by Leslie Helm
The Japanese claim they don’t need words to communicate their thoughts. They say they understand each other using haragei, gut intuition. Nonsense, I thought. Japanese are constantly misreading each other’s feelings. As a young man, I was filled with righteous indignation about the Japanese culture I knew so intimately. Today, looking back on my younger self, I don’t necessarily disagree with what I wrote. There is so much about Japan worthy of outrage. But as I sat at my desk with the pile of scrapbooks on my lap, I wondered how much of my critique of Japan was heightened by my own personal reaction to Japan’s insularity.
If they are going to exclude me, then I am going to exclude them, I may have reasoned. My expertise on Japan was valuable precisely because Westerners regarded the Japanese as so inscrutable. Wasn’t it in my own interest to exaggerate the chasm that separated East from West? The broader the gulf, the more I was needed as an intermediary, the more my life as a gaijin had meaning. But there was something achingly unfulfilling in defining myself by what I was not. A gaijin, after all, was anybody who was not Japanese. So what was I? Two decades later, I would discover that there are hundreds of thousands of us around the world who academics now refer to as members of “third cultures” because we don’t belong entirely to any one culture.
Distracted for the rest of that day, I left work early. Since Marie was still in Seattle, I took the subway three stops to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club to grab dinner. The club was on the twentieth floor of an office building on the edge of Ginza, a popular shopping district. Visiting dignitaries gave press conferences at the club. Reporters met with sources for dinner or drinks.
I walked to the bar and sat at the “correspondents’ table” where a few regulars gathered. Sipping our beers, we discussed the latest news: perhaps it was the story about the latest politician to deny Japanese soldiers had ever massacred civilians in Nanjing, China, I can’t remember. What I do remember about that night was a distinct shift in how I looked at myself and my role as a reporter. I had always felt a sense of esprit de corps among these foreign correspondents—a feeling that we were a special breed reporting an important story. Now I felt disengaged. Weren’t we just cycling through variations on the same tired story about Japan’s insular ways? The intimacy I felt toward my fellow reporters was real, but the sense of community was not. We were like members of a packaged tour. We enjoyed being together, but when the tour ended, we might never see each other again. So if this wasn’t my true community, what was? Lodged uncomfortably at the back of my mind, like a tiny pebble caught in a shoe, was the reality that my father had died at sixty-four without ever finding a place where he belonged.
After dinner, I took a detour home through Shibuya, the heart of Tokyo’s busy entertainment district. I followed the crowd off the train, down the stairs and out the turnstiles. I stopped at the pedestrian crossing, but more people kept coming from behind, and soon I was packed as tightly on the sidewalk as I had been on the train. I gazed up to see a teen idol dance across a fifty-foot screen that dangled on the other side of the street somewhere between heaven and earth.
When the light turned green, we surged forward, and for a moment, as a wall of people moved toward us from the opposite side, we looked like two armies converging in battle. I slipped away from the crowd down a narrow lane. I walked past restaurants and bars whose kitchens pumped out smoke that smelled of grilled fish and burnt soy sauce. An old fortune teller who always placed her small table in the middle of the lane, split the flow of pedestrian traffic like a rock in a stream. Her wrinkled face, bowed low over the table, reflected the yellow light of her square paper lantern.
At an electronics store, I stopped to look at a long row of television screens where a boyish-looking man with a blue blazer, scruffy brown hair and goggle-eyed glasses stood frozen, staring out from a passing stream of grey-suited salarymen. It took a moment for me to realize that it was my face being captured by the store’s camcorder.
“Irasshai, Irasshai (Welcome)” shouted a young salesman. He put his back to me as he tried to lure passersby into the store. I walked on to an area where every surface—telephone booths, utility poles, walls and ground—was plastered with small flyers advertising prostitutes. If I had been of another generation, I might have called one of those phone numbers. If I climbed a low hill to the left, I would have found myself on one of the quiet, dimly lit streets that surrounded this entertainment district. There, in a love hotel that charged hourly rates, I could have had a private rendering of Shibuya’s flashing, thumping sensory sea.
Shibuya was the mecca for Japan’s youth, but I was neither Japanese nor young. Perhaps it was the unexpected reaction to the kenbei article. Or perhaps it was Dad’s recent death. Whatever the reason, I felt as if I had been let loose from my mooring and was drifting rudderless.
ONE MORNING IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1991, about six weeks after my father’s funeral, my wife and I found ourselves dressed in our Sunday best, sitting nervously in a drab cubicle in the Shibuya ward office. My only previous visit here had been to get my alien registration card, an identity card every foreign resident in Japan must carry. I had registered at a ward office in Yokohama for the first time when I turned fourteen, and I had always found it daunting to have my fingerprints taken as if I were an outlaw.
On this particular day, however, I felt even more uneasy. A city official would soon decide whether Marie and I were worthy of becoming parents. We had requested permission to adopt a Japanese child.
Although I was the one who first pushed to have children, it was Marie, who, after it became clear we couldn’t conceive children, decided we should consider adopting in Japan. Marie had made all the adoption arrangements.
