Letters
Dear Sylvia,
When I was invited to write a letter to someone about my relationship to Asian Americanism, you quickly came to my mind. But I didn’t want to just write to you, I wanted to invite you to respond and share your experience.
Before I ever met you or saw your films, I remember coming across your website and reading descriptions of your work and feeling an immediate kinship. I knew I had to know you. I was always drawn to film and literature as a vehicle for accessing other subjectivities as a way to make sense of my own and the various cultures that intersected in my life. I imagine this is the case for many. Some artists who are bicultural, or have a migratory experience of some kind, come to reckon with this aspect of their identity through their practice. I was intrigued by how your early films engaged with the complexities of being from two cultures with their respective histories.
You write that your films “negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.” Your films resonate with me precisely because you succeed in communicating through affect. The feelings your films produced in me reminded me of my own searching, questioning, and reckoning. Am I Japanese? Am I American? Am I Asian American? Japanese American? Hafu? Am I a first generation immigrant? Perhaps I’m all of these things. Although you’re not American, I somehow found clues to my identity in your work.
I’m curious to know what works and artists accompanied you in your understanding of your identity. How did these influences shift your practice or process? How did you know that film was the medium you had fluency in? Since most of your work utilizes found footage, I wonder if preexisting images enunciated some of the questions and feelings that you yourself were grappling with.
The intimacy we feel when something outside of ourselves resonates with something internal is very profound. In that moment with an image, a film, or another’s life experience, we find kinship. Witnessing—or accompanying, as we do when we experience an artwork—grants us entry into others’ processes of becoming, and that experience inevitably becomes part of our own.
I’m grateful for your work and your friendship, and that we share and accompany each other in this unique place between Japan and the West.
Love,Aily
------
愛理ちゃん,
Is this how you write your name in kanji? I assume so—the characters fit you so perfectly: Love and Reason. Your parents picked such a beautiful name for you!
Did you know I have a Japanese middle name? It’s Yuki. There was a brief time that it seemed popular for some to use katakana for first names. My mom’s Japanese passport states her first name as セツ, Setsu. Anyway, she didn’t care for kanji in names. Frankly, I don’t think I had one for my name, until I kept asking her in grade school. I still remember her reaction—I’m sure she improvised on the spot. 雪。 Snow!
In the ten years or so that we’ve known each other, we’ve spoken time and time again about our respective experiences and how different they were. My identity has never been easy to define, and it has definitely changed over time. I went through a long (and hard) acculturation in the years after I moved to Germany. As you know, I was born and raised in Japan and attended the Tokyo German School there. I always identified as Hafu until I moved to Berlin, where I began omitting the half-Japanese part because it resulted in (constant) emotional labor, and in being othered too much—not just in every new encounter, but well into friendships, too. I think both Germany and Japan still have long ways to go in terms of their acceptance, understanding, and visibility of various minorities. Very few people seemed open to “believe” my experience: there were always too many questions about an “authenticity.” Nowadays, I like to say that I’m a transnational. I feel comfortable with this label because the prefix trans- denotes a movement of sorts, between, or from one to the other, whether that’s physical (moving from Japan to Germany, vice versa, and beyond) or psychological (between cultures; processes of adjustment, understanding, becoming).
For me, this acculturation occurred on every level: food, clothing, communication, behavior, mannerisms, and even in thinking. I moved to Germany in the early 1990s, at a time when people “innocently” asked me whether I spoke Chinese when I told them I grew up in Tokyo. This was before cheap air travel, which opened cultural horizons for the mainstream, and way before foodie culture arrived in Germany. It was still rather rare that Germans ate seafood (as it wasn’t widely available), and the notion of eating raw fish still triggered repulsion in many. It was quite hard and expensive to get Japanese food items.
