For me, there’s more weight. It’s more than the matcha. Oh, much more. The weight of trying to belong to a place I never truly knew, but that will always be a part of me. The way I look. The language I speak with my parents. The red passport I hold. Yet Japan feels oddly foreign - struggling with kanji, Googling phrases, using online translation to write birthday messages because my Japanese is messy and tangled with Western words.

Whenever I land in Japan, I feel neither fully at home nor fully on holiday. It’s a strange limbo I can’t quite describe. My grandma was the only thing that truly felt like home - she understood that her granddaughters were Westernised. 大ママ(Omama) knew. But when she passed just before the pandemic, I felt myself grow more distant from my second home.

I guess this is why I have a longing to maximise my time in Japan. To find clarity in who I am and a deep dig into my roots. The less time I spend there, the looser my ties feel. At least that’s what my irrational brain says.

I grew up in the suburbs of London for most of my life, apart from a three-year stint in Poland when my dad was transferred from Japan to work across Europe (try being an Asian family in a country where 99% of the population was white Catholic but that’s a whole story in itself). Anyway, back in London, being an ethnic minority in a very English school felt normal to me. So normal in fact, that whenever I was asked the dreaded “where are you from?” I’d shut it down with a firm “London” or “No, I’m British.” (I wasn’t, but I had fully convinced myself I was despite holding a Japanese passport.)

At school, I used to feel embarrassed about using chopsticks or about the rice balls and pickled plums my mum had lovingly packed into my lunch. (I’m sure you’ve heard that one or something similar from your BIPOC friends already.) And then there was Japanese school in Acton, West London every Saturday carpooling with my mum’s Japanese friend’s kids - something I barely mentioned to my school friends. It’s everything against a child to stick out because social survival is simple at that age - it is to fit in. Looking back, I can see that I resisted ‘being Japanese’ simply because no one else was. And yet, it was a reality I could never truly escape.

Then came make-up. I grew up in the 2000s era of Maybelline - the infamous mousse foundation that was all the rage but every shade was too pink for my yellow undertones. The pink-and-green mascara every girl had that promised lifted lashes only made my straight ones droop. Hues of green and blue eyeshadow looked beautiful on the blue-eyed models but would disappear underneath my hooded eyelids and leave me frustrated. Why didn’t I look like the pretty blonde girl in the adverts? Why do my eyes look the same, 3 layers of eyeshadow later? I can laugh about it now but as a teenage girl, that was hard.

Then a few years went on, into my late teens, where I often got annoyed when people I had just met would talk to me about their recent trip to Japan. I thought they couldn’t see me past my ethnicity. I’m just a portal to their Japanese obsession, I thought (ridiculous, I know). I was more than that. I went to an English school. I grew up in London. My accent is British. Still, they wanted to tell me about everything they’d experienced in Japan and how much they know about anime. Looking back, I actually can’t believe how dismissive I was - probably ruder than I’d ever allow myself to be. But that reaction came from a place of deep denial about my own identity. Now, I’ve become that person. I adore Japan. I love the culture. I love being bilingual, the thickness of my hair, my rice cooker. I love being Japanese.

(I still don’t know anything about anime.)

Fast forward into my adulthood: London’s multi-cutural hub has allowed me to breathe in my identity without searching for it. There’s are communities, clubs, neighbourhoods, initiatives etc. and despite how expensive it is here, I do love the diversity that London has to offer. There is still work to be done but beyond this city, we’ve come pretty far from the same-looking models that set the beauty standards for me and every other BIPOC girl in the early 2000s. The fact that Asian girls have been the main characters on TV and ads now makes my inner teen feel seen.

I take myself on solo udon dates, picking up onigiri from my favourite Japanese store and re-watching every season of Terrace House. Having Jamie as a lifelong partner - someone who understands my culture and can converse easily with my parents - feels like such a gift. I’m endlessly grateful for the life my parents gave my sister and me: an upbringing that didn’t conform to the rigid Japanese work ethic, access to a good education and the comfort of speaking English.

But what I cherish even more are the small things — the miso soup and rice my mum made every morning, the matching Totoro pyjamas my sister and I wore, learning to use chopsticks before I ever picked up a fork, growing up with words like shouganai and meri-hari (more on this another time), family dinners shared on the floor around a low table, Japanese mascara.

These small rituals and memories are my threads of home. Ties to a place I never truly lived, yet still deeply feels like mine.

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