Marie and I had first met in the summer of 1977 when we both worked part-time for a Japanese company based in Berkeley, California, that managed programs for international exchange students. We had both been guides on a tour of San Francisco nightlife. Although we shared an interest in Japan, we could not have been more different. Marie was intensely focused, taking a heavy course load at UC Berkeley as a double major in music and Japanese. The first time I spent the night at her apartment, I woke up at six o’clock in the morning to find her in the living room listening to the same passage from Wagner’s Ring Cycle again and again. She was studying for a test with a discipline I had never seen before. I was the drifter. In the previous two years I had worked in a French vineyard, studied communism in Paris, worked in an Israeli kibbutz and taught English in Tokyo. Marie focused on Japan with an intensity I found both surprising and refreshing.
When I stood up at the front of the tour bus and spoke to the students about our plans for the evening, Marie thought I was showing off. Born and raised in Japan, I had learned the language naturally. Marie had learned Japanese the hard way, through long hours of study. Unable to find a dorm room in her freshman year, she had taken a job as a manager in a women’s dormitory for Japanese students. Entranced by the culture, she had gone to the International Christian University near Tokyo for a year as an exchange student. When I met Marie, her spoken Japanese was still halting, but she was already far better than me in writing and reading Japanese.
As we sat waiting for our interview, I grew increasingly nervous. I agreed with Marie that we should adopt in Japan. It made sense. Since every mother in Japan receives good prenatal care under the country’s national health-care system, children relinquished for adoption are typically very healthy. But if the logic was clear, my heart remained uncertain. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the incongruity of the idea of launching a family from this cold, bureaucratic office.
For Marie, there might have been an element of destiny. After all, it was the lack of a dorm room in her freshman year that had gotten her interested in Japan. And decades later, while cleaning out her parents’ house, Marie would come across an oil painting she had painted in high school, long before she had any interest in Japan. She had completely forgotten about the painting, and yet, what Marie had
painted from her imagination, was a young Asian girl with short bangs and big cheeks—someone who looked hauntingly similar to the girl who would change our lives.
After half an hour of waiting, we were finally ushered into a tiny cubicle. The grim looking, middle-aged woman with her hair tied tightly in a bun was slowly flipping through our file.
“I am Maruoka Kazuko and I will be your representative,” she said in Japanese, looking at us with stern eyes. “So, you are thirty-six and you want to adopt a child?”
Marie and I nodded. I imagined Maruoka-san mentally ticking off all the reasons we were not competent to be parents. Perhaps she had already found a negative—we were too old.
“Have there been any divorces in your family?”
“Yes, my parents,” I said. Mark two against us.
Maruoka-san then wanted to know if our families had “a history of physical abuse.” I wondered if she saw me flushing, for in that moment something surfaced in my mind that had long been buried. I remained silent.
Marie had not entirely understood Maruoka-san’s question and looked questioningly at me. I translated for her.
“No,” Marie said quickly. She didn’t know about how abusive my father had been, and I wasn’t about to bring it up.
“Would you take a child of any race?”
“Yes, of course.” Marie and I had talked about this. We knew that many of the children put up for adoption were the mixed-race children of American soldiers or immigrant workers.
“How about a handicapped child?” she asked.
I hesitated, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.
“It depends on the situation,” said Marie, standing her ground.
“Hmm,” Maruoka-san replied.
When she then asked us how we felt about adopting a Japanese child, I finally felt ready to make my case. “I am part Japanese and Marie is a professor of Japanese studies. We both speak Japanese. We plan to raise our children to speak Japanese and understand Japanese culture.”
Maruoka-san never cracked a smile throughout the interview. When we walked out of that office an hour later, we had no sense of what her evaluation had been.
As our application wended its way through the bureaucracy, Marie never wavered, but I vacillated between fear that we would be turned down and anxiety about what would happen if we were approved. With a biological child, there is inevitability to the process. Nature programs parents to accept and love their biological children, it seemed to me. With adoption, it was far more complicated. If we were approved, and a child became available, Maruoka-san would send us a picture. If we were agreeable, we would begin to visit the child at the orphanage over a six-month probationary period. During that time, we, or the city, could decide whether the child was a good fit for us. Once the child grew accustomed to us, we would bring him or her home. At the time, it seemed as if the process involved too much uncertainty, too many decisions.
When I told Maruoka-san that race was not an issue, I had not been completely honest. I had read a great deal of research that suggested interracial adoptions resulted in far more complications than same-race adoptions. Our child, looking nothing like us, would get sick and tired of explaining to everyone that she was adopted. As a teenager, the research suggested, she would face a serious identity crisis and might even reject us as parents.
When we received word that we had been approved to adopt, I felt both relief and trepidation. Our next step was to attend a special orientation. In January 1992, Marie and I made our way to the fifty-fifth floor of the newly completed Tokyo City Hall, a one-billion-dollar, twin-towered high rise that was architect Kenzo Tange’s idea of a modern Notre Dame Cathedral. The orientation took place in a small nondescript classroom high above a city blanketed in smog.
