A Story of My Roots and Routes--Part 4 "CONNECTING WITH TCKs"
By Atsushi Furuiye
Part 3 "HOME WAS NOT HOME" is here.
Over the course of three years in high school, I made some great friends who accepted me as I was, and with whom I still keep in touch. At the same time, I began to look for other people with the similar experience of having lived abroad and returned to Japan, starting with my classmates from the Japanese School in Mexico. I also found out that some of the students in the high school with me had been in, for instance, the Japanese School in Düsseldorf, Germany. There were also some who had lived in the States.
I kept up the effort even after graduating high school, and in my senior year at the university, I met up with a girl who had flip-flopped back and forth between Brazil and Japan. She was studying about ourselves, the TCK experience. I was also drafting my thesis on the same theme. We joined the networks we each had of our TCK friends and started a self-support/study group. The meetings we had were conducted in both English and Japanese, we were free to talk about whatever we had in mind regardless of what the Japanese common sense would dictate. We were from all over the planet, but we all shared the same traits that are now regular talk in the TCK community. Most didn’t have the sense of being rooted in one place, some even felt the yearning to move across borders every several years. I named this yearning “expiration of your emotional visa.”
Our family was moving around, too. Dad returned to Japan as scheduled in late 1973. That was when I was in my first year of high school. He was assigned again to Mexico within a year. My sister who was having difficulty adjusting to her junior high school in Yokohama decided to go along with Dad. Mom stayed with me. When Dad couldn’t stand not being with Mom, he called Mom over to Mexico. I moved to a small boarding house in Tokyo and started to live alone when my third year in high school was about to begin, something unthinkable in an ordinary Japanese family with a student preparing for an entrance exam. I enjoyed the freedom of being by myself, had my first girlfriend, had fun with both non-TCKs and TCKs and made it successfully to the most revered university in Japan.
My family moved back to Japan when I was in my third year of university. The company again provided us with an apartment, and I was the one to clean up and refurbish the long-deserted room in Tokyo. Mom was the first to claim she did not like the room. It was too small for someone who had lived in a huge apartment in Mexico for nearly ten years in total. We purchased a large apartment in Yokohama and moved there. Dad was then sent to Brazil for a new assignment. Mom went along to live with him in São Paulo, but this time my sister who had become a college student in Tokyo decided to stay. When I joined my first job which was in TV production, I had a chance to go on location in Brazil. My parents were still there, so I stayed with them for some weeks, leaving my sister alone in Yokohama.
RIGHT: The apartment in Manhattan, where we lived in the basement.
In 1983, I was assigned to be a resident director in New York, and with my newlywed wife, moved to Manhattan. We used to enjoy walking through Washington Square even at midnight, and East Village was our favorite place to stroll around on weekends. We moved back to Japan in the next year and rented an apartment in Yokohama.
Even after living in our apartment for nearly a decade and raising two sons there, it never occurred to me that I would purchase a home, nor did I have an answer for that old question “Where is your home?” By the time, I knew it was a common unanswerable question among the TCKs. After some years in the TV business, I started writing for a monthly magazine featuring the education of Japanese children living in foreign countries and those returned, so the fact that I could tell my interviewees I was one of them was a great help. I came to define myself as a TCK, not Japanese nor Mexican or American.
This story was originally written in English for a fellow TCK who doesn’t read Japanese. I revised and rewrote it for general readers in Japanese, and the two are not exact translations of each other. You can read this part of the story in Japanese here.