Rather a TCK than a Kikokushijo

Rather a TCK than a Kikokushijo – The Decision I made 50 Years Ago

Older readers who have ever attended a school class reunion or two will know what I mean about the special bond of that kind of friendship. It seems to grow stronger as the years wear on. As infrequent as the get-togethers tend to be, one is fairly astonished at how ex-classmates one never really “hung out” with back then suddenly turn into “dear old friends” close to one’s heart. That’s how class reunions are, but put them in the bi-cultural/multi-cultural context we are familiar with, the nature of that bond feels truly special.

I recently went to the class of 1962 reunion of an “American” (i.e. international) high school I attended for two years before graduating that year. It was a great opportunity to get reacquainted with old classmates, including some I hadn’t seen in 47 years. (Others I’d already reunited with at a much bigger all-alumni centennial reunion in San Francisco back in 2003.) The venue was in nearby Seattle, and I even had the good fortune of going with a Japanese Canadian ex-classmate, a good friend from back then who happens to live near us in Vancouver. He was kind enough to drive both of us in his car.

Over 20 ex-classmates from the US and Canada, Japan and Germany, some with spouses and grown-up children, met in a downtown hotel. We visited the wife (and once popular librarian at the school) of a much-respected teacher and principal, who passed away recently after an illustrious career with the school. We enjoyed a buffet dinner with drinks at her home with a spectacular view of the waters of the port of Seattle as the sun slowly set. Next evening, the group took a short cruise to Blake Island for a salmon dinner and show.

Throughout that weekend, including late-night wine-and-conversation sessions, we talked in twos and threes and in groups, catching up on news of other classmates and other school friends in locations as widespread as California, New York, Singapore, Hongkong, Bavaria and Japan. The get-together went by in a flash and soon we were in the hotel lobby, hugging each other to say goodbye, promising to meet again.

One question lingered as my friend and I drove back to Vancouver. How come my old classmates, some of whom I didn’t know well back in high school, have become so close?

Shared memories of the days when we were all about to go out into the big world were of course a big reason. I also thought about the unusual make-up of the student body in the pre-Tokyo Olympics days. Situated in Nakameguro (and soon thereafter moving to Mitaka), the high school was attended by children of businessmen, news correspondents, missionaries, diplomats and others of dozens of different nationalities, about 60% U.S. and the rest being Canada, European nations, Taiwan and other Asian nations as well as Japan.

Then a term I learned several years ago came to my mind – third culture kids, or TCKs. It’s the term sociologists use to refer to “someone who, as a child, has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own” and are sometimes also called Global Nomads (Wikipedia). Starting with the missionaries, then the military, diplomats and others, more and more American families spent time abroad in the post World War II years. Sociologists began to notice that their children had acquired unique characteristics, which stayed with them into adulthood. These characteristics integrate elements of their original (first) culture with those of the foreign (second) culture(s) they grew up in, into a third culture.

Coined by sociologist Ruth Hill in the 60s, TCKs have become a “heavily studied subculture” (Wikipedia). Among other things, “TCKs tend to have more in common with one another regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCKs from their own country.” This could explain the special kinship I felt toward my old classmates. Our conversations sometimes revealed totally opposite political views or big differences in lifestyle and other preferences. Yet there remained this unique bond.

Regardless of our nationalities, our collective memories of high school life are crowded commuter trains to and from Nakameguro, nearby coffeeshops and pachinko (pin-ball) parlors, Shibuya and Roppongi by night, home and away basketball games with U.S. military schools and churches and clubs frequented by foreigners, though American and Asian cliques had their own preferences.

For me, Tokyo was still home but I was already a TCK, having spent over four years in Britain and Italy. When we returned from Rome, where my father had been assigned to cover the Olympic Games, I wanted to continue my education in English, rather than go back to the Japanese system. I wanted to remain part of the English-speaking “outside world (Europe? U.S.?).” I remain forever grateful to my late parents for letting me go to the international school whose tuition was not cheap. It was then that my father also told me the tuition was “all that we can afford,” meaning I had to somehow earn my spending money. I’m again grateful in retrospect because that’s how I got started teaching English at age 15, and continue to do so occasionally to this day some 50 years later.

I was fairly steeped in British and U.S. teenage culture, and also rather reluctant to face what used to be called the “examination hell”—the daunting Japanese university entrance exams, including Japanese language and classics. Some 20 years later in the 1980s, the re-adjustment of the children of returning businessmen, media workers and so on to the rigid Japanese educational system would become a social issue as the kikokushijo (literally, children returning to Japan) problem, as Japanese corporate activities overseas reached their peak..

Kikokushijo is generally defined as “children of school age who return to Japan after an extended period of life overseas”and, according to a study by Momo Kano Podolsky of the Kyoto Women’s University sociology department, are “almost always perceived as being fluent English speakers with a profound knowledege of the host society and culture resulting in some type of ‘emancipated’ personality.” In fact, about one-third of all Japanese children abroad attend full-time Japanese schools and live a relatively secluded life isolated from host populations.

The Japanese Ministry of Education from early on sought to alleviate the potential “problem” caused by the increase in the number of Japanese overseas residents vis-à-vis the educational system, including their children’s proficiency in Japanese, and slowly managed to set up a system of re-integration over the years. Today, kikokushijo are no longer a major issue, the lingering popular perception being that they can be a bit unruly and have some trouble adjusting to the relatively rigid Japanese educational system.

In contrast, TCKs in North America, and probably Europe are still not widely recognized as a sociological grouping, much less seen as a problem, perhaps because North American societies were multi-cultural to start with, and the returning kids didn’t have a problem with English.

Ms Podolsky points out that while TCKs and kikokushijo “share common characteristics such as involuntary international mobility, immersion in various cultures, distance from ‘home culture’ and resulting feelings of ‘marginalization/emancipation.’” But the big difference is that while there is “eagerness on the part of the TCKs themselves to reaffirm a common identity based on those characteristics,” the kikokushijo have a tendency to regard being grouped together as a category as “constricting rather than comforting.”

So we were perhaps “reaffirming our common identity” as members of the class of ’62. And now that we are a bunch of senior adult TCKs, wherever each of us thought we were heading as teenagers back then in Tokyo, we were now here together in Seattle after all the thick and thin we’ve been though on different shores. For me personally, the renewed bond of friendship was a reaffirmation of the choice I made 50 years ago to become a “Japanese global nomad,” rather than a “stay-in-Japan Japanese.”

Incidentally, I did attend my Japanese primary school classmates’ reunion in Tokyo several years ago. As a rare participant, it was great to meet many ex-classmates again. But most of them live in Tokyo and meet every year. The only thing to vary being the venue, I found them to be somewhat blasé about the whole thing. They will, I guess, eventually have to witness their number dwindle from year to year. As for my reunion with my TCK friends, we promised one another “let’s go for the big 50th reunion, maybe in Hawaii” as we said goodbye. We may, or may not, see each other again. I like that better.

The choice between becoming Canadian (or American) and going back to being Japanese has to have been the critical decision faced by some elements of the Japanese immigrant communities in North America from the time they started coming over around the turn of the 20th century. In the early days, most thought they came for dekasegi (literally, going overseas to make money). When World War II broke out, some Nikkeijin who happened to be in Japan had to stay there. After the war, some Nikkei Canadians were deported to Japan. Some of these folks might have confronted that choice. To this day, I hear folks in their 50s, who have lived here for decades, talk of eventually returning to Japan for “medical reasons.” I’ve also met such “returnees” in Tokyo in recent years. Such was their choice, and I am also glad I made mine. I hope my account of how I made that choice might be of some interest to the readers.