In the beginning ....
Hello everybody, I would like to be blogging about mixed race people, since I am one myself it will be mainly from my perspective and experiences. I will be talking about identity, culture, language, and such which is both a strength, but also a weakness to us mixed race people. Remember this is mainly based on about myself so when I mean "us" or "we" I am speaking on behalf of the people I share this feeling with, so if it seems too generalised I apologise in advance.
Now to begin with I would like to pain the big picture of what I have been through in terms of different schools and group of friends and such. I was born in Japan, my father being Japanese and my mother being European, because my mother had wished to have her child at a traditional japanese midwife. This was a very interesting decision for it would have been "normal" for a european woman to go through labor with her side of the family and not fly kilometres across the world. However, getting back on track... after 2-3 months I went to Switzerland to my new home and country i will grow up in. I went to a swiss day care, kindergarten and until 3rd grade to a Swiss public school. Then I changed to a Japanese school and finished Junior High school there, this gave me a good opportunity to be in touch with my Japanese side, a learn about Japanese culture in a way that Japanese kids who live in Japan cannot experience. For High school I entered a Americanised School in Kobe, Japan and there I did not only learn about American culture but also so called international culture. And now I am in a University in Kyoto studying international relations also with a lot of international people. However, the international culture that is in this University is very different from the one in High school. This might be obvious but there are still some similarities and it will also be one of my topics in the later blogs.
After drawing this big picture one can see that there are a lot of big and small changes that was made during my 22years of life, yet this is what made me the way i am now, which will be different in another few days, weeks, months, and years. Coming back to topic, it is not only mixed race people that go through culture changes, such as children from diplomats or where one of the parent needs to move from country to country because of their jobs go through this too. Nevertheless, the parents mostly send their children to international school, so that the children do not need to change language all the time, and have one element that is steady in their childhood.
Well, this is it for today.