In this chapter, I share my journey of navigating the third space as a transnational Japanese and American through autoethnographic vignettes. My hope is to reveal how a simple change in my self-introduction was a result of years of grappling with my sense of belonging in the first and second spaces of Japan and the United States and realizing the value of my experiences in the transnational Third Space. Autoethnography provided me the opportunity to practice reflexivity in my research to examine my positionality and by uncovering stories of belonging, uncovering my identity as a transnational third space. I provide an overview of autoethnography as a method to reveal my identity story to arrive at the transnational third space. Along with sharing vignettes, I discuss how autoethnography serves as a platform for first person accounts of minoritized and silenced voices to be heard and experiences to be shared. To conclude, I suggest autoethnographic activities in classrooms to create a transnational third space in educational contexts to encourage a diverse learning environment for students, while valuing their lives outside the classroom.
My Family Background
Existing in the between space of neither this nor that, life has been a struggle of grasping the uncertain identity and sense of belonging as a Japanese and American. It was an internal struggle of constantly being told what I was not, yet perpetually uncertain how to express who I was within others’ seemingly dichotomous view of being either Japanese or American.
My mother is a Japanese woman, and my father is a White American man. My mother’s hometown was a coastal city in Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. Her parents owned a small, traditional kimono business that embroidered and painted family crests onto kimonos. My grandfather was known in town for being extremely Japanese, even by Japanese peoples’ standards. The only time he wore Western clothing was during World War II, when he was sent to Manchuria and was a prisoner of war for three years.
In the 1970s, it was still uncommon for Japanese students to study abroad, yet my mother was determined to learn English and commuted for hours each day to a language school, paying tuition with the money she earned through part-time jobs. After graduating from the language school, she decided to study abroad to further her language ability. She did not go through a specific program organized by a university or the government but found accommodation and a government-funded English language school for immigrants in California on her own. My grandparents told my mother that she could study abroad in the United States under one condition—not to fall in love with an American. However, once this happened, my grandfather accepted my mother’s decision and my grandmother reluctantly agreed. During World War II, some Japanese women were given a long, wooden stick to ward off foreign soldiers, and I chuckled every time I saw that stick displayed in the guest bedroom, where we used to stay on our visits.
My father is White, from a middle-class Christian family from the Midwest. His family had a small business that distributed janitorial supplies. My grandfather was also a pastor at a church, so my father was kept busy helping with the business and attending many of the church activities at the chapel. They used to travel around the nation because my grandfather was invited to speak in many churches and to youth groups. My father played basketball in high school and college but was drafted into the Vietnam War.
About ten years later after he met my mother, he learned Japanese through cassette tapes they found at the local library that were made for diplomats working in post-war Japan. I now appreciate that both of my parents valued language learning, which led me to be bilingual. After I was born, my parents decided to move to Japan for a couple of years because my father wanted to experience Japanese culture. We first lived in Kanagawa Prefecture, just outside of Tokyo. We happened to live close to a U. S. military base, but my father was not in the military. When I was in the sixth grade, we moved to Tokyo—within walking distance from the famous Shibuya crossing. Although the move to Japan was supposed to be temporary, thirty-seven years later, my parents are still there today. Whenever I see pictures from my parents’ past, I wonder how two people living in such different worlds could come together. Even with parents with strong national identities for the respective countries, I felt disconnected from Japan and America, my first and second spaces.