great thread this is. I’m learning from folks (especially MrDibble, Scudsucker, TokyoBayer, and am77494), and folks are being civil and bringing anecdotes and information both. Thanks–it’s a pleasure to read!