Marie and I were the only foreigners among a group of twenty prospective parents who all sat behind rows of desks. It is odd how our competitive spirits pop up at the most inappropriate times. And yet, there it was. I felt as if we were in a competition and that if Marie and I were judged worthy, we would go home with a prize: a child of our own. As I sat there, I immediately began weighing our chances. Our biggest weakness, clearly, was that we were foreigners, but we had plenty of other things going for us. We were a good ten years younger than most of the other couples, and our motives were pretty straightforward. In our introduction, we said simply that we wanted children to love. We wanted a family. Everybody else seemed to have some agenda. One single woman had already adopted three children and wanted to “save” another. Several elderly couples said they wanted a child to take care of them in their old age. They didn’t speak of family. And love didn’t appear to be part of the equation.
After the introductions, a city official gave us the basic facts. There were only a few dozen babies available for adoption each month in Tokyo, a city of nearly thirteen million people. About four-hundred children are legally available for adoption nationwide each year, although there are more than thirty-thousand children in orphanages and other institutions. (I would later learn that only a few dozen of the children went to foreign families. By comparison, Americans adopted 7,900 children from China alone in the peak year of 2005.) More boys were available, the official said, because Japanese parents preferred to adopt girls who would be more likely to take care of them in their old age.
I assumed there were so few children available for adoption because of the widespread use of abortion as a means of birth control, a result of policies discouraging the use of birth-control pills. Later I learned the story was far more complicated. Many Japanese mothers didn’t want to relinguish their parental rights to allow their children to be adopted because, even though their children were now cared for in an orphanage, they wanted their children to take care of them later in life.
At the same time, there were also few Japanese parents interested in adopting children. The adoption system in Japan had evolved not to care for the needs of children without parents, but to ensure family continuity. It was common for Japanese families without sons, for example, to legally adopt an adult son-in-law into the family. The son would take the wife’s name, providing continuity. It was also common for a couple to give up one of their children for adoption by a childless relative.
Although there were cases of children out of wedlock being given up for adoption, they were typically done secretly to avoid having to record the transaction in the family registry, as law required. The “special adoption” system we were using had only been in place since 1988. The hope for this new adoption system was to encourage legal adoptions by allowing mothers to take the child out of their family registry so there was no record of the birth, and allowing adoptive families to record an adopted child in their family registry as if the child were a biological child. The special adoption system had not caught on in part because the Japanese were reluctant to adopt a child whose parentage was unknown and who might, therefore, not be of “good blood.”
After we had all introduced ourselves, a professor who specialized in adoption rose to speak. He said many Japanese parents moved after adopting a child, hoping they could hide from their neighbors and from their own child the truth about the adoption. He instructed us to tell our children they were adopted before they reached junior high school, at which time they were bound to discover the truth anyway. While nearly two-thirds of adoptive parents believe it is important to tell their children they are adopted, he warned, less than a third actually do so.
These lectures and the shell-shocked look on the faces of the adoptive parents, I am ashamed to admit, pleased me. I wasn’t thinking about the many unfortunate children who wouldn’t be adopted. I was thinking of my own selfish concerns: For the first time, I felt we had a good shot at being chosen to adopt a child.
In May 1992, two months after our orientation to prepare for adoption, Marie and I still had not heard from the authorities about whether there was a child available to adopt. We were growing impatient. Hoping to prod the system, we visited a Catholic
orphanage we had heard about. We were shown to the nursery where about a dozen infants, most of them less than a year old, sat on the floor largely unattended. We sat on the floor among them. I picked up a rattler and caught the attention of the boy closest to me. I was surprised when, without hesitation, the boy crawled onto my lap. He had thick black hair and attentive eyes. I cradled him in my arms, and he lay back against my chest deeply content. A calm came over me as I sat there on the floor with this child in my arms.
I do not find it easy, by nature, to empathize with strangers. As a college student, I once spent several weeks working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and the Dying in Calcutta. One morning, the nun in charge asked me to shave the head of one of the residents. Afterward, when I picked him up to return him to his bed, I was stunned to find he weighed little more than a newborn baby. Cradling him in my arms, I found it difficult to feel pity for this young man who had only days left to live. I simply could not see the world through his dying eyes.
But as I sat in that nursery cuddling this little boy, it seemed to me that the adoption calculus was far simpler: This boy was starved for affection, while Marie and I wanted a child to love. As we left the orphanage, the director told us the boy was available for adoption and we would soon hear from the city’s welfare agency, which had jurisdiction over adoptions at all orphanages.
We did not wait to hear from the welfare agency. Immediately, we bought a crib from an American couple leaving Japan and set it up in the living room. When we didn’t hear from the city for several weeks, Marie called Maruoka-san, our social worker. The orphanage director had spoken out of turn, Maruoka-san told her. The boy was not available. Now, every day when I returned from the office, the empty crib seemed to reflect my inner emptiness.