Notes of a Jewpanese Nomad

Back in the days, when I was still a free radical, easily flying amongst other free radicals, I met a guy who was quite hot, playful, intelligent, and… well, hot.  I met him in shul, we were talking over seudat shlishit, and there were sparks flying between us. 

But, he was a good religious boy, so he was not going to date anyone just for play or fun.  So, he started screening me: I understand that you are halachically Jewish, no problem there.  You are culturally more Japanese.  No problem there either—Jews come in all kinds of stripes and colors, including the Japanese kind.  But how pure is your belief?  Do you really believe in Judaism?  Or, do you just “happen to be” Jewish? 

Hmmmm… said my rather rebellious brain.  “I don’t like this.” 

The red-headed hot boy wanted to know, whether my beliefs in fact were more Buddhist-influenced than Jewish-influenced.  What a tricky question. 

First of all, the starting assumption needs some more tweaking—Japan is not a “Buddhist country,” the way American is a “Protestant” or to be more specific, “Puritan country.”  This is problem number one. 

Problem number two:  I don’t really buy any pre-packaged religious ideas or concepts about things.  But I also don’t believe whole-heartedly in a purely ‘scientific’ worldview of things.  Articulating my theology at any given point is a rather involved process (as I expect it to be for many many people) and cannot be easily categorized into “Jewish” or “Buddhist.”

Problem number three:  I didn’t like being measured about “how Jewish” I was.  I was also feeling this subtle pressure to be “completely Jewish” to ‘pass’ as a possible girlfriend (=possible future wife) candidate. 

So, I shot back with a test for him.  I emphasized my secularity over my religiousity a bit, and inflated the “Buddhist-influence” on my beliefs more than probably was accurate even for then. 

The result?  Well, Misha’s got red-hued hair, but does not have flaming red-hair.  That blazing red-hair looked really exotic and delicious.  Alas.  

I love cukes, aka, cucumbers.

I used to be a great cucumber lover from infancy (I think), but there was a particular recipe that my mom sometimes made. I was a great fan of this recipe and remain to be today. But whenever I make this cuke recipe, I can’t forget how fortunate I am for being able to reproduce this recipe outside of Japan.

When I lived in Victoria, Canada, I had no kitchen so I didn’t think about foods that I could or could not make with available ingredients. The problem was more severe: I had no kitchen!! As a result, I developed a great fondness for dish washing. It was not such a bad thing. It just deprived me of cooking for two years.

When I lived in New York, I was shocked to find out that the kind of cucumbers that I could get at the local supermarket did not work so well for this recipe…

So my cucumber salad drought lasted for another four years. When I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area, I did not have a car. That made it a little harder to scout out the cucumber situation so while eyeing the English hothouse cucumbers, I remained abstinant of my favorite cucumber recipe.When I moved down to the neighborhood that I live in now and walked into our local supermarket, I saw Persian cukes piled high sold at a reasonable price. I think I gasped. I knew instinctively that this would be the perfect substitute to my home-grown cucumbers that would allow me to make my favorite cucumber recipe.

They have thin edible unwaxed skin and are smaller than its American cousin. They make great cucumber salads.

The recipe is:

diagonally sliced cucumbers, sesame oil, and soy sauce

Because it is such a simple recipe, there are a few tips that make it better.

One: The cucumbers will taste sweeter if before slicing them up, you cut the ends and rub the head of the cucumber with its tail top. You will see some white foam coming out of the edge where the cucumber meat meets the skin, which is bitter if you taste it. Wash off this foam and slice up the cukes! (I learned this tip in my co-ed Home Economics class.)

Two: Use about the same amount of sesame oil and soy sauce.

Three: Don’t dress it heavily. For about 7 Persian cucumbers, I use probably about a teaspoon each of sesame oil and soy sauce. Too much gets too salty and oily. Not a good thing.

Oh, by the way, pickling cucumbers work fine too.

