I never forgot that feeling of psychological liberation, which is why when I enrolled at Princeton I immediately signed up for introductory Japanese courses. Rather quickly, I discovered that most of my fellow students already had some familiarity with the language: Chinese students who already knew all the kanji, or characters; those who had taken four years of Japanese in high school but could not place into a higher course in college; and a few Japanese-American students who could not read well, but spoke fluently. These students influenced the way in which tests were curved, and I, who only spoke Spanish at the time, felt like I was at a great disadvantage. My grades were fine, but I probably was one of the lowest-performing students in the class. I wasn’t good at dictation, second-guessed myself with particles, and fumbled during role-plays while those who probably only had to study for exams the night before aced them. Towards the end of freshman year, we were encouraged to apply for a summer intermediate Japanese study program in Ishikawa Prefecture. I didn’t get accepted. Devastated, I fervently searched for another one, ended up at the Middlebury Language School at Mills College, and then studied some more after the program to make sure I learned the same material as those in the Ishikawa program. I placed into Advanced Japanese 301, but the demographics in this class were even less diverse: mainly white men and those of Asian descent. I was still one of the lowest-performing students on tests, but in conversation, I flexed my muscles. It was then that the freedom I’d felt in Japan flooded back to me, and I was much more improvisational and free-flowing than my classmates.
Each time I went to class, I felt enveloped by an entirely different culture and I relished the feeling. I wanted to become a polyglot, undermining stereotypes about black women, or maybe placing myself outside of them. No one would expect a black woman to have an advanced proficiency in Japanese; I could be part of more social situations, my multilingualism allowing my identity to be as shape-shifting as my tongue.
My passion for Japanese would carry me throughout my years at Princeton. As more and more students opted out of it—those same students who had surpassed me when we were underclassmen—I persevered. By the time I applied to become an intern at Temple University Japan’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies—which was coincidentally located in Azabu-Juban, Sailor Moon’s neighborhood—I was damn near conversationally fluent. I was able to tell the time and hold forth on the implications of an aging society with only slight hesitation. I was going to work with Mei Nakamura, an author and associate professor of creative writing and Japanese literature at the university, and Calvin Sanders, senior associate professor in the Department of Humanities at the International Christian University. I would work on my writing with Mei while helping Calvin translate modern and contemporary Japanese poetry with the intention of publication.
My return to Japan was a relief. Once I landed at Narita International Airport and found a shuttle to Ikebukuro, I huddled in my seat with my earbuds in, reading the Japanese signs. If I was going to seamlessly reenter this country, casting off the mantle of being a black American woman, my Japanese knowledge would make that much easier. I made a concerted effort to ignore updates about the ongoing trial of George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a young black boy, for wearing a hoodie in a gated community. I spoke Japanese and made purikura with my black Middlebury alumni friends in Shinjuku; bathed in an onsen and took a cable car around Mount Fuji with my fellow interns in Hakone; dined with Japanese businessmen in Shibuya; frequented Japanese churches and museums in Roppongi. My mother and her boyfriend at the time visited me in Japan for my twenty-first birthday, and she was astounded that no matter which shop she entered in the Ginza district—Tokyo’s version of Fifth Avenue—she was always asked if she needed help and no saleswoman hesitated to hand her an expensive purse to look at. Whenever we left a department store, she would tell me that she had never been treated with that much respect in an American store ever. For her, to be acknowledged upon entering a store and then allowed to peruse the aisles without being followed was intoxicating. I wanted to tell her that in Tokyo she was not a black American but simply an American, a gaijin, but I ultimately chose not to do so. I didn’t want to hamper her experience with national and linguistic comparisons between the United States and Japan.
None of this is to say that I was not aware of my blackness in Japan. Obasans, middle-aged Japanese women, touched my waist-length Senegalese twists when they discovered that I spoke Japanese and were stunned to learn the number of hours it took me to complete the hairstyle. But to the best of my knowledge, that was the extent of it, even though I have heard of other black people experiencing far worse. I was not in a country where my ancestors had been enslaved. I was not stared at when I walked through different neighborhoods either in the day or the evening, no waitress gave me poor service, no one made any snide remarks about my body, and I never heard a racial slur. In short, I was free. Until I heard that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.
I was sitting in my room in my dorm. It was early in the afternoon, and I had just finished translating some of Hagiwara Sakutaro’s poetry. Like most afternoons, I was using Twitter to catch up on all the breaking news. Immediately after logging in, I saw a photograph of George Zimmerman’s gleeful face, looking up and smiling at his lawyer, on my news feed. I don’t remember breathing as I read through hundreds, maybe thousands, of tweets from black users expressing their grief and sorrow for Trayvon Martin. It was a shock wave that reverberated throughout the world, but because I was so far from America, I felt a deep pain at not being around those who looked like me during this moment of collective mourning. The walls began to close in around me. The sun piercing through the windows became too bright for my eyes. There was no word in Japanese or English that could accurately encapsulate how much I was sinking on the inside. I confided in one of my friends, a woman of white and Chinese Malay descent, who was a passionate Democrat. Like me, she was appalled with the ruling. That relief in sharing my disappointment, however, was short-lived. Her anger was political; mine was personal. I needed someone black to talk to.
Why would I call myself a black woman when I could just be a human? Why?
Because when I walk out of my front door, I am not simply treated as a human being. I am treated as a black woman. I am both unconsciously and consciously aware of how others’ biases kick in when they see me, and how their subsequent treatment of me differs from the way they might treat someone else who is not black and female. The responses I get when I report my treatment to other black women let me know that these behaviors are patterns. My experience flattens if I believe that I can freely roam this earth without thinking about how my body impacts where I will and will not be tolerated. When a white person asks a black woman why she cannot just be a human, he or she is asking, Why can’t you be like me? Why can’t you partake in the humanity that I have as my birthright, even though I can rip that humanity away from you by casting you out of our society if you do anything that I don’t like?