I was used to courtesy, politeness, and being more cognizant of people when speaking, as you know, because in Japanese communication one uses different language depending on gender, age, and professional status. Berlin to me was pretty rough. One of the first things I was told when I finally got into art school, was that if I wanted to survive in this society, I needed to toughen up, and stop being so “nice.” I was told that I needed to learn how to “use my elbows,” that I didn’t seem to know what that meant. Within five years after moving to Germany, I ended up dropping out of university and going back to Japan for a few years. I wasn’t coping at all, but more than anything, I was disillusioned by the art school—not only because it felt more capitalist, conservative, and neoliberal than many other sectors in society, but also because I suffered from racism and sexism at the hands of almost all White, male teachers. I was actually never going to return to Germany, but I really wanted to finish my university degree. Tuition is free here, while student fees with living expenses in Japan (and even more so in the US) were too daunting, so I came back. But I was resolved that I would return to university only if I could study under a female professor, and luckily, this was possible.
My life up to my thirties always seemed predetermined by external projections: the Japanese were adamant that I could never understand Japaneseness simply because I wasn’t 100% Japanese, but the Germans also went the other extreme: at the University of Arts in Berlin, there were some feminists who thought it was progressive to call me only German. “Of course you’re German!” They were trying to be inclusive, but I could never get myself to tell them that it felt like erasing part of my experience and identity. In any event, I most definitely never looked Asian enough.
I believe it’s still quite common among Germans and Japanese to think that there is something authentic, originary, or primary about their respective cultures. Even though both countries have age-old histories of migration and mixing, and of course, colonialism––for Germany, these histories are a little more obvious, and for Japan, they are much more obscured––it feels like both Germans and Japanese share a strong belief that their respective cultures are native, homegrown, and endemic. There is a sense of unquestioned entitlement; there is prevalent, if latent (because often “unconscious”) essentialism. I think for many—conscious or not, latent or explicit—the dominant national culture is still an indisputable norm. In Germany, there is a socio-political concept in place of deutsche Leitkultur (German leading/dominant culture), which one must sooner or later submit to, in order to integrate, assimilate and succeed. (A kind of mirror image of that is the "one race mythology" that Japanese conservatives perpetuate.)
The turn of the millennium and the changes that came with the acceleration of globalization seem to have improved a lot in Germany. There has definitely been a bit more visibility and representation of “minorities” on every level, including academia, the arts, and visual culture. Germany is slowly beginning to go beyond working through WWll atrocities and national reunification issues to address its migration and colonial histories. But I believe that as long as any notion of Leitkultur remains a political stance, things will only change on a superficial level.
The first short film I made, Memories (2004), was an attempt at constructing my family history. My German father moved to Japan in 1958 and lived there for 36 years. I don’t know where or how he met my Japanese mother. The mystery and secrecy around my parents’ lives before I was born—combined with the fact that neither of them ever wanted to speak about their respective childhood experiences during WWII in Germany and Japan—just made me more curious. But at some point, I realized that the family secrets would always remain secrets, so I began thinking about history and memory in more general terms. Maybe I was looking beyond my own family history for a transnational history that pertained to my own identity. I found that history was usually narrated through a monocultural and national lens, and it seemed full of erasures and exclusions. I feel the desire to look beyond some of these gaps, to connect my experience with those that came before.
I’m not sure what came first, falling in love with old archival celluloid films or the urge to work with them. It probably happened simultaneously. Using found and researched material made perfect sense for exploring a time that has already passed. I love juxtaposing images and making unexpected connections between different people, places, and times. It feels right because that’s what marks the transnational experience for me—beyond feelings of an in-betweenness, my films translate the straddling, bridging, connecting, entangling, mixing, and merging of possibly completely disparate narratives, cultures, and contexts. Found footage works on multiple levels: formal, material, and metaphorical. Taking old films and creating new meanings through montage was full of creative possibilities for me. The (American) term “orphan film” also resonated because many postwar Hafu kids were orphaned in Japan, as were their stories and histories.
I spent my formative years as a filmmaker in San Francisco and in the American context, I suddenly “qualified” as a person of color. I experienced racism in both German and Japanese societies, but my experience in those countries was never “valid” and never seemed to fit any mold. It was only when I visited California for the first time in 2004 that I felt accepted for who I was. The Bay Area is a special place to me—the temperate weather, the colors of the sun light, the landscape, the proximity to the Pacific Ocean and the mountains, the fact that there, many European and Asian American cultures mix. No one thought it was a big deal that I was half-German, half-Japanese. I felt at home immediately. It’s funny because the Latinx communities usually thought I was one of them. The way they looked at me and automatically spoke to me in Spanish gave me an odd, but very nice sense of normalcy. In San Francisco, people didn’t ask me how long I lived where and what language I dreamed in, people didn’t ask me where I preferred to live, and if I thought I was ever going to go back.
