The Dream Drain

by David Mitchell

On the eve of departing, a novelist reflects on the pitfalls and perks of Japan.

An expatriate's relationship with the host country is a shifting one, and during my eight years in Western Japan, I have run the whole gamut: Greenhorn-in-Wonderland, hyper critic, "Excuse-me-but-you're-standing-in-my-Japan," culture-intoxicatee. I am returning to the U.K. at the end of March, but, paradoxically, my tie with Japan is due to grow much stronger in mid-May when my wife gives birth and I become the father of an infant Japanese-Briton.
This prospect changes everything. Many long-term western expatriates in Japan inhabit an Edenic state of bourgeois affluence with no strings attached. We enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, yet remain untroubled by civic duties. We can't vote, we may lack linguistic fluency, our opinions are presumed to derive from our national stereotypes, we rarely blip on the national radar, so we are absolved from caring overly about where we live. Japan's problems, except in a Japanwatching way, are not our problems. However, as someone who intends to return in five years to put a child through Japan's elementary-school system, the country's failings suddenly matter more.

My sharpest worry is that national homogeneity continues to be Japan's modern religion. There are no degrees of citizenship here: if you are not "a Japanese" your gaijin status is hammered home at every encounter with officialdom, every gape from rural school kids and every well-meant compliment on your chopstick skills. This is not an "Expat-as-Victim" article: I know that in the immigration authority's hierarchy of gaijinhood, Caucasians have a far easier time than, say, Filipino "Japayukis," Russian exotic dancers or South American laborers. My point is that foreignness is like a magical garment from a folktale, one with the sewn-in curse that its wearers cannot remove themselves. Only social consent will allow my child to feel at home in his or her Asian mother-country.

Japan withholds this consent like a zealot withholds an admission of doubt. At the political level there is no provision for dual nationality in adulthood, so on his or her twentieth birthday our child must go through the ritual of renouncing British citizenship in the eyes of Japanese law�while retaining both European Union and Japanese citizenship in the eyes of British law. On a civic level, even Hiroshima, my home for eight years and, according to its tourist literature "the international city of peace," denies Korean conscripts killed in the A-bomb blast a monument in Peace Memorial Park because its foreign presence would sully the sanctum's purity. "Internationalization," as oft-quoted a mantra here as anywhere, means little on street level beyond flag-bunting, expressway signs in English and more Starbucks franchises.

The sea-change necessary to update Japanese society's relationship with the rest of the world and its peoples is not on the horizon, not yet. Gerontocracy keeps younger talent away from powers of decision making, resulting in a US-bound brain drain, a Europe/New York City-bound arts drain, and, more depressing for a father-to-be, a "dream drain": a pervasive acceptance that a creative and fulfilled life in a human-friendly environment lies only in the Paris of Am�lie, the Rome of Audrey Hepburn's Holiday and the Canada or Hawaii of Japan Travel Bureau brochures. An economy gnawed by deflation produces a climate where xenophobia heats up, not cools down. Education should propagate multiculturalism but instead fosters cookie-cutter conformity in a marathon sprint to brand-name universities which offer a woefully shoddy product. If my wife and I have a daughter, she may well need to sacrifice all hope of a rewarding career should she elect to stay in a Japan as sexist as it is now. The political forces that steered Japan to global dominance in the 1980s are now too dead to kickstart the country back to life, but not dead enough to roll over, expire, and allow their 21st century successors to take over.

This pessimism may be too murky. Japan changes more by revolution than evolution. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 catapulted Japan into the industrial age in the blink of a historian's eye, as did the post-war economic "miracle"�a word employed by Western commentators who failed to see rapid growth coming. It may be that the demographic and financial meltdowns Japan faces will trigger another volcanic transition, and soon. It may be that this change will promote meritocracy, protect the environment, modernize the economy, strangle the Yakuza, muzzle corruption and, crucially for my family's future, usher in a broader definition of what it is to be Japanese. I hope so. I have a strong affection for our child's Asian homeland, an affection that I want him or her to share as a native and not a curio. "Ah, so your child will be a Half," I was told by my colleagues when they learned of my wife's pregnancy. "No," I said, "my child will be a Both."