Cool water on a hot day

We came back from camp on Saturday night. Two leisurely days and nights on the shores of Lake Biwa with good friends, followed by an impromptu stay with Kentaro's parents, who came out to join us at the lake on the second afternoon and invited us to come by on the way home, have left both the boys and me brown and relaxed, ready again for all the city can throw at us.

Spending time with other bicultural families is really important to me. Partly it's for the boys' sake - if they are to grow up confident in their double Japanese/English identities they need to be around people who look and think like them, other children who see understanding two languages as neither strange nor particularly cool and who don't see their round eyes and brown hair as a cue to yell Eigo de hanashite! ("say something in English!"). Although Japanese society is becoming more open, marriage between Japanese and Westerners is still relatively rare, and our children (known as haafu, meaning "half") do stand out. When they are little, strangers exclaim how cute they are; but as they grow older, they become aware that they are different from their friends, in an environment where for the most part conformity equals correctness. So I take every opportunity to find multicultural friends and role models for Kei and Dan, in an attempt to counteract the ambivalence of the mainstream message that they are exotically attractive the one hand, and potential outsiders on the other.

It's also a treat for me, though. Being in an intercultural marriage is one situation that carries particular stresses and issues which are hard for people who haven't experienced them to understand, and being a foreigner in Japan is another. So to spend time with other people, particularly women, who are in the same circumstances and who empathise without the need for everything to be spelled out, is like taking a dip in a cool lake on a long, hot day. Groups such as the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) and the Married in Japan mailing list, which has to be one of the most supportive Internet groups ever, are real sanity savers. Any worry is lightened when you share it with people who not only understand, but have been through exactly the same thing and can offer a variety of solutions you'd never have thought of for yourself. Not to mention laughing wryly with you, hugging you, rejoicing with you, and on occasion crying with you, rekindling the spark of your own humanity so you can start to laugh again in turn.

I've officially been the Kansai AFWJ camp coordinator for the past couple of years, and previous camps have had up to eight or nine families with over a dozen kids participating. This summer, though, many people seem to have either gone back to their home countries, moved away, or had new babies, and this time we were camping with Margarite from Holland, her sons Kai and Dylan, who are slightly older than my two, and Reina, an American whose elementary-school daughter was away visiting relatives in the US. Sandra from Hong Kong joined us for a barbecue on the first night, and my in-laws came swimming the second afternoon and brought fireworks with them. Having fewer people than usual actually meant a lot less stress, and after swimming most of the day we sang and chatted the evenings away with a small amount of wine and a good deal of laughter.

The last night, another multicultural family came and camped on the same beach: a German mother with her two half-Japanese daughters (one married to a Chilean guy and with her own Japanese/German/Chilean daughter) and her young German/American son. They'd been touring Japan in the van for two weeks, camping here and there and enjoying the country as they found it. It was refreshing to meet them, and to feel even more strongly the openness some international families possess simply because of who they are.



The morning after we arrived, I was awakened before dawn by a group of three (Japanese) teenagers cavorting noisily about the beach. Though I crawled out of the tent to shush them so they wouldn't wake the children (who were actually so tired after the previous day's swimming that they probably wouldn't have opened their eyes for anything less than a major earthquake), I couldn't be angry. The sunrise was quiet and certain, pine trees painted black against the rosy gold of the clouds. It was the perfect way to start another day of both being foreign and belonging here, bringing up children whose bicultural experience of the world will be totally different from my own but who are linked to me by both heritage and love. I'm sure that as they grow they will find their own ways of coping, their own cool water to refresh their spirits. But for now, a lakeside camp with friends will do all of us just fine.