I connected with artist activists like Scott Tsuchitani, who criticized “both sides:” through his work, mostly racism and representations of “Asians and Asianness” in visual culture. But Scott also criticized a sense of stagnancy within the Japanese American community, which didn’t make things easier for him. I related to this, to criticize and be criticized, and fight on multiple fronts. My conversations with Scott were very important; I think our experiences had a lot in common even though we came from very different backgrounds. In retrospect, I think we shared a sense of feeling “orphaned” by our reference cultures, by history, and by what were supposed to be our communities. Although this is my projection now, over ten years later, I’m not sure if Scott would agree with me.
Discovering Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) was very meaningful for me at the time. The way Tajiri went beyond official recorded history, interweaving fragments of memory and family history, in order to make sense of her personal history. The way she used absence to declare presence was an approach I had never seen before. The personal was nested in family/community/national/transnational narratives. I became very interested in Japanese American history, as it’s deeply marked by the friction between American and Japanese national histories; at the time it felt as close as it would get to finding a (proxy) history I could relate to, and this became a premise for my second film, Remote Intimacy (2007).
The time I spent on the Pacific Rim was formative for me as a filmmaker. It was around this time that I discovered Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work; her writing in particular was hugely influential for me. I remember the first time I read one of her essays, I felt like I had been struck by lightning. I woke from some sort of slumber, deeply inspired, even enlightened. She wrote—I’m afraid I forgot in which essay it was—that one should not self-marginalize or stay on the margins, but continually move in, out, around, through, and beyond different contexts. My memory is likely making modifications, but this the meaning I understood and took away from that first essay I read about 15 years ago.
This quote has haunted me: “Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer.” It’s funny, because I identified with so much of what she wrote, all the while her work made me critical of the processes involved in making films around/about the politics of identity. I began to question and scrutinize my first biographical essays: this process led to me to work around these issues in a much more abstract, nonverbal, and metaphorical way.
This makes me think of a fellow half-German, half-Japanese artist, Hito Steyerl, who has made a point of not overtly discussing anything related to her identity. In an interview, she says that there’d been “a historical pressure to confess or use a confessional discourse among ethnic minorities in Germany, and that it’s the only possible story you’re supposed to tell, like relying on your origins or ancestry or stuff like that. But the problem with these stories is that if they do not correspond to the prefabricated stereotypes existing around this specific minority, then people will not be satisfied. And that’s sort of a trap or double bind, let’s put it like that. You are forced to confess, but whatever you say will not be what people expected and will therefore be invalid. I always tried to avoid getting caught up in this double bind, so I never made any work which could be understood as fitting into that category.”
I believe that it’s possible to make films in ways that don’t easily fit into one or the other category. But this is what I think now: I wasn’t so confident about it when I began making films. After ten years of making abstract work, I’m returning to making personal film essays about my experiences. I’m ready to take this on again now; I feel the need to open up a space up for myself, and hopefully for others as well—no matter what audiences expect and how they judge it.
I can’t think of films (or essays) that I encountered in Germany—or Japan for that matter—that related as deeply to my own experience, at least not in the way that I was impacted by the Asian American context. Being removed from it, as an outsider looking in, allowed me to see all categories and labels as temporary tools, that nothing is static, just like an identity is never static—it’s always in the process of becoming. While identity categories allow for communities to shape around them, I believe they must always be questioned, scrutinized, opened up, even exploded, before being reassem-bled in new articulations. I see this reflected in the way I’ve labeled myself over the course of my life: Hafu, half-Japanese, bicultural, intercultural, mixed race, and transnational. But language plays a role as well: in American English I’ve also been a Hapa, in German, it’s always been very complicated, while in Japanese, I’ve always been nothing but Hafu.
I’ve really valued our friendship over the years, Aily. I’ve really appreciated your confidence, your thinking, your programming, and your projects in the art and film world. It’s been inspiring and exciting to see a slightly stronger Hafu presence, and more representation, in the arts, and of course beyond.
頑張ろう。
Much love,
Sylvia