Since her experience studying abroad in the United States in the 1970s, Nobuko Awaya has been concerned with issues of identity, and has since traveled the world to study minorities and intercultural communication. In recent years, she has been launching art projects based in Chihanan in Izu, her hometown. We spoke to her about her intercultural experiences and her work to this day, focusing on her involvement with the Japanese community.
As the only Japanese student studying abroad
Kawai: How did your relationship with America begin, and how has it progressed to where it is today?
Awaya: I was in the drama seminar at the Department of English and American Literature at university, and I wanted to become a director. I studied at the Southern Methodist University, College of Arts, Department of Drama, in the US for one year on a government scholarship. I had originally wanted to go to the University of Edinburgh in England, but in the mid-1970s, they had a policy of not accepting international students from Asia, so I was turned down. So I quickly decided to go to an American university with a strong drama department.
The university was located in Dallas, and students from economically affluent backgrounds came from all over the country. Although it was in the South, the overwhelming majority of students were white, with very few people of color. Unlike universities on the West Coast, there were no Japanese-Americans, and I was the only student in the faculty. I was also the first Japanese international student. There was another Lebanese male student in the faculty, but he had lived in London and Bali for a long time, so he was already in an international position and had no cultural adaptation problems.
There were only a few Asian students in the entire university, and the international student body on campus consisted of two from Hong Kong, one from Taiwan, one from Afghanistan, and a Nigerian prince from the theology department.
For American students, Japanese students are a novelty, but Japan is a far eastern country that has no interest to them. When asked in the cafeteria, "Is Japan above or below the equator?", I had to learn to respond with a joke like, "No, Japan is in the center of the earth." As I worked hard, feeling as if I was carrying Japan on my shoulders, I fell into a crisis of my own identity. Before I knew it, I was losing the culture and language that I was supposed to rely on. When I realized this feeling, I began to question what I was made of.
I also suffered from homesickness, which I had never expected. One of the people I became friends with in college was a black student (the term "African-American" didn't even exist back then) who grew up in the Deep South and whose father was a pastor and a community leader. She was also the first black person in the drama department to be cast in a Shakespeare play, and after we became close, she told me about the painful experience of being torn apart from her white lover.
I studied until late at night every day and was forced to think about "what I am" in an environment that had no trace of Japan. It was at this time that I also began to realize that I was Asian before I was Japanese. Much later, I spent a month and a half in Africa doing research for the United Nations Association newsletter, and the Japanese people I met living in Africa had a strong sense of "we are white people," which made me feel uncomfortable.
When I returned from my study abroad, I was very interested in two things: the desire to see Asia and the social situation in which Japanese people become a minority. Since I had no money, I took the exam to become a youth delegation from the Prime Minister's Office and visited ASEAN countries for two months. I started reading about Japanese Americans in books by Professor Sarutani Kaname, who was at my university, and visited the so-called "Amerikamura" in Wakayama. My second trip to the United States was to join my partner who was studying abroad, but since I had become a magazine writer after graduating from university, I was interviewed at the U.S. Embassy, obtained a journalist visa, and lived in Seattle in the 1980s, before Ichiro, while continuing to work. The story from then until now is too complicated and long to explain simply, so I will talk about it in response to other specific questions.
Kawai: What made you become involved with Japanese Americans and the Japanese American community in America?
Awa-ya: Following my two interests after returning to Japan, I made various encounters during my second visit to the United States and entered the Asian community. I was involved in Asian American newspapers and the United Nations Association (a private subsidiary of the United Nations), and had valuable and rich experiences, such as meeting important friends who I still keep in touch with today. For example, in my early days, I liked poetry, so one day I just happened to go to a poetry reading, where I met the poet Alan Lau , and was introduced to Ron Chew, editor-in-chief of The International Examiner. I wrote articles, and interacted with Asian Americans, including Japanese Americans, in Seattle, listening to their stories. I participated in activities for Japanese Americans affected by the atomic bomb, visited the Tule Lake Internment Camp, and did many other things.
Immigrants are the pioneers of Japanese internationalization
Kawai: Why did you become interested in things related to Japanese communities? What attracted you to them?
Awaya: It's not because I'm Japanese. I think the starting point was the strong experience I had of the change in my position when I studied abroad, which I mentioned earlier. In other words, when Japanese people go abroad, they become a minority, and when they stay in their own country, they are the majority, just like white people in America. Even for Japanese people born and raised in Japan, the position of "themselves" inevitably changes depending on the geographical, social, and historical circumstances in which they find themselves, and the way others see them and the way they understand themselves also change. So you were focusing on that mutability.
That's how I later became a teacher in the field of intercultural communication. I realized when I left Japan for the first time that nationality, culture, and language are not solid things, and that human beings are built on this "fragility." However, as I happen to be Japanese, I felt an inner familiarity with Japanese people and wanted to get to know them better.
Generally in Japan, when talking about Japanese Americans, the emphasis is on the hardships of immigrants, and the backgrounds tend to be stereotyped. I felt rebellious towards this, so encountering various stories of Japanese Americans in Seattle was a truly enriching experience.