The other day when we were walking around in our neighborhood, I said to Misha, “Well, imagine.  If I were a housewife…”  But he didn’t let me continue.  He immediately said, “I would have an easier time imagining you as an astronaut than a housewife.”  I wanted to dwell on the fantasy for a split second longer than when he cut me off.  Although I’m not too bitter about it since I probably wouldn’t have been able to advance the vision much further than… oh, about… five words-worth more, to be on the generous side…  I could imagine being a medical doctor for a longer time (like five seconds) than being a housewife (probably for about two seconds).  Being an astronaut actually provided some great daydreaming material although also completely unrealistic.

The almost certain loneliness that being a housewife would bring to my life would be unbearable.  For the same reasons, I probably wouldn’t be able to deal with a job that required me to “work out of home” all the time.  I mean, you never know.  People change all the time, and you always find out about new realities that you didn’t know about.  But for now, my daydreaming seems to have no room for jobs and careers that require me to stay at home all day.  So I wonder what I will be when I “grow up.”  Hmmmm….

Strangely enough, the longer I stay away from Japan, the more I start to crave the tastes from “home.” 

When I first left Japan, I lived without a kitchen for two years—while I hardly cook nowadays, when I was in my teens, I actually used to cook my own breakfast and lunch.  So for the first few weeks of having left home, I didn’t understand why I was left with so much extra time to doodle around in the mornings.  –Sorry I got sidetracked….

The point is, after about the third year of being away from home, I couldn’t stand it anymore and my dad was offering anyway, so I asked him to get me a rice cooker. 

Recently, I have found myself almost constantly craving Green Tea Ice Cream.  Yes, it was definitely one of my favorite flavors back home too—in fact, it was a dazzling new flavor that came out in my teens that I instantly fell in love with—but one that I didn’t eat it much.  Partially because the best flavor was sold by <a href=http://www.haagen-dazs.com>Haagen Dazs</a>, which as you know, is always a cut above others not only in flavor, but also in price, and also…. Because the heavy cream was often too creamy for me…

Now, though, I have had enough of no Green Tea Ice Cream!  I found a (sort of) local gelato shop that makes good Green Tea gelato called <a href=http://www.angelatocafe.com>Angelato Cafe</a>.  But really, the best place is <a href= http://www.gelaterianaia.com>Gelateria Naia</a>, which has a few shops in the San Francisco-Bay Area and I think makes the best gelato/ice cream.  But, neither of them are hekshered establishments, which prevents me from bringing them back home to serve to guests in my home… 

Since Haagen Dazs makes quite excellent Green Tea Ice Cream in Japan and Korea (and I am sure in China too) and all their flavors are hekshered, I am launching a campaign to get them to sell that great flavor outside of the North Asian continent as well!!

Come on, write to them!!  It’s http://www.haagen-dazs.com/coicou.do.  Suggest to them making and marketing Green Tea Ice Cream outside of the North East Asian continent!!  It will be “the real thing” (as opposed to this “green tea” ice cream widely distributed in the LA area, which tastes like detergent—yuck!!) and will make so many people happy!!

Growing up in a bit of a Jewish desert has its advantages (although there actually are far more Jews than people seem to think):  I never had to deal with the “But you don’t look Jewish” comments and stares either in or outside of the Jewish community. 

You look mixed in the Tokyo JCC (my home shul), you probably have a Japanese parent and an Ashkenazi Jewish American parent.  And although the gender combination that people assumed was wrong in my case, that was not so important.  What was important was that they got me.  They understood where I was coming from—which was more or less where the community stood too.  The community and a lot of people in it were an interesting mix of Japanese and American Jewishness regardless of their roots.  (The place was originally Russian but by the time I came along it was mostly American.  Now, it’s a lot more mixed than that—a lot more Israelis and Europeans too.)  I didn’t grow up with a fundamental insecurity about being Jewish like I have about being Japanese. 

After meeting a few fellow racially-mixed Jewish people and non-Ashkenazi Jews, I realized how lucky I was to have grown up until the end of my adolescence not having been questioned about my Jewishness.  I heard many people—my traditional Mizrachi roommate who grew up on the East Coast, an Ashkenazi Jewish-Asian woman who grew up Conservative on the East Coast, and a Ashkenazi Jewish-African-American guy who grew up Reform—say that they didn’t feel accepted in the community because they didn’t fit the “typical Jewish” look. 

