One of the many products J-List carries is a fun film called Big Dreams, Little Tokyo, a movie I like a lot, and not just because some J-List kanji T-shirts appear in it. It’s the story of Boyd Wilson, an American who’s obsessed with learning Japanese and being Japanese, and he goes everywhere dressed as a Japanese businessman, handing out business cards for his language school and translation service. His roommate is Jerome, a Japanese young man born in the U.S. who wants more than anything to become a sumo wrestler, and the two of them have many adventures as they stand on the border between East and West. During the film, there’s a scene where the main character is told, “Boyd, you’re not Japanese. No matter how many times you bow, you will never be Japanese.” This devastates him, and he goes home and rips all the posters of scenic Japan off his wall. I had to laugh at that scene since I’ve been in that situation before. There’s something about working really hard to master a language and trying to memorize every kanji character “just because it’s there” — even archaic ones that Japanese themselves cannot write — that makes a person liable to overidentify with the object of his fascination. Gaijin in Japan eventually come to see that balance is needed between the two halves, and I’m much more at peace now choosing to be an American in Japan, rather than trying to be Japanese myself.