We in Japan should also think about the history of how our blood changes depending on the social situation, and the future that may result. As I trace the history of Japanese Americans in my own way, I thought that in a sense, they were the pioneers of the future of Japanese people in the age of globalization. This is truly amazing, and I think there is a lot that Japanese people can learn from Japanese Americans. I think this kind of historical perspective is important when thinking about Japan in today's international society and the issues of minorities in Japan. It's a modern issue.
Kawai: I heard that you have also been involved in the issue of the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. Could you tell me more about this?
Awaya: The compensation issue arose just when I was in Seattle. In the early days, there was a difference in opinion between the first, second, and third generation, and there was internal resistance, but the energy of the third generation young lawyers was amazing, and there was also support from other Asian and Jewish people. I saw the rising tide and the process on the West Coast, and the vivid memories remain in my heart even now. I can't forget it.
I was interested in the retrials (or coram nobis, to be precise) of several Japanese Americans who opposed the internment, which were being conducted at the same time as the compensation issue, and in particular Gordon Hirabayashi, a Seattle native, and attended his trials. At the time, his father-in-law, Floyd Schmoe, who had made an outstanding contribution to the reconstruction of Japan after the atomic bombing, was living in Seattle, and I met him and had a chance to talk with him. He was already in his 90s, but he was healthy and intelligent. His pacifist philosophy and his respect for his former son-in-law, Gordon, had not changed.
In 1986, I left Seattle and moved to Hong Kong before returning to Japan. After settling in Japan, I visited Alberta with Yoshi Ishikawa and others at the invitation of the Canadian provincial government as a journalist, and met Gordon in Edmonton for the first time in a long time, where I had the opportunity to speak with him alone. When the war broke out and the Japanese were incarcerated, Gordon was a university student, and he said he expected that there would be about 100 people who opposed the incarceration of Japanese Canadians. But in reality, there were only a few. His "actions" were a complete minority in the Japanese community, which values harmony, so it is hard to imagine how lonely a fight it must have been. After graduating from graduate school, he left the United States and began his career as a researcher at a university in the Middle East.
I wrote about Gordon Hirabayashi in a Japanese magazine in 1985, "America Questioned in Wartime Japanese-American Trials" (Monthly Tide, September issue), but what's interesting is that in Japan, there is not as much interest in this kind of thing as there is in stories about the hardships of Japanese-Americans. So I was surprised to see a photo of my article on Gordon in Japanese inserted in the film "Unfinished Business" directed by Steven Okazaki, but the article had almost no impact in Japan. When Gordon died, Japanese newspapers barely covered the story, but in comparison, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong gave it a lot of coverage.
Are Japanese people and Japanese-Americans like oil and water?
Kawai: When you worked as a staff member for The International Examiner newspaper and the United Nations Association in Seattle in the 1980s, what kind of society was Seattle at that time from the perspective of "Japanese Americans" or "Asians"? Are there any memorable moments?
Awaya: There are two. First, Seattle is relatively small compared to San Francisco or Los Angeles, and has an atmosphere similar to that of its sister city Kobe in Japan, where Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese people all live together to form Asian America, and there is an area called ID (International District) that is neither a Japantown nor a Chinatown, and the impression is that the racial relationships are mild, including the relationship between whites and African Americans.
Another thing was that the Japanese community in the US was clearly separated from the Japanese American community. For example, there were only two Japanese people, including me, who frequented the Asian American newspaper I was involved in. Some even said that Japanese people and Japanese Americans are like oil and water. I felt like I was in between, while wanting to do something about this relationship. So when I returned to Japan temporarily, I interviewed the JACL in Tokyo, introduced Japanese manga themed on Japanese Americans to the US, wrote articles about Japanese atomic bomb victims, and interviewed Japanese Americans harvesting matsutake mushrooms, trying to bridge the gap between the two.
Kawai: I heard that you were interested in and began researching multicultural coexistence and intercultural exchange early on due to your experiences in the United States. How did you get started? What is the relationship with Japanese studies?
Awaya: After returning to Japan, I entered the field of intercultural communication. When foreign workers became an issue, I wondered whether they were in Sanya, and I went to volunteer at soup kitchens, which made me rethink poverty in Japan. I also looked at the current state of international schools, which were just starting to open at the time and aimed to target the children of Japanese parents who were not English speakers. I covered the gaps between various cultures and societies, and wrote about them mainly in PHP's "Voice Monthly" magazine.
Of course, I was looking for ways to connect with Japanese Americans, but there were no media people around me who were interested in Japanese Americans, so I was about to give up. Then, one day, a senior from university ran an African-American group, and while I was helping out with people who came to Japan there, I met Mayumi Nakazawa, author of "Yuri: Life in Harlem as a Second Generation Japanese-American," which tells the story of Yuri Kochiyama, who worked with Malcolm X. I immediately became involved with the Asian American studies group that she was running with Tatsuya Sudo, and we held meetings on a variety of topics until 2017.
Through their respective networks, the three had the opportunity to meet and talk with various Japanese people they knew in the United States, such as Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Emi Omori, Mark Izu & Brenda Aoki, Roko Kawai, and Alan Lau.
I worked at a university for 20 years, teaching intercultural communication, but I focused on teaching rather than research. Looking at young people, I felt that they had an overwhelming lack of intercultural experience, and I wanted to somehow convey how to understand others without stereotyping them, so I taught basic theories on a variety of topics.
© 2025 Ryusuke Kawai