In Japan, I was Jewish if I said so (no one knew what that meant in Japan anyway).  In the one place where there was the danger that people would have commented on my “unusual look” for a Jew, they got me and so of course they didn’t even bother questioning.  How lucky I was.

On the other hand, based on my relationship to my fellow Japanese, I imagine why many non-Ashkenazi looking bunch of people tend to drift away from Jewish communities and Judaism.  For those who have a mixed ancestry, many say that the culprit is intermarriage.  I don’t think so.  I think that intermarriage is a symptom and not the cause.  I also don’t think that children of intermarried couples are far from lost from the Jewish community if only the community learned to treat those children a little better.  The problem is “not looking Jewish” or having “different” traditions than the mainstream American Jew.  That’s why there are also many non-Ashkenazi Jews who don’t feel at ease in an American shul nor with “the average” American Jew.

I don’t have much to do with the Japanese communities around here.  I am not interested in befriending the general Japanese community because I feel ambivalent about Japanese people:  I don’t want to have to go through explaining myself over and over again; I don’t want to have to prove or justify my Japaneseness; I also don’t want to be scrutinized for my “Japanese” or “un-Japanese” moments.  I imagine that maybe some non-Ashkenazi (looking) Jews might feel similarly and that’s why they don’t associate with Jewish communities—even with the primarily cultural ones.  I can’t be sure, but that’s one of my guesses.

To the vast majority of Ashkenazi American Jews, I seem to look Japanese or Asian.  That, combined with the fact that I speak an American-accented English seems to lead many to assume that I am a hyphenated American: Japanese-American or Asian-American.

In a sea of American Jews who feel quite comfortable being “American”–just American, non-hyphenated Americans–suddenly again, I am a “foreigner”–a presumed hyphenated American, unlike them non-hyphenated American(Jew)s.

It makes me feel like I am back in Japan again and that I am back to being… oh, anywhere from age 3 to 17, when people insisted that I looked “foreign” (外人っぽい).  A boyfriend once insisted that my sister and I looked like twins after seeing her for the first time.  Sure, my sister and I biologically sprung out from the same couple and look like we are siblings, but we are not that similar.  It made me angry that someone who was supposed to know me better could not see our differences.  Luckily, I had friends from childhood who said, “sure, you two look alike, but of course you don’t look like twins–you are not that alike!!”

I no longer walk around everyday thinking about things like this.  But, when certain things happen, these emotions still come flowing out and attack me.  I call them the rude awakenings.

Today, it was when someone who I had never met before confused me for someone else who was “Japanese.”   The person who confused me for a another “Japanese woman in a Jewish context” did not notice the mistake until we had been standing there for about 5 minutes trying to figure out where we knew each other from.  I had never seen this person before, but I am used to standing out and being noticed much more than the average person, so I thought that maybe we had crossed paths somewhere.  Then came the explanation: “Oh my god! I am so sorry!! I mistook you with someone else!!”  Apparently, someone else has a “Japanese wife.”  What an incongruous site; a Japanese (in this person’s eyes) woman in a Jewish setting!! How could there be more than one!!  I even heard the name of the person who I was confused with.  Honestly, I didn’t want to know any of that detail.  I just wanted to hear an “Oh, I confused you with someone else, I am sorry.”  That way I could have went on guessing what the source of confusion was.

I will tell you why it is doubly annoying to me.  To the person who confused me with another “Japanese woman,” it was an innocent mistake because it was only mistaking me for another person of my tribe, right?  Well, the hard part for me is, if that person who I was confused for sees me, I doubt that she would think that we look alike all.  Because if she is “Japanese” she probably would think that I look “white,” like a foreigner to her.

Here we go, back to square zero again.  Neither Jewish nor Japanese.  Incongruous among both of my people.

If you are 50, even 40 and older and you are like that, I don’t blame you.  But if you are in your late 20s or younger, have travelled away from home, have lived in a big city, and are still like that… you’ve been lazy or your education has failed you and I have no sympathy.  Shape up!!!!