By Atsushi Furuiye
Part 1 "FAMILY HISTORY" is here.

My father became an engineer manufacturing first batteries, later semiconductors. As he was transferred from one plant to another, the family moved from city to city. Near Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture, then to Kamakura in Kanagawa prefecture, and on to Kawasaki, also in Kanagawa.
I was born in 1957. Mother chose to go back to her parents to give me birth, so I was born in a hospital in Kumamoto City. I heard I was in the city for about three months and came to Kamakura.

My first memory that I can say is my own is from the second place we lived within Kawasaki. It was in a boarding compound for the company’s employees. Near the entrance to the compound was a large building that housed the mess hall and recreational rooms for the single women hired from rural towns. The girls were housed in an apartment building behind it. The farthermost building was for families with children like us. For a kindergartener that I was then, it was a long way from our apartment to the entrance. I would go there to be picked up by a school bus every day. One morning, I was a bit late, and the bus left in front of me. I could see it running away. I chased it as fast as I could to the next stop. For some reason, it stopped there for a while with its door closed, so I knocked on the door but no one inside seemed to take notice. I banged harder and harder until they opened the door for me.

My second memory also involves running. It’s kind of funny because I never liked running. It was in 1964 when I was in the first grade of an elementary school that stood about a kilometer from our home. The Tokyo Olympics were being held. On the day the marathon was competing, I ran all the way home after school. On the way, I found an electric appliances shop, saw the TV in its window showing the athletes still running, and hurried home. I believe I got to my goal sooner than the gold medalist.

Around the time I was getting into fourth grade, my father would often travel abroad on his assignments. Japanese manufacturing was starting to go global. Once we even had foreign guests in our little home. It was the first time I met a foreigner. Mother prepared some dinner for them featuring meat which was a luxury for us then. She ran out of meat. I was sent out to get more.

Eventually, Father was sent to Mexico City to build a plant for semiconductors. I, along with Mom and my sister were to follow him a few months later. I remember I had recurrent nightmares in his absence. The street that I ran to catch up to the school bus when I was in kindergarten had a large sewer on one of its sides. It was made of concrete about two meters wide and perhaps a meter deep, and had bars about fifteen centimeters wide that went across the sewer at street level about two meters apart from each other. The intrepid children would try to walk across those bars only to find a wall on the other side. The water that flowed was always dark, and well, it smelled like a sewer. In my nightmares, Father would appear from this sewer as a skeleton wearing his normal business suit but dripping and dirty. I would look into his hollow eyes and wake up crying.

It was on July 7, 1967, that I took my first flight. It stopped over in Vancouver, Canada, and we arrived in Mexico City in the evening of the same day. This was my first experience with the time difference that I would later become familiar. Father had prepared for our arrival well, but it was all new to me. He had a driver’s license and a car (he had never driven in Japan,) an apartment which was much much larger than the one in Kawasaki, and had hired a maid (impossible in Japan for ordinary families like us!) It felt like I was in a fantasy world as he drove us beneath thick trees lining a major avenue to our new home.

There are a lot of stories that I can write about our life in Mexico, but I’ll leave them for further occasions. Here in this story I’m writing now, the theme is the sense of home, so I’ll stick to the episodes that are related to this.

Living in a foreign land and attending an American school where and when there were only a small number of Japanese, I developed a strong sense of nationality. When we were learning about the attack on Pearl Harbor in the classroom, I would tell my classmates the Japanese side of the story. When Mexican kids followed us through the streets and called us Chinese, I would yell back that we were Japanese. When the Olympic games were held in Mexico in 1968, we cheered for the Japanese national team. I was proud to know that our soccer team won bronze beating the hosting Mexican team in their last game. Overnight, the nickname the Mexicans called the Japanese turned from Mifune (the movie star) to Kamamoto, who was the hero of the soccer team.

As years went by, I became a Japanese living in Mexico with some American mindset. I mean exactly this, word by word. I was a Japanese. I was living in Mexico. I was learning in English with the American curriculum. I was all these three, not just one of them. Mexico had turned into my new home.

After four years in the American school, I transferred to the Japanese school which was newly established in Mexico. I got into the eighth grade in my new school. At home, we’d often hold discussions on where I would go on studying after I finished junior high: Should I go back to the American school till I finish twelfth grade? Should I return to Japan and get in a high school there? I had an uncle living in Canada then, so it was also an option to go stay with him and attend a school there. What would be the possibilities for further education in each case? College in the States, in Japan, in Canada, in Mexico or elsewhere?

It turned out that by the time I was in the ninth grade (final year of the junior high), we knew that my father’s job in Mexico would also be finished in a year or two. Mom, myself, and my sister were to go back to Japan when I entered a high school in Japan. Dad was to stay in Mexico until he gets his things done.

It was in the December of 1972 that the three of us moved to Japan.

to Part 3 "HOME WAS NOT HOME